I'd Rather Be Writing » long tail

The Problem of Free and the Long Tail of Content Production

Tom Johnson — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:23:24 +0000

Internet users have grown accustomed to free content. But this is not without its problems. Jeff Chandler used to produce a Weekly WordPress podcast . His last podcast, “I tried,” is dated back in December. It’s a long, tired explanation about the difficulties of pouring so much energy into an endeavor that has no substantial financial return. As he moves toward marriage and maintains a full-time job, the amount of free time he can devote to essentially a profitless hobby shrinks even more. After more than 100 podcast episodes, it seems he’s starting to change his course.

It’s no surprise to me that the podcast would come to an end (at least the recent hiatus seems to portend an end). About a year ago, I remember speaking with a friend of mine who works at WordPress. I told him they should hire Jeff on their WordPress team, because his steam would eventually run out without a sustainable income, and this podcast channel, which had a lot of momentum, would slow. My friend explained that it’s not always necessary to incorporate everyone into full-time WordPress employment to ensure their services continue. Looking back, to some degree I was right.

Recently it seems that Automattic, the leaders of WordPress, too, is also feeling the squeeze of free. According to Chandler’s last podcast, with the closure of Windows Live services, hundreds of thousands of bloggers have been signing up at WordPress.com. WordPress.com increased from 400,000 users to 900,000 users per month.

I don’t know if it’s related, but recently I noticed that Automattic started clarifying their prices for Akismet, the plugin that helps block spam. It used to be that when you signed up for a WordPress.com username, you automatically saw an Akismet API key in your profile that you could plug into your blog. I missed this idea, but apparently Akismet was a service that I should have been paying monthly fees for since the beginning. In fact, since I have more than 25,000 page views a month (my site received 57,000 page views last month), I am supposed to pay $50 a month for the Akismet service.

The following image shows the pricing model. If your site receives more than 25,000 page views per month, you have to select an enterprise commercial license starting at $50 a month.

Akismet's newly clarified pricing structure shows that if you have more than 25,000 page views a month, you have to pay $50 a month for Akismet.

That seemed steep to me, so I deactivated Akismet and am now trying out Antispambee, which so far works quite well. I also closed all comments on posts older than 60 days. Ninety-nine percent of comments on old posts are spam anyway, so this just reduces the amount of possible spam.

While of course I dislike the sudden clarification of Akismet pricing, I have to wonder if WordPress itself isn’t feeling the squeeze of free services, somewhat like Jeff with his podcast. Automattic gives a lot of software away for free, making money mostly through add-on services such as custom domain names, access to the stylesheet, and storage space. Controlling spam is a must-do task on a blog, so this is a potential money maker if they can sell it as an add on. (Without a spam blocker, I would receive about 100 spam comments a day, which would essentially kill the open commenting policy on my site.)

I had a more regular podcast on my site last year as well. I will still occasionally post a podcast, but it became clear to me more than a year ago that podcasting wasn’t my future. Listeners are far fewer than blog readers, the time required to produce a podcast is much higher, and podcasters are constantly being threatened by big media’s move into the amateur’s space. Why listen to me drone on about technical writing when you have This American Life, Radiolab, The New Yorker Fiction podcast, and dozens more professional podcasts in your queue?

This brings me to a larger point. More and more free content producers are going to fade away. They’re going to realize that, for the effort they put into their sites, the return isn’t worth it. Regular, sustainable content produced on a daily basis will decline.

However, because more people will start blogs and podcasts, this decline in content from the free content producers will be balanced out by the general increase in collective content. Your RSS Reader will still be full of new feeds to check out, but rather than reading through your top 20 feeds in your blogroll, you’ll read through the top posts from over 200 blog feeds. This is the long tail of content production. Fewer bloggers and podcasters producers will push out regular content because they don’t see enough return. But since there will be more content producers overall, readers won’t notice a difference.

The long tail of content production: Even though the number of new content per source decreases, the overall increase in the number of sources leads to a greater amount of overall content.

In other words, never mind that Tom only publishes 1 podcast every 3 months. You can grab podcasts from 15 other sites that are even better. Those 15 other sites may only produce 1 podcast every 3 months as well. But collectively, your iPod is still full of new podcasts to listen to. You just have more variety and more sources that you’re pulling from. Content is still free, but the sources are more varied.

Will the paid content model ever work online for amateurs? Will the influencers eventually fade away into a sea of irregular content producers spread out globally? I think so. But I am not saddened by the fact that it’s harder and harder to make money online. I like the idea that a global conversation across countries and companies and contexts is taking place. When ideas come from a greater diversity of engaged people, the information is richer and deeper.

For me, the revenue I make from my blog through ads, WordPress consulting, and speaking engagements is minimal compared to the salary from my regular job. I never entertained the idea that my blog could somehow support me and my family. Also, if I somehow did find enough revenue (possible if you’re single, live in a shared room outside of town, have no debt or car, and eat only Top Ramen noodles), I would run out of fodder for my blog without a job to keep me challenged. I would slip away from my immersion in the technical writer’s world. This world keeps me engaged and provides me with topics to blog about.

If all revenues cease from my blog, I would still find a lot of value in it, because it keeps me professionally engaged. This is why if you’re starting a blog, it’s probably best to let it accompany your career choice. With this strategy, your blog efforts always provide an indirect financial return on career growth. This indirect financial return can be an incentive that helps you keep blogging even when there seems to be little tangible reward.

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A Mile Wide and 30 Seconds Deep: A Metaphor for Help from Mike Hughes

Tom Johnson — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:45:17 +0000

I don’t know if it was my long bike ride along a river or my immersion in the writing phase of a documentation project, but this week I’ve been pondering Mike Hughes’ assertion that help should be a “mile wide and thirty seconds deep.” I first heard Mike mention this help landscape metaphor in a podcast several months back. Mike also wrote an article called “The Help Landscape: A Mile Wide and Thirty Seconds Deep” for UX Matters a couple of years ago.

Here’s the principle, as Mike puts it: “Help needs to be a mile wide—it must cover everything—and 30 seconds deep—tackling only small amounts of detail at any given point.” In other words, your help file should be comprehensive, especially covering niche topics, but your treatment of each topic need not be much—a conceptual paragraph and a list of steps perhaps.

Mike bases his reasoning from user observation and two principles. After watching hundreds of people use help, Mike concludes that “Users go to Help only when they’re stuck and stay there only until they feel unstuck.” It makes sense, then, to focus on areas where the users might get stuck (which might be the niche topics), and to only provide enough information for users to unstick themselves, after which users return to the application.

Mike warns about the danger of providing too much information, citing John Carroll’s adaptation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: “The more complete training is, the less usable it will be; the more usable it is, the less complete it can be” (The Nurnberg Funnel). In other words, providing too much information actually hurts the usability of the information. People have a small “intake bandwidth,” as Mike phrases it, when it comes to help. Overload them and they choke.

Finally, Mike references the Long Tail, a concept from Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson. The Long Tail asserts that, in the long run, online stores with niche products outsell physical stores focusing on mainstream products. Amazon.com is a case in point. With help materials, niche topics (those help topics addressing edge cases and infrequent situations or tasks) collectively receive more hits over time than the core how-to topics. With this reasoning, Mike recommends a help strategy that covers comprehensive, niche information but in short topics.

Mike’s strategy seems like a commonsensical approach, one that wouldn’t receive much opposition, but it’s not one adopted by everyone. For example, the help for Microsoft Office tends to be the opposite, with long help topics and a jump menu at the top for navigation. Some of the topics are so long they could be mini-essays. For example, this topic from Microsoft Word on inserting fields, quite typical of other Office 2007 topics, is 14 pages long.

Unlike Microsoft’s help, Techsmith’s help (for Snagit and Camtasia Studio) is short, but it also doesn’t address niche situations. The help is light, especially compared to their pages and pages of forums. At the last STC Summit, I asked someone at the Techsmith booth why their help didn’t include more of the information asked in the forums. The booth representative said the help was purposely light to minimize translation costs.

As I document an application at my work, I’ve been trying to implement the mile-wide-and-thirty-seconds-deep principle. In the previous version of the application, I focused on core topics, for the most part, covering only the essential tasks because I feared overwhelming users with too much information in the table of contents. After the release, as I received questions I began adding them to the help little by little.

With this second release, I’m now writing a help topic for every task I can conjure up, without fear of having a bloated, unnavigable table of contents. I assume people will only turn to the online help when they have specific questions, and they will search the help rather than navigate it. If they want a basic tutorial, they can refer to the quick reference guides (which I’m lengthening) or a variety of video tutorials. But when they search the help, I want the search results to contain the answers, like Google’s results.

I’m not sure how a multiplicity of short topics affects search results. Does the mile-wide-thirty-seconds approach fragment search results into dozens of possibilities, requiring readers to click back and forth ad nauseum looking for the right topic? Do the shorter topics provide more accurate results because they don’t contain an encyclopedia of information?

I don’t know. But I do know we live in the age of Google, and our users have a search-to-find-it mentality. The challenge is figuring out how to sharpen and optimize search results so that, like Google, the results are accurate.

What techniques are you using to optimize your search results? (By the way, you can follow Mike Hughes’ blog here.)