n their unending quest to drive away readers, webmasters are starting
to get desperate. Nowadays readers are being conditioned not to
click on any articles on the Web. If you do, sooner or later you'll
see a demand for money.
Of course everyone likes money, but blocking a reader from reading something he just clicked on is slapping him in the face. It makes the reader feel unwelcome, and he'll do one of three things.
Cave and pay the website whatever they want.
Switch to Twitter mode—I mean X mode—by blocking all cookies and reading only the headlines. This makes sense in today's fake-news-rich environment. As intelligence people say, it's all “low quality” information out there anyway.
Drop you from the browser's bookmarks. This makes sense too: counting the articles you've read proves they're tracking you. They almost certainly keep a record of all the articles you ever clicked on. What are they using that information for?
One clue comes from news sites in the UK. Our American news companies are so inaccurate we tried getting news from the UK. We were even hitting the Russian sites pretty hard until quite recently. But the Brits didn't like it, and the UK Telegraph put up a wall to keep out American readers but let everyone else in. Another trick to keep the “Yanks” out is to charge them double when they try to subscribe. Now we know how the Israelis must feel.
I heard that they eventually broadened their paywall to include everybody. For those of us who can't afford to pay everybody, it was another voice silenced.
Some sites know about the cookie trick, so they fingerprint you instead and refuse to dish out content with no warning, just a blank page, which makes paying them impossible. Sure, you could use a computer trick to get in, but why go where you're not wanted?
One website uses a different tactic: cursed with far too many literate readers, they've turned into a tabloid, with articles about how to clean those nasty bathroom stains, somebody named Tay-Tay watching a football game, and flying saucers. And such bad animation their front page looks like a cross between The Daily Prophet and Benny Hill.
Another site has an even more clever strategy: their boxes scroll so fast they're impossible to read. “Forty facts you NEED to know: the . . .” and zoom it's gone. “Try clicking on that one, you bastard! Ha ha!”
But oh my God, the proofreading. Or should I say the “Editor, fix the this that sentence the the EDITOR PLS FIX FIX FIX” proofreading. Thanks to cell phones, social media now consists mainly of incomprehensible globs of typos instead of comments. And people trying to write on their iPhone give “phoning it in” a whole new meaning.
Then we get things even Grammarly can't find, like this dangling participle:
Having once again been placed at the bottom of customer satisfaction league tables by Citizens Advice and Ofcom, we went undercover to see first-hand what is going on at a company responsible for delivering 700 million parcels a year.
A classic Freudian slip.
Most readers go to your site not to learn, but to get their daily fix of outrage. You save a fortune in bandwidth because they just read the headlines and smugly nod to themselves, as they take another sip of their strawberry squid frappuccino, that their political enemies are indeed bad people, just as they always suspected.
The UK Guardian is doing it right. They don't block anybody, and they give the ultra-left-wing ideologues—even Americans—who read them a good reason to send in money: to keep them independent of influence. A pop-up is the worst solution because readers are conditioned by pop-up ads to dismiss them without reading them.
You don't get this problem with bloggers. Not only is everything we write trash, we never proofread and we never check the site stats. If you're at Harvard you can plagiarize us all you want and we probably won't sue you. Whevever you're from, you can read as much as you want.
Insulting customers is a big part of what killed DVDs. Companies were terrified that people might watch DVDs without paying for them, so they added un-skippable FBI and Interpol warnings in multiple languages. Threatening viewers with a $500,000 fine and prison—in English and Turkish—every time they watch sends a clear message: they don't trust you. Who wants to buy from a company that sees you as a criminal? That caused a death spiral just like the one caused by commercials on cable TV. If they had good content they'd be rolling in money. But it was cheaper to put up trash. Now it's happening to the Web.
My new strategy is to subscribe to printed magazines as we did in the old days. If WWIII breaks out and people start dropping like flies all around me, I'll hear about it in a few weeks. Till then, no news is good news.
feb 07 2024, 4:59 am
