The Top Three Reasons Why Lists Are.... Oh, Forget It

Paul Waldman asks an interesting question - a lot of online content comes in the form of lists as a form of link baiting, but lists are also prominently featured in traditional magazines, especially the type that want to inspire an impulse sale at the newsstand or checkout lane. The length of the list seems to be relatively unimportant - people respond to lists, and tend to click links or buy magazines that promise lists:

So what's the lesson here? Lists are magic. Buzzfeed has built its spectacular success on that principle (just look), there are other web sites who have similar success, (see, for example, Cracked, which on the web is something very different and more successful than its print roots as a Mad magazine rip-off), and it's something every magazine and website editor knows. The next time you're at a newsstand, look at the magazine covers, and see how many are using lists to grab your attention. "9 Moves That'll Drive Him Wild." "8 Exercises to Burn Fat And Rip Those Abs." "12 Strategies For Achieving Financial Security." "14 Celebrity Bikini Nightmares." But the question is, why?

Waldman offers a couple of theories:

1. "Maybe it has to do with the promise of something both finite and complete, distilling the world down to something you can manage and then be done with."

2. "It could also be the attraction of something easy to read—because it's broken into small pieces, you know it won't require too much work to read, you'll be able to skim it easily, and if you want to read part of it and then stop, you'll be able to."

Waldman questions his theories as being too rational, as he sees the attraction of lists as being more visceral, "making us click on things whose topics we don't even otherwise care about". And Waldman's onto something with the argument that our clicking isn't purely rational. For actual informational content, I can't recall the last link I found that promised a list that lived up to its promise.

But here's the thing: Even when we click on a list out of idle curiosity, something we might not click but for the promise of it's offering the "top three reasons," or "four most important factors", on one thing or another, the clicking is fundamentally rational. We have questions or we have curiosity, and the list promises that somebody else has engaged in curation, separated the wheat from the chaff, and will give us the answers in a quick, easily digested form. You don't click on what might be a long form article or even a short essay about something of marginal interest to you, but if you can get that information by glancing at a list the cost-benefit analysis (time vs. interest) shifts. And if the topic interests you or is important to you, the implied promises of curation and relevance have appeal.

Supermarket magazine stands have been filled with lists for as long as I can remember, and they've presumably failed to live up to that promise for at least as long, given that the same essential lists are offered month after month, year after year. The top three ways to lose weight, the top five ways to find your soul mate, the top three tricks to drive your significant other wild in the sack... The goal is to get you to click or buy without thinking, or if you must think, "It's only $1.99," or "If the article at the other end of the link is junk I've only lost a few seconds of time."

Will it continue to work? The evidence at the newsstand says "yes", and so far the evidence from the content mills suggests that the technique isn't losing its effectiveness online. Alas, the actual cost is that the most meaningful, relevant information is likely to be headlined with a misleading title in order to draw more "eyeballs", and may fail to be noticed in favor of lists that, unfortunately, are often junk.

A Domain Name Free-For-All

With ICANN announcing that, with the cost of application starting at a mere $185,000.00, you can purchase your own top-level domain (TLD), we will soon experience a dizzying array of alternatives to the traditional TLD's (principally .com, .net, .org, .gov, .edu, .mil, and country domain names). I heard an ICANN representative declaring that soon we'll have .pizza and .movie TLD's, and I suspect he's correct, but... to what end? For example, will a single pizza company acquire the .pizza TLD, or will a third party acquire it and try to convince all of the world's pizza shops that listing their store as .pizza is a business necessity? Companies that presently attempt to manage trademark and reputation issues by purchasing domain names on the most common TLD's will... realistically speaking, have to throw up their hands in despair.

ICANN is promising to police new TLD's for name confusion, and promises also to try to keep past domain squatters and typosquatters from obtaining TLD's. Beyond obvious typos, good luck with that. If I want a TLD for nefarious purposes and fear that ICANN is going to deny my application due to my identity, I'll obtain it through a proxy. Some TLD's will be worth millions from day one - abuse is inevitable.

I do suspect that the new rules will have an impact on domainers who sit on single or double keyword domain names, as I expect that the changes will accelerate the use of "OneBox"-style navigation on browsers. Unless you type in an exact domain name the text you enter will be treated as a search instead of defaulting to (keywords . com) as was once the case. But beyond that, I expect that it will improve the value of established sites on .com domain names - because with few exceptions I think that a proliferation of TLD's will serve primarily to confuse consumers and that, just as they did when .com, .net, .org, .info and the like became competitors to .com, they'll either default toward .com or defer to a search engine. (When was the last time you intentionally browsed to, or even notices that you were using, a ".info" domain? How about ".aero"? Did you even know those TLD's exist?)

Why, you ask, wouldn't it make sense for people to type in a new TLD associated with a particular business or profession? Let's say a new ".law" TLD is created - why wouldn't people looking for lawyers or legal information gravitate to that TLD? Well, what if there's also ".legal", ".lawyer", ".attorney", ".lex", ".atty", ".lawhelp", ".lawinfo", etc.? What if the owner of .law charges an exorbitant rate for registrations, to recover the six to seven figures invested in acquiring that TLD? (Similarly, I'm not sure if ICANN's rules would deem ".car" and ".cars" too similar, but what about ".auto", ".vehicle," ".suv", ".truck", ".automobile", ".wheels", ".motorcar", etc. - the "non-confusing" variations quickly become overwhelming.)

The biggest winners here, I suspect, will be ICANN and the search engines. ICANN will take in millions in fees to review applications, and each approval will make ordinary people more dependent upon search engines to guide them to valuable online information. Second, unless the OneBox solutions are implemented across the major browsers, typosquatters will likely fare well. Third, people who have not been able to get memorable domain names should be able to obtain better names, but subject to TLD confusion - they will get better domains, but may lose some traffic to the ".com" variation. (Sites that used TLD's in a clever way, such as del.icio.us, still typically found it beneficial to acquire the .com variant once funds were available to do so.)

The biggest losers, I expect, will be people who have been sitting on "high value" domain names without developing them, in anticipation that their value will only rise with time. People who rely upon generic keyword traffic based upon their domain name as opposed to their site content will likely see that traffic siphoned away by an increased number of low-content sites competing for the same keywords. And the average person hoping to make some sense of the web behind, "if the business I'm looking for is truly important it probably owns the .com".

"No, You Can't Have That Discount"

You've probably seen banner ads for Lamps Plus on major media websites, including newspaper websites, offering $10 off a purchase. Well, I was in the market for a new lamp, and thought I would try them out. They have a really clever database design, "powered by EasyAsk", they have nice, clear images of their merchandise, their prices are comparable to other online vendors, and they do a great job trying to upsell accessories at the end of your purchase.

So what are they doing wrong?

They wouldn't honor their discount.

Now I'll grant, when you click through their ad you get a paragraph-long set of exclusions from the $10 discount offer, but they do nothing to explain to you why a particular lighting fixture doesn't qualify for a discount. You just get an impersonal error message and no discount.

To me, that's worse than not offering a discount in the first place.¹

So what did I do? I searched the same product at Yahoo! shopping, used Google to look up coupon codes for the various merchants listed, and found one that offered a ten percent discount plus free shipping. Lamps Plus ended up saving its $10, and I ended up saving quite a bit more.
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1. It feels like enough of a cheat when you see the "coupon code" box and don't have a code. I like the approach of KidSurplus, where they offer up a coupon code on every page of their site - so you have the easy opportunity to get a discount if you don't have a better code from another source.

Lieberman's False Accusations Against Lamont

You know this by now - the FBI has concluded that the Lamont campaign was not responsible for attacks on Lieberman's website. If you followed the issue at the time, you probably expected that outcome. As I stated back then,

It gives me no confidence in the Lieberman campaign staff, or their accusations of sabotage, that they seem to think that their website is served from a magic box which can only fail in the event of the malicious acts of others.

The FBI's determination as to the cause? Lieberman's magic box server was misconfigured.

According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause," the memo stated. "The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site.

"The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server. . . . Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial of service attack."

Has Lieberman apologized yet? He should.

Joe Lieberman's Website Woes

Joe Lieberman's campaign is apparently still accusing Lamont of somehow being responsible for hijacking his website.

"We call on Ned Lamont to make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately," Smith said in a statement. "Any attempt to suppress voter participation and undermine the voting process on Election Day is deplorable and has no place in our democracy."

The latest version of their accusation seems to be of a denial of service attack:

"This statement is to confirm that the suspension of displaying the Web site www.joe2006.com was not due to to an overdue account. Friends of Joe Lieberman is completely paid in full. The screen that showed yesterday is a default image from the server," the Lieberman campaign said Tuesday in a statement.

"In order to isolate where the denial of service attack was coming into the site, we disabled it as rapidly as possible. Once we were able to isolate all the site files for study, we were able to add an appropriate one-page maintenance message."

Except throughout this "attack" people were able to access the website and see an error message. It gives me no confidence in the Lieberman campaign staff, or their accusations of sabotage, that they seem to think that their website is served from a magic box which can only fail in the event of the malicious acts of others. They also seem to believe that only a political opponent would target a high-profile website in a manner likely to grab headlines.... A savvy opponent would not do this on the eve of a primary.

Here's another lesson for political campaigns - particularly major or national campaigns - set up your servers to automatically refresh site content on a regular basis (e..g, every half-hour) such that no vandalism of the site itself will last long, even when responsible staff members are busy with other matters or are asleep. Consider setting up a separate SMTP server to handle mail. Implement frequent automated backups of any areas of the site which are regularly updated, to prevent or at least minimize data loss. This is basic stuff, which is why even I know it....

Google Enters the World of Webhosting

I mean, beyond blogs. Google Page Creator. (Via SitePoint blogs).