The race to the bottom
In the past few years the web has trained us to look at one statistic above all others.
The count.
How many page views we’ve had. How many video or channel views on youtube. How many unique visitors our web site garnered. The number of app downloads. The number of followers we have. The number of friends(?) we have.
We’ve been trained strongly by all these counts that we retroactively do whatever gets more. How can we not. What gets measured gets done. It is the only thing that we consistently measure across the web. So we naturally re-act to it.
What we need to be most careful of is the things that get spread, are usually the things that shock. And the things that shock have very little staying power and loyalty. If we follow the count too closely, we end up in a race to the bottom. We morph into something that aggregates, rather than something that creates value and we may even forget what we originally set out to do.
Good stuff Steve, as always
@joppas (via twitter)
well said. Don’t ever loose touch with what you originally set out to do.
The Green Guerilla
Yep, this blog is a classic example of the count. While I can rely on getting over 1000 people reading what I say everyday, I can get up to 5000 readers a day if I blog on something topical, or hot in Silicon Valley. The temptation is to write to the traffic. But then I remind myself I’m idea curator, not a newspaper.
Steve.
Don Bradman never looked at the scoreboard to see his run tally until he went out. Focussing on the numbers too much whilst you’re trying to get them is fraught with terrible distractions. I agree!
I think the online edition of Melbourne’s broadsheet newspaper ‘The Age’ is a classic example of this. It’s interesting how, over time, the featured stories have become more salacious and celebrity gossip-oriented. If you compare the online version to the print version it will look substantially different.
The online editorial decisions have obviously been made based on what people are clicking on. But in attempting to grow the readership of the (free) online version, they are muddying the brand, which diminshes the (paid) print version.
The result is an increasingly homogenous and mediocre site.
In the longer term, it would probably be of greater value to focus on that subset of the count that is committed to returning because you are offering something unique, prepared to open their wallet on occasion to quantify the value they perceive as receiving from you, and act as self-directed brand ambassadors for your offering.
Yes I agree to that Steve! We tend to focus on the count and not on the quality that we produce. We should give more importance to those things with value because it has more staying power.
Never thought about how those stats could be a bad thing, but you make a good point. Playing just to the numbers can really water down what you’re trying to achieve.
It’s kind of a weird thing, because in some ways you do need to listen to your audience and go with what they like. On the other hand, you have to stick true to what you’re trying to do.
Quality over Quantity then…