

The Value of Content - jamesknelson
https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/the-value-of-content-a30bbe8b54a5

======
Mithaldu
> Surely there must be more like me? People who appreciate that somebody,
> somewhere is putting craft and effort into creating something, and that
> these people need to get paid if we want that to continue?

They exist and made [https://www.patreon.com/](https://www.patreon.com/) where
artists can sign up to make donation accounts that either work on a per-time
or per-work basis, and people can donate whatever amount they like, and
optionally get rewards defined by the artist for certain donation levels.

Here's an example of a magazine using it for funding:

[https://www.patreon.com/TheVitaLounge](https://www.patreon.com/TheVitaLounge)

~~~
Sir_Substance
>Surely there must be more like me? People who appreciate that somebody,
somewhere is putting craft and effort into creating something, and that these
people need to get paid if we want that to continue?

I agree with you right up to the second comma.

Youtube was a smash success well before it started giving youtubers
advertising money. Open source software has been around way longer than paypal
donations. YMTD, Newgrounds and 4Chan have never paid their content creators.
Stuff like the jargon file, zombocom, quakenet and OCAU has been around since
forever, running on donations from users or the willing pockets of their
creators. Wikipedia editors get paid in warm fuzzies.

People are basically creative and giving, and like making content for others
to enjoy. The internet was hardly languishing from a lack of content before
advertising started to seriously make inroads.

Hell, when it comes to technical advice, half the best content is technical
posts made before 2006 on random forums all across the internet by people who
just want to be helpful. No forums user has ever gone "I'd like to post a full
teardown of my favorate motorbike engine, but no one will pay me so I guess
that the opportunity cost would be wasted, maybe I'll go spend 5 hours on
mechanical turk instead".

 _On the other hand_ , sites like wired, forbes, the wall street journal and
time have spiraled into a cesspool of clickbait titles, poorly researched
articles and thinly veiled native advertising pieces since they moved their
business models from mostly paper mags to mostly online advertising.

I reject utterly the notion that the web is improved by paying people to make
internet-centric content, and would shed no tears whatsoever if I saw all
monitisation-driven content creators leave the web for whatever they feel are
greener pastures.

~~~
omalleyt
I agree wholeheartedly and also want to point out that people who regularly
produce great content can usually capitalize on their audience through other
means that don't directly monetize the content. Obviously speaking
engagements, hardcopy book sales, and other offerings related to the content
you've produced. Content is too general a term to be very specific here.

------
drcongo
Author of the post here. Thanks for posting it, it's little out of date in
terms of the references in there but I stand by the sentiment.

Since I wrote the article I feel like I've seen something of a drop in usage
of the kinds of techniques described, total anecdata though.

Patreon posted below looks very interesting. Thanks for the heads up.

~~~
jasode
From your article, you wrote:

 _> If you want the whole story here you should also be sat in a room testing
this modal overlay with real people. Ask them questions:

“Do you like that overlay..." [...] It’s extremely unlikely that they like
it._

Your opinion may ultimately be correct but your _justification_ for it is
flawed.

If you survey people, you get what's called a " _stated preference._ " (SP)
[1]

However, there's another concept called a " _revealed preference_ " (RP) [2]
and this often contradicts the "stated preference."

The web analytics Ramit Sethi believed in may also be flawed. However, the
point is that statistics collection attempts to uncover "revealed
preferences". Since RP is often hidden, the tools for uncovering it are _not
surveys_. Instead, they use hidden cameras, or Point-Of-Sales transaction
data, or eye tracking, or web analytics, etc.

There are many examples where RP yields more insight than SP. This is
counterintuitive so we end up thinking SP is the correct perspective because
it "feels right." Many real world examples have proven SP to be incorrect such
as retail sales events, airlines, dating & romance, etc. I can expand those
examples, or you can search google if you're curious about them. Annoying ad
overlays on web content may be another area where RP trumps SP. I haven't
researched it enough to know.

Your article gives more weight to SP than RP with no justification why it
should.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_modelling#Stated_prefer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_modelling#Stated_preference)

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference)

~~~
calinet6
Okay, I challenge you to discover a "revealed preference" that says they like
overlays. Not that they click them, not that it "results in an action," but
that they _like_ them and they will be more likely to return to the site
because of the positive and enjoyable experience of the popup.

There are a few dozen confounding variables in your analysis as well if you
want to look for the revealed preference. Why are users clicking the modals?
Are they certain that they have a choice? In the article, the author makes the
excellent point that many people believe that they must complete the modal to
continue reading the article. That's not preference, that's coercion.

So, sure, it's valuable to understand revealed preferences without bias of
leading questions. Absolutely. But you still have to keep your head on and
understand the variables you're measuring, the confounding variables, and
larger effects at play.

This question comes up a lot in user experience design, with stated preference
vs. revealed preference (how you do user testing and surveying vs. how users
actually use the product unprompted), and the larger macro-scale question of
what actually makes a quality experience. Often making all the decisions about
the user experience from microinteraction tests leads to a poor overall
experience, and it's exactly because of too much focus on 'what works' without
understanding how the measurements are being made and how we should interpret
that data.

~~~
jasode
_> , I challenge you to discover a "revealed preference" that says they like
overlays._

That's not my position. I never proposed that web surfers "like" modal
overlays. I think we can all agree that intrusive overlays annoy everyone.

The "revealed preference" I'm talking about isn't referencing the modal
overlays specifically. The RP reference is to the " _whole story_ " (to put it
in author's words). To me, the "whole story" is how the website measures the
value of its content, how it monetizes it, what % of people never want to
return, what is a sustainable audience, etc, etc.

There are multiple dimensions to what people "like/dislike" and people assign
different (and hidden) weights to them.

The author wrote: _> They will falsely conclude that people love these modal
overlays._

I've never heard _any_ sane UI developer or programmer expound that position.
That looks like twisting the words of what they actually think (aka a straw
man). The actual conclusion by them is more accurately portrayed as, " _they
conclude that greater % people love THE CONTENT MORE THAN THE INCONVENIENCES
of these modal overlays. The % of people who tc;dr is real but small enough %
to be acceptable collateral damage._ "

The RP behavior analysis attempts to answer that second thesis. Surveys and
questionnaires are the wrong tool for it.

~~~
drcongo
You are the only person who has even mentioned surveys or questionnaires.
Arguing with yourself over something only you have mentioned is the very
definition of straw man.

edit: to clarify - the asking them questions bit mentioned in the article was
part of a user testing session. We'd already watched them walk through it
trying to complete the tasks required, the follow up questions were for
clarification on why they signed up for a non-existent newsletter that we
didn't ask them to sign up for. At no point did we do a survey or a
questionnaire.

~~~
jasode
_> You are the only person who has even mentioned surveys or questionnaires_

I'm simply using a generalization of something you wrote to ease the flow of
the discussion here. You wrote:

    
    
      *"Ask them questions:"*
    

Why is my restatement of that to be a "survey/questionnaire" an unfair
generalization? It wasn't a malicious intent to mischaracterize you.

If we did a search &replace for "survey/questionnaire" and changed it to
acryonym " _ATQ_ " for " _Ask Them Questions_ ", does the meaning of my post
really change?

EDIT to YOUR EDIT:

> _" At no point did we do a survey or a questionnaire."_

Sorry, I wasn't contending that you did a _literal_ survey. I was simply a
placeholder label for discussion purposes.

If we can get past the misunderstanding of labels, I'd think it would be more
helpful if you actually address the substance of my previous argument: why
does "ATQ" about modal overlays trump "revealed preferences" about the value
of web content?

 _> so it seems a little odd to pick that bit as the thing to take issue
with._

It's not odd because the " _Ask Them Questions_ " was your _only_ visible
justification to convince us.

~~~
drcongo
We're in edit hell now!

------
SandersAK
We at Beacon (beaconreader.com) agree.

We've focused on this for the past 18 months and have helped journalists and
publishers get more than $1m in funding for quality journalism projects.

I wrote about this as well a while back:
[http://www.beaconreader.com/blog/the-reader-writer-
relations...](http://www.beaconreader.com/blog/the-reader-writer-relationship)

Hit me up if you wanna chat: adrian at beaconreader.com

~~~
drcongo
Beacon looks like a fantastic project, thanks for the heads up.

------
jotm
The post is pretty relevant even today - I'm seeing more popups and slideouts
and other s^&t now than ever :-).

However, it's a fact that they lead to more conversions, more signups and more
sales.

It's pretty useless to complain about them - if the publisher's goal is to
drive sales using content that will never be seen, that's their prerogative.
If the readers don't like the popups, they can just say TC;DR and leave the
site forever. Or use ad blockers (which publishers hate, for obvious reasons).

In the long run, analytics will show that drop in view numbers.

~~~
valisystem
> However, it's a fact that they lead to more conversions, more signups and
> more sales.

I wouldn't jump to conclusions. Maybe you have expertise on this, I don't, but
I've seen nothing that could make me lay a definitive conclusion like this.

The article incision is on the fact that some people needs analytics to back
up evaluation of the web site trying to know if it's doing good or not,
regardless of revenue. So you end up to those techniques that drives
irrelevant numbers up, that can even damage potential revenue, but it's ok,
you're doing the right things, look at those good numbers. You can't test such
things with A/B testing or anything else, it's long term relationship with the
audience, and those analytics are not measuring this.

~~~
jotm
Yeah, I'm only talking about small niche websites aimed at ranking in Google
and/or Facebook and driving leads/sales. Various pop-ups and free offers work
very well.

I'm pretty sure they don't work on tech-savvy people and for large blogs where
the audience matters more than monetization.

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jaimebuelta
The biggest challlenge on any measurement is to be sure that you're really
measuring a good proxy of the relevant information. Too often metrics are
driven on misleading numbers...

------
anthnguyen94
I think the neat thing about Medium is that it has the Facebook style
validation. Surely, you're more careful about what you say on Facebook because
your name and profile is attached to everything you post. Medium is the same.
The focus is on you, author is you, no handles, or anything. Makes it a lot
less likely for you to post some garbage clickbait.

~~~
pjc50
_Makes it a lot less likely for you to post some garbage clickbait._

Hardly. Buzzfeed, the epitome of clickbait, has author bylines. As does the
Daily Mail. Some of the best blogs I've ever read have been anonymous, and the
famously high-quality Economist has no bylines. The thing that makes people
less likely to post clickbait on Medium is that there are no adverts to pay
them for clicks.

------
jordanpg
I agree with the sentiment. Off-topic suggestion, though.

Want people to value your "content"? Consider abandoning the word "content"
forever.

Those same people analytics people you deride use it in their spreadsheets.

Words matter, and the word "content" is about as icy and evocative of
technical, corporate fetters as "enterprise solutions" to me.

~~~
drcongo
Of the 95k odd people who have read the article on Medium, nobody has ever
before mentioned a dislike of the word content. As much as I'd love to, it's
hardly practical to cater to the tastes of each 0.001053%

~~~
jordanpg
Well, I suppose the question is what do _you_ think about the word?

I'm saying that if I wrote anything that I felt was worth reading and posted
it to the internet, that I would never call it content. I'm saying that, to
me, that word connotes a certain type of writing: the type you find on
colorful sites with lots of ads, whether benign in the sense you talk about or
not. Reference material, if worth looking at, at all.

I'm not asking you to cater to my tastes, and we're on the same side as far as
the article goes. I'm just telling you what that word has come to mean to me
in the year 2015.

------
mooreds
Note that the post is from 2013.

~~~
eterm
which makes the quote "Medium gives so much care and attention to your content
that almost anything on there automatically feels of value." more important,
because I clicked the Medium link and was presented by exactly this dark
pattern.

