Dude, teens don't like Twitter!
Morgan Stanley today, in a fit of “we can do no wrong”-ness, posted a “research” report discussing the behavior of today’s teens regarding media. The only problem was that their research was based on talking to a single 15 year-old intern at Morgan Stanley. That’s right, they talked to one random dude. While normally this sort of interview would be fodder for a high school newspaper, Morgan Stanley continued their quest for irrelvance by publishing it themselves.
Because the report is generally so useless, I will not be posting a link to it. However, nothing stopped Mashable and CrunchGear/TechCrunch from posting their own coverage, including a full list of the conclusions reached by said 15 year-old. Mashable had the sense to at least question the research, but TC went ahead and used one of these useless conclusions as their headline (talk about link-baiting):
Morgan Stanley report shows that teens don’t use Twitter, don’t buy music (but still go to the movies)
in reality neither site should have said anything about this worthless report and they definitely should not have posted the conclusions. Guys: if it isn’t news, don’t cover it.
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Posted by
joel |
Categories:
Internet,
Media,
journalism |
It’s always fun to see a trailblazing product get announced and then watch the press run around trying to figure out what it is, what it means, and why it’s important. The latest occasion for this kind of tomfoolery is Google’s announcement yesterday of the Chrome OS. Here’s my take on it:
What it is
Chrome OS is the Chrome browser plus a version of Linux that is built to run a single application: the Chrome browser. The “applications” that run on Chrome OS are what we have traditionally thought of as web sites, pages, or services, things like Google, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Delicious, or pretty much anything else that starts with http. These include services like Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets.
What it isn’t
A traditional operating system. You can’t install Photohop, MS Office, iTunes, Yahoo messenger, AIM, or any other OS-based application you’re used to. If you want to play MP3s, you’ll have to find a site or service that will do that like Pandora or Orb. If you want to IM, you’ll need a web-based IM like Meebo. If you want to edit pictures, you’ll need a web-based photo editor like Aviary’s Phoenix.
What we don’t know
- It’s unclear if Google will build hooks into Chrome to allow it to manipulate local files.
- It’s also unclear how much access web applications would have to peripherals. I don’t know if I can just plug it into an iPod, webcam, or external hard drive and have it work. Google claims that Chrome apps would run on any standards compliant browser, and that functionality just isn’t part of the current browser model, so I’m guessing these peripherals would not work.
What it means
Chrome OS, at release, will be built primarily for netbooks. It will let you boot the netbook quickly and browse the web within seconds. It’s good for people who want access to the web anywhere and aren’t doing heavy-duty computing like hardcore PC games, Photoshop, or even complex Excel spreadhseets or Powerpoint presentations. It definitely isn’t going to be useful as a media center.
A netbook with Chrome OS is what used to be known as a thin client or a Network Computer, but with real graphics capabilities. It’s meant for mobile computing, and it will only threaten Microsoft’s Windows OS in the ultra-portable netbook space for the foreseeable future. Windows 7 need not worry.
As for the press’ coverage, it’s largely regurgitations of the Google Press Release with a dash of analysis and a double helping of “maybe it’ll be important…you decide.” But then…we have TechCrunch, which is getting harder and harder to describe as a “news outlet.”
Today Michael Arrington brags about how he predicted the Google OS in September of ‘08, despite the fact that rumors have been flying since at least ‘06 admittedly without the “Chrome” moniker. In his “prescient” article, he claims
Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows.
Not true at all. As Google made clear in their latest announcement, Chrome OS will still require Linux as the traditional OS it runs on top of. He goes on to grandly pronounce
Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs.
Firstly, the browser still needs Linux, and let’s not forget our history - the pioneers of computing have been talking about the thin client since 1993 and the similar Network Computer since 1996, both of which follow the same model as the Google OS, so he wasn’t exactly going out on a limb there. Why he felt the need to brag about his tardy prediction again today, I can’t say.
Certainly there are still questions to be answered about Chrome OS and I don’t think it will be a game changer in the next couple years, but it is a step forward in making mobile computing cheaper and more convenient. We’ll still need our PC’s with real OS’s to do real work, but this could indeed take a big bite out MS’s dominance in the low-end PC market, particularly when wireless data plans become more affordable. Of course, don’t expect MS to be silent - they’re working on their own browser-based OS as well.
Update: 3:19pm
By way of Valleywag (bravo VW), I noticed Dave Winer’s summation of the Chrome OS, and he almost gets it right. He says:
Let’s be dispassionate. Before yesterday’s announcement: 1. Chrome ran on Linux. 2. Linux was an operating system. 3. Linux ran on netbooks. However, most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it’s still true today.
I think this is mostly accurate, but I think Google is trying to create a different class of device that is actually different from today’s netbooks and therefore, it isn’t a question of Linux vs. XP. A Chrome netbook will boot directly to a browser window, and everyone knows how to use a browser, so it avoids the typical Linux geekiness. The fact that it only runs a browser clearly makes it much less feature rich than XP, but it’s also much faster and cheaper. Maybe it needs a new name to signify its limited abilities - micro netbook or browserbook or something…but I agree with Dave that calling this an OS is really just a marketing maneuver.
On the newstand
For subscribers
In a recent post on his blog Mr. Magazine, Samir Husni discusses the recent trend of magazines producing a single issue with two different covers, one cover for placement in newsstands, and a different cover for their subscribers. It seems that for distribution on newsstands, the covers were more sensational and sexy, with more lists (8 reasons your diet isn’t working) and more lascivious content (”The Sex of your Dreams (& Hers.)”) Notable magazines using this technique are Men’s Health, US Weekly, and Bazaar.
What surprised me about the article was Husni’s dramatic objection to the practice:
I do not believe that the single copy cover should be any different than that of the subscriber, if we are in the business of customers who count and not just counting customers. Subscribers do visit the newsstands and what they see their should match what is on their coffee table.
Husni doesn’t seem to give any reasoning for his assertions; he just thinks this is the way it “should” be. The way I see it, if you’re not just “counting customers” and you actually think your customers count, why not give them an experience they want? If you know that most people in a certain segment have a certain preference and you have the ability to cater to that preference, why wouldn’t you? Naturally, newsstand issues need to be more marketing oriented, so the headlines should be more attention-grabbing. If someone wants to put a magazine on their coffee table, they many not want lewd headlines about sex tips all over it. So why wouldn’t you give your readers what they want?
I applaud the magazine industry for this step in the right direction. Websites have been delivering customized experiences for years, so it’s about time that magazines took a page from our…book?
The internet publishing industry did itself a serious disservice when first designing ads for the web. Rather than learning from the newspaper and magazine industries, they reinvented the wheel by designing ads that were as unobtrusive as possible, and they’ve been paying for it ever since.
Remember the first standardized ad size? It was 468×60, an amazingly small ad unit by today’s standards. You just can’t fit a meaningful message on an ad this size (especially with today’s larger screen resolutions), and to compensate ad sizes have been creeping upwards over time…from the original 468×60 and 125×125 to
250×250 to
120×600 to
728×90 to
300×250 to
160×600 to
336×280 to
300×600 to
flyovers, pull-outs, interstitials, and a whole new set of big ad sizes.
I say it’s about time we started showing huge ads. We online publishers have been limiting our success for years, ever since that first tiny ad size was standardized.
To see why this is the case, look at print magazines. Those guys have huge ads. One of the most common units they sell is a full page! They sell full pages, half pages, quarter pages with the smaller eighth- and sixteenth-page ads getting either shoved to the back of the magazine or spanning several pages so they can tell a story. Certainly it is true that the print mag industry is hurting these days, but that pain is because of rising printing and distribution costs and an oversaturated market, not because of their advertising model.
Only now are we online publishers finally seeing ad standards that are competitive with the print mag standards (One could argue that interstitials are full page ads, but most don’t take up anywhere near the whole page.) TechCrunch whines childishly about these big ads having a poor user experience, but I posit that TechCrunch’s alternative of a superabundance of small ads create an even worse user experience than one or two large ads would. TC shows ELEVEN ads before you even get below the fold, 10 of which are deprecated 125×125’s that allow for virtually no design, messaging or branding benefits, and they make the whole page look messy and cluttered.
Large ads are simply better because:
- There is more room for compelling design
- There is more room for compelling messaging
- Page layout is easier - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen page designs compromised by trying to fit a 300×250 ad. Interstitials and full page-wide ads are actually easier to design around
When will web ads be this cool? When they're big enough
Print mags have much larger ads than websites, so do they have a poor user experience? Of course not. In many magazines the ads are so cool that they’re almost considered content. Magazine readers realize that you need to see ads to get cheap/free content, and website readers only whine about big ads on websites because:
- We have conditioned them to see small ads
- Online ad creative is often poorly designed (not visually appealing, message isn’t compelling, etc.), and
- Online ads are often poorly targeted
We have been trying to fix the Problem 1 for 15 years, and once we do fix it, the advertising folks will fix Problem 2 for us because they’ll have much more space to work with, as they do in print mags. As for targeting (Problem 3), AdSense was the biggest quantum leap in this space, with behavioral targeting being the next wave; there is plenty of work going on in this area.
As soon as online publishers and advertisers can fix these problems, user experience will improve, ad rates will improve, and we will finally see the maturing of the online advertising model.
