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August 25, 2006

Never mind click fraud, sometimes even live clicks aren't worth having

Incredible but true, someone has come up with an online ad more annoying than the punch-the-monkey idea - an ad so successful that I still have no idea what the vendor was trying to push, but the ad itself is now permanently burned into my memory. It seems somebody thought this was such a winning idea that they dusted down the idea and gave it a sonic makeover. Actually, make that a sonic attack - because you will think only of yourself when you encounter this one. It makes "download or we'll hijack your browser" fake spyware-detection software look benign.

It's a mosquito that you have to hit to "get a free laptop". Luckily, I had the audio switched to headphones when I stumbled across this one, and they were lying on the floor. A synthetic mosquito noise isn't pleasant even at that range. The only way to stop the buzzing is to hit the mosquito, triggering the popup. Hitting the mosquito isn't tough, as you'd expect, because the chances of the operating responsible sending me a free laptop just for clicking a mouse are practically zero. I didn't wait to find out, however. With the other hand I was ready with the Apple-W keys to zap the new window as quickly as it appeared. So, I have absolutely no idea what this scam offer is all about.

But I do hope they are paying for each click on this ad.

Posted by Chris at 10:13 AM

August 14, 2006

Fitting to the curve

The one place where you would expect the Long Tail model of markets to apply is on websites. After all, they spawn pages easily and serving an unpopular page up is no more expensive than providing the same one time and time again to many different people. OK, with caching the way it is, that's not quite true. But the difference in cost between the two is way different from providing unpopular CDs from stock compared with top sellers.

Website usability consultant Jakob Nielsen thought he would analyse his own website to see how well it fit the Long Tail model - a curve that follows Zipf's law. It hugs the axes on a regular graph, giving you the impression that only a few elements are important because they score so much higher than all the others. But, if you add the contributions from the small fry together, they turn out to be as important as the few hits. One characteristic that Nielsen noted is that if you plot this kind of distribution on a log-versus-log graph, you get a straight line.

Nielsen took the useit.com web statistics and plotted them to see how they did against the straight line. The most-visited 300 or so pages fit the line pretty well - incredibly well if you think about it. But then the curves went their separate ways. By the time you get to the 500th most popular page, there were 10 times fewer hits than Zipf's law would predict based on the page views of the more popular pages. The bottom 200 pages accounted for just one visit or less during the sampling period according to the graph.

So far so good. Nielsen has plotted a phenomenon that a lot of people with a website notice - that nothing but tumbleweed blows through a goodly number of the pages. He arrived at an oddly different conclusion: adding more pages to the site would "wag the drooping tail of the dog". Somehow, adding more content would make more of the plotted page views fit the Zipf law distribution.

That all sounds very well, until you consider that most visitors to useit.com or any other site consider themselves to be part of a Long Tail distribution. They just happen to be looking for something or browsing through. Pages that rank very high in search engines and are heavily linked from within the site or from other sites will do very well. Others will just appear to drop out of existence altogether. There is almost a Zen question in there: "Does an unindexed web page have content?"

Simply adding thousands of pages to a website on the basis that you will suddenly snap the line back onto the one proposed by Zipf and dusted off by Chris Anderson does not strike me as a winning strategy. Unless you count bundles of tumbleweed blowing in as legitimate visits.

Nielsen's statistics are for just one site but two curves taken from data 10 years apart show pretty much the same effect. The curve that did fit the Zipf distribution was the one for inbound links. That makes some sense as the whole concept of this type of power law distribution is based on interconnections rather than content. It is not so much that Nielsen's site has accumulated insufficient pages to follow the Long Tail plot all the way - rather that there are too many unremarked pages to ever get back on the curve.

I suspect that if Nielsen were to do this same study in ten years, he will notice that more pages fit the straight line on a log-log graph, but that drooping tail is still there. It might even account for a greater proportion of the overall graph. It all depends on how those pages are favoured by links.

It would be interesting to see how other supposed Long Tail model industries would fare given a similar treatment. I would be more surprised if music sales did not show a similar drooping tail. If nobody knows something exists, why are they going to go look for it? Let's face it, Chris Anderson's original article on the Long Tail in Wired opened on how a book suddenly turned into a best-seller because people found links to it from another unrelated work and closed on the need for links and recommendations to power Long Tail economics. But you can't make links to everything and expect each one to have equal weight and that alters the economics of Anderson's favoured business model. Does the tail of the Long Tail need further examination?

And, as I posted the first version of this entry, I noticed that Nick Carr had pointed to observations by Douglas Galbi on the frequency of children's names. It is another example of how demand is not necessarily connected to supply in markets. Looks like the Long Tail's tail is getting some scrutiny.

Posted by Chris at 9:12 PM | Comments (3)

August 8, 2006

Endemol's get-rich-quick scheme

Who is the most dumb in this situation? The people in the Big Brother house getting voted on or off? Or those paying 50p a throw to vote them on or off - and then complain en masse to Ofcom when the programme producer Endemol decided to sneak in an extra vote? Rather than just say "to hell with it" and turn over to watch something with a vague hint of neural stimulation, close to a thousand decided to ring up the regulator, Ofcom, and moan about Endemol's greed.

In this case, Endemol has said it won't profit from the latest wheeze - the profits will go to charity, the company claimed. However, the company has made no secret about its willingness to make extra cash from what it calls "brand exploitation" (as opposed to viewer exploitation). If you look at Endemol's most recent financial reports, the company has seen a lot of extra money pile in from adding more and more premium-rate dial-in and Short Message Service (SMS) text response opportunities to its programmes. Some of its shows are now purely about getting viewers to pay through the nose to take part.

In the first half of this year, digital media sales grew almost 40 per cent, compared with the same period a year ago, from €37.6m to €52.0m. For Endemol, digital media means money from phone calls and texts, plus sales of interactive services on phones and computers. The company does not break out sales within that group, but the company notched up 180 million calls or texts in the first half of the year from brand exploitation. Another 100 million were for dedicated interactive shows. I think we can guess where most of the money is coming from for the digital media group, which now accounts for about a tenth of Endemol's turnover. The UK, by the way, is now Endemol's best-performing territory.

Jeff Jarvis thought all this complaining to Ofcom was an example of over-regulation. I'm not sure how public complaints amount to over-regulation - Ofcom has not actually done anything. It would be tough: any regulator is going to have a tough time ruling on something like this in less than a working day. Maybe Jarvis should have had a gander at the broadcasting code. Here's the relevant bit of section 10:

10.9 Premium rate numbers will normally be regarded as products or services, and must therefore not appear in programmes, except where:

they form part of the editorial content of the programme;

or

they fall within the meaning of programme-related material.

10.10 Any use of premium rate numbers must comply with the Code of Practice issued by the Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services (ICSTIS).

Basically, unless there is some other regulation that applies to this situation, Ofcom is not about to slap Endemol on the wrist (so, no Jeff, it is not over-regulation). If you want to punish Endemol, stop watching and ridicule your mates for continuing to watch it. Although you really should have been doing that in the first place.

Should Ofcom beef up the code to prevent programmer makers from minting it from premium-rate calls? There is an underlying question: how much money do you spend on trying to save people from their own stupidity? I contend that the answer depends on how much their dumbness damages other people. Therefore, preventing bad or vindictive driving and excessive gambling seem to be good ideas. They don't just damage the people who take part, but usually damage lots of people around them. Excessive texting or phoning to TV shows? Fashion will probably do more damage to this quickly than any amount of regulation that Ofcom could come up with. Maybe we will see "I was a text-TV widow" stories appear, but I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by Chris at 10:41 AM | Comments (124)

August 4, 2006

"I think it is viral, cause after seeing it, I feel a little sick"

Hats off to Sam who posted the comment that provided the title for this post at Adfreak as people like Steve Rubel got all worked up about an ad agency making a video for YouTube in a desperate attempt to win the account for sandwich shop Subway. Various people burst out in howls of outrage at how Subway's brand would be damaged by these people posting a pitch video. And half the rest argued over whether it was a viral video or not, on the basis (paraphrasing slightly) that they don't suck and not because people email them to each other.

All I can say is that I wasted a good four minutes watching this - I didn't last the full nine and somehow I doubt that Subway will either unless they have bottomless patience for people declaring how far out of the box they can think. I have to confess, the cringeing horror of watching people make an arse of themselves in front of a video camera in true reality-TV style was absent. They were too dazzingly boring for that. Only one brand got damaged here and it wasn't Subway. People buying ad-agency time and 'ideas', you have my sympathy if this is the guff you have to watch. I'll wait a while before complaining about Powerpoint presentations again.

Posted by Chris at 10:23 PM | Comments (2)

Cool for crowds

It's not often that I find myself agreeing with Jeff Jarvis, which had me worried for a while as to whether I was suffering from a bile overdose. But I still cannot believe the thinking behind a resolution passed by a UK teachers' union, reported by the BBC, the Guardian and PA among others. Curiously, not the Daily Mail as far as I can tell.

At the Professional Association of Teachers annual conference, Wesley Paxton and Simon Smith argued for a resolution that has the look of many minor resolutions that get passed at union meetings: "Conference regrets that it does not appear to be 'cool' to be clever".

It's pretty innocuous stuff, but the speeches that went along with it were a bit more worrying if they represent what practicing teachers actually believe.

In his prepared speech, Smith said:

With a few exceptions, including sport, academic prowess is in many eyes not ‘cool’.

I have talked to various pupils from years 8 ,9 , 10 on this subject in the run up to conference. I got the message that “yes” they would like to be clever but it was expressed in the same vain as “yes I would like to win the lottery”. Not as something they could or would change by being in education. It was something you were or you were not.

And in true pupil style, being clever meant that you were boring, lacked personality, were a teacher’s pet and other things not polite enough to mention in company such as this.

Well, not much has changed in the last 30 years by the sounds of it. Clever has never been popular at school and, let's face it, probably never will be. According to the news reports from the conference, the situation is so bad that pupils are scared of being rewarded for effort or achievement for fear of falling foul of their dumber but more aggressive peers:

Ann Nuckley, an administrator from Southwark, south London, said many pupils in her school refused to come up on stage to receive awards. "I am ending up sending book tokens through the post because children won't come up and get them, which I think is extremely sad."

Smith said he had the answer to the problem. Redefine it:

If we were to use the word successful rather than clever we could all achieve it at our own level and in our own way.

My belief is that we here as educators are responsible for the valves that children hold in this area, so we should do something about it.

I am sorry to say that at the moment a culture has developed that mocks being clever. We should fight against it. Change the language we use; change something.

So, basically, avoiding use of the word 'clever' and replacing it with 'successful' will fix the problem. Are teachers really that clueless about the mechanics of the schoolyard, a place where anything can be turned into an insult given enough thought and venom? It didn't take long for "special needs boy" to pop up as a retort, after all. Kids find reasons to be rude or violent to each other - it's that impulse that needs to be dealt with, not covering up differences between them.

It seems that now teachers have accepted the maxim of the decade - from blogs to Big Brother - that popularity is the most important thing someone can have. Don't rock the boat, don't stand out, don't be individual. Consensus is all that matters. It's like being taught by Homer Simpson.

Posted by Chris at 8:02 PM | Comments (1)