I’ve been blogging a lot, but evidently not here. Instead, I’ve been writing for a wage at Nokia Conversations. That’s a far better arrangement for me in almost every respect, but has left things rather dusty over here on twopointouch.

So, one of the things I write is a bit of a rant for the weekly newsletter. You can subscribe if you want, but my cunning wheeze was to use that content to create some new posts right here. Thanks to Nokia and my employer for allowing me to do that.

This was my first newsletter bit, when I was still young and angry, about six months ago. It first appeared here.

——

Let’s get something straight. Mobile email is great. I can be contacted wherever I am; always know what’s going on, and look like I’m hard at work at the same time as meeting a friend for lunch. No problem there. I don’t even worry too much about the email addiction and expectation that I’m available at ungodly hours. It’s worth it for the flexibility.

But it’s not quite right. Not yet.

This is what happens. I sit at my desk in front of my computer in my home office for most of the day, most working days. My email client is sitting open, filling up with the wit, wisdom and legal threats of my colleagues and contacts. My job entails changing focus quite frequently, so I need to check it every few minutes. That’s alright. By the end of the day, there’s no unread messages, though probably quite a few in the ‘action-this’ pile.

Meanwhile, my mobile phone is doing exactly the same thing. Filling up with messages. Buzzing or beeping every few seconds to helpfully remind me what it’s doing.

That’s annoying on its own. Yes, I could switch it off, then switch it on again if I leave the house. But the chances are that I won’t remember to do that, and in any case, it’s a faff to have to go through folders and into settings every time I want to have email on the move.

Then there’s double annoyance that I’ve managed to reach ‘inbox-zero’ on my computer, and yet there’s 106 ‘unread’ messages on my mobile. That shouldn’t happen. I know, I know: there’s clever software available that will synchronise the read/unread state of messages. But I haven’t got that.

So this is my proposal. My phone knows which is my home network. I’ve called it ‘home’, so it couldn’t be easier for it to work that out. So when I’m at home, download emails but don’t announce them. Assume that anything that arrives while you’re connected to this network is already read. Squirrel it away so I can find it on the move, but quietly.

If it isn’t connected to the home network, that means I’ve gone out — so wake up and do your job. Beeps, buzzing and all the rest. I need you then. Oh, and mark the posts I’ve read on the move as read on the server, will you?

Finally, stage three. I’ve been out and then come home. So the phone reconnects to the home network. At this point, it knows it can go to sleep.

So there you go — mobile email done right. Simple, eh? (Cue avalanche of messages from engineers pointing out the multiple flaws in my idea).

image credit: jayfreshuk

De-activating the plugin disables all the articles connected to it, as shown here, changes the title of your post, removes the tags, all the content (not just the feed content, but whatever you had to say about it, too) and the extract.

I wasn’t thrilled about the amount of control it was exercising on my blog’s content in the first place: dictating the title of the post, the tags and the excerpt. It also reverted these when I tried to change them. So I disabled it, whereupon it’s added insult to injury.

So, nice idea. Horrible in practice. Sorry.

Reports from the media measurement company Nielsen have dropped one of the features with which the company is arguably most associated: the idea of a television ‘channel’. MediaPost reports:

Nielsen said it had dropped one of its most popular features — data showing how many channels the average TV household receives — because in a digital, time-shifted multichannel universe, there no longer is a “consistent” meaning for the term “channel.”

People watch their television time-shifted through DVRs, VCRs and VoD, through computer screens and smartphones, alongside other media such as their laptop screens and they flick with their remotes whenever the momentum drops. They still watch programmes, of course – and Nielsen’s data will measure those audiences. But they don’t tune in to channels anymore. The ‘how many channels’ statistic, which – as you’d imagine – showed an ever-widening number of choices, makes no sense in a world where to answer to that question is effectively ‘infinite’:

In 2008, the last year for which Nielsen reported the data, the average U.S. household had 130.1 TV channels available to it, but on average, “tuned” only 17.8 of them, according to Nielsen’s definition of channel tuning. That means that the average TV households was only watching about 14% of the channels they had available to them. The percentage of channels the average TV household tunes to had been declining over the years that Nielsen has been reporting that data.

Long Live the Channel

The last sentence there – ‘The percentage of channels the average TV household tunes to had been declining over the years that Nielsen has been reporting that data” – is pretty telling. Creating more opportunities to watch rubbish doesn’t mean that people will do so. Generally speaking, people only want to watch the good stuff, and that’s what has led the popularity of time-shifting and over-the-web television like Hulu and iPlayer. At any given moment, it’s entirely likely that there is ‘nothing’ on broadcast TV but ‘anything you want’ via other means.

That said, the BBC still accounts for 1/3 of the UK’s TV-viewing; it won 13 of the 23 television BAFTA awards last year, with multiple nominations in almost every category. The BBC iPlayer site gets more than 1.4mn visitors a day. Could it be possible that these statistics are related? That a channel that cares about quality and service delivery might actually still mean something as a channel? I think so.

I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting.

The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly in multiplayer videogames. People discover little cheats in videogames that can advance their score but annoy everyone else. Whether to use them anyway is an example of the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. According to Game Theory, the dominant strategy is to use these cheats.

[Explication: your opponent has the option to use the cheat as well. If they do, and you don’t, you lose. If you do, and they don’t, you win. If you both do, then it’s equal. The worst that can happen from using the cheat is that the stakes are even. On the other hand, if you don’t use the cheat, then the worst that can happen is you losing. That’s worse than the stakes being even: so use the cheat.]

However, the consequences of everyone using the cheats is mayhem and no fun for anyone, so it’s actually also an undesirable outcome, but less undesirable than losing. Everyone cheating rather than playing the game properly. But so long as the strategy exists and can be executed in a way that’s undetected, the rational decision is to continue the abuse. The way to counteract this for developers and publishers is to close down the cheat strategies or publically identify the abusers so that future potential opponents will either (a) avoid them or (b) use the same strategies as the abusers. Identification and iteration of the same game conditions turns the short-term gain into a long-term loss*. Creating a state of uncertainty over whether abusers will/can be identified can also work.

[*Actually, the maths says that continuing to cheat still remains dominant, even when the cards are on the table, but humans are rarely mathematical creatures. People are complicated and irrational: winning isn’t always the overall goal for them. Some people don’t play the dominant strategy anyway, because of a sense of honour or fair-play. On the other hand, some people always will, despite the consequences, because they don’t care. (They’re ‘griefers’ in videogame jargon).]

The second post was by Bobbie Johnson on the Guardian website about the Firefox and Chrome extension Ad-Block. If you use Ad-Block, then it stops the advertising banners and MPUs on websites from loading. That makes for a faster and smoother browsing experience for you as an individual. However, the websites that you are looking at lose revenue, since they probably sell their advertising on a CPM basis – cost per thousand views – it doesn’t matter whether you click on the ads or not. Not all ads are intended to be clicked on anyway, such as branding campaigns.

If everyone Ad-Blocks, then the site you love goes out of business. If no-one does, then it thrives. The ‘cheat’ is the idea that Ad-Block is still pretty-much a secret, or that most other people are more honourable than you. That you can block advertisements, but because hardly anyone else is using it, then the sites will still be OK.

So here’s the obligatory 2x2 matrix:

The best outcome is that your favourite sites prosper and continue, and you don’t have to see the adverts. The worst — the ‘everyone cheats but me’ scenario -  is that they go bust despite you not filtering ads yourself. The dominant strategy is to Ad-Block and hope very few other people do that as well. It will continue to be dominant until enough of us perceive free web media as a long-term game, are identified as free-riders or learn the consequences to our short-term victory.

We want sites to prosper, yes? So what do they/we need to do? They need to make viewing and interacting with their content a long-term game. Part of that is achieved by Bobbie’s column – if Ad-Block is worthy of a column in the Guardian, then it’s certainly not some sort of hacker secret anymore. It is the most-downloaded Firefox Add-on and the leading Chrome Extension. Any certainty that ‘everyone else’ will play a dominated strategy ought to disappear. Thus, the ‘best’ outcome, where you get a free ride on sites that prosper has gone. Take that out of the picture and the game looks rather different: playing fairly together is the new best option. They should probably publish figures on the footer of every page of the revenue lost to filters; maybe scale that into an ‘articles we were unable to commission this month’ widget, if the loss is large enough. Arguably, it should be possible to identify the users of Ad-Block (if it isn’t already) and serve them altered content.

We need to switch off the extension, with the recognition that this is a long game, even if our identities remain masked: it’s the future of free media on the Web. Our best outcome is a free-ride, on sites that are free-to-access anyway. The worst outcome is our favourite sites going bust.

With long-termism brought to the front of our minds, the best outcome is removing a little inconvenience; the worst would be a disaster.

picture credit: HDR cafe

[As you might be tempted to point out: I used to use Ad-Block but I have stopped].

Note that this isn’t the same as digital maoism. Reznor and the rest are still focused on making music and being rock stars, not selling T-shirts and so forth. Masnick also makes the point that getting all the extra “business” stuff done is a useful job for an agent or even a label, and might help justify their existence.

Like other media owners, computer games publishers have a hard time with piracy and other unauthorised distribution. You know this is true because you were a teenager once yourself and you copied disks and downloaded cracks. In my case, it was copying cassette tapes of Spectrum games. It’s really quite a big problem: 2DBoy, the publishers of indie puzzle game World of Goo, had a built-in mechanism for tracking every copy of the game in circulation. They discovered that 90% of those copies were unauthorised, and that’s discounting any versions whose distributors had found a way to circumvent the tracking. While that doesn’t mean that game publishers only get 10% of the revenue they would in a world without piracy, I think we’re likely to agree that it’s probably a fair chunk.

Distribution

When Dragon Age came out, I had several options for getting hold of it.

I could go to a shop

• advantages: I get a box, a disc and a printed manual.
• disadvantages: I have to go to the shop. I might scratch or lose the disks. I have to put the disk in the machine to play. Costs £40.

Or I could buy it through a digital distribution service like Steam (it’s like iTunes for games, basically).

• advantages: I get it right now; Steam looks after the installation and any patches; can’t lose or scratch the disk.
• disadvantage: need to be connected to the Net to play; no printed manual; costs £40.

Or I could download an illegal, cracked copy through PirateBay or similar.

• advantages: I get it right now. No need to jump through copy protection hoops. Costs nothing.
• disadvantages: err… might get caught.

So, the method that earns EA no money is, in many respects, the most convenient. They should probably try to dissuade me from doing that somehow. Here’s what they’ve done and what they might have done.

Digital-Rights Management

Games publishers have traditionally responded to the threat of unauthorised copying by introducing more and more sophisticated forms of copy protection and DRM. You have to have the DVD in your drive to start the game. The game requires you to enter a unique serial number. It might check this number against an internal algorithm. More recently, it’s likely to check the number against a database on the publisher’s server – a key that’s used more than a few times will be blacklisted. It might check that key every time you play. Dragon Age employs all these methods. But it doesn’t really work very well as a means of protection.

First, it’s a pain in the neck for legitimate customers. Why should I have to go hunting through my discs every time I want to play the game? What’s with this trillion-character serial number? Hang on, my Internet connection is a bit flakey – what do you mean I can’t play? These methods aren’t just inconvenient; they are also disrespectful. They treat paying customers like potential criminals.

Second, the pirates appear to be really rather good at thwarting copy protection. Cracks to make a game playable without any of the above are easily obtained. So it turns out that the only people who are inconvenienced are genuine customers. Nice work!

Score: 1/5

Enrich the Genuine Copies

In recent years, the idea of giving ‘extras’ to paying customers has gone by the board somewhat. I recall buying games in the nineties that came with 2–3 different manuals, a map of the in-game world, a poster, occasionally novelties like a metal figurine or a sound track disk. Nowadays, games come in DVD-style boxes and so the possibilities for novelties are rather limited.

Nonetheless, EA have actually done quite well with Dragon Age on this score. Rather than physical extras, they come in a virtual form. My box came with a coupon with two extra serial numbers I could enter into the game. These added new content to the game: a couple of extra adventures and unique items and powers to make my character stronger.

I had to register my game with the publisher in order to unlock this content and so there’s no way for pirates to get hold of it. I really like this idea: the illegal copy is impoverished while legitimate buyers are rewarded. And thinking about gamer psychology, I believe it acts as a strong motivation to get the real thing. Those using unauthorised versions will know that their character isn’t as strong and hasn’t got the same resources as those belonging to users who bought it. Gamers hate having a ‘lame’ character.

Unfortunately, Bioware slightly botched the execution. Using the premium content requires the game to check in with the server every time it is run, spoiling the experience for those with a flakey internet connection or wanting to play the game on the move.

On a more positive note, the title is being actively maintained by the developers. Two patches have already been released with a third in the works. Once again, it’s unlikely pirates will be able to use these, again making their copies inferior.

Score: 3/5

Sell a Platform

But EA did more with add-on idea than simply providing bonuses for registered customers. It has built Dragon Age as a platform as well as a game. You can go onto the site and purchase Bioware points to spend on extra chunks of content, such as the Return to Ostagar expansion. Again, you need to be registered to buy and use this content, which once again devalues the pirated releases. Since the game’s launch, there’s only been one piece of additional content to purchase, with a further expansion due in March.

The developers also released a toolset for the game allowing users to create their own tweaks and content for the game that can be distributed and installed in a similar fashion to the official add-ons.

Score 4/5

Build Community

The toolkit is just a small part of the ways that the publishers have attempted to foster a community around the game. Registering the game automatically creates a MySpace-style profile page for every user which automatically records achievements within the game and your character’s progress. You can add comments and screengrabs, and the site comes with the normal tools to twitter/facebook/tell others about what you’ve managed to achieve.

While I think this is useful for games, it’s not especially so in this case. Dragon Age is a resolutely single-player game so there is no particular reason why anyone should be remotely interested in another player’s progress, unlike, say, multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or Eve Online. Oh well – I’ll still give points for good intentions.

Score 2.5/5

Conclusions

A mixed score overall, then, with overly zealous DRM casting a shadow over some more insightful ideas to make piracy a poor option for users. Nonetheless, it appears to have been relatively palatable to users, with over 3.2mn copies shipped by the beginning of February. At £40 a unit, not including any after-sales of extra content, that equals um… squillions in revenue.

The key to good practice here is giving customers more than they expected, rewarding their patronage, hooking them in as they experience the game and up-selling them with extra content to extend the experience. These sorts of ideas might easily be applied to other media forms, such as a music CD or a magazine subscription. If I pay, give me more, exclusive extras that add a lot more value to the legitimate edition than the unauthorised copies. Make it easy for me to use it as a want to. As we all know, the bits and bytes of any digital product can and will be copied by people who are determined to do so. However, if you make those ones and zeroes just a fraction of the whole product experience, then there is still a business in making media.

A presentation I wrote for a meeting today about where our media are heading in the next 5–10 years. It doesn’t make a lot of sense without my accompanying narrative, I realise. Nonetheless, I wanted to keep it safely bookmarked and you might enjoy a round of Powerpoint-Karaoke against it.

Also, no image sources are acknowledged *slaps own hands* – sorry, Internet people: it woz Google Image Search wot made me do it. Happy to add.

The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and Search during the Super Bowl comes from two hot-spots of media attention:

1. Google Search is continually used as the prime example of the power of word-of-mouth over traditional forms of marketing: ‘…and they never spent a dollar on advertising it!’ says the social media guru.
2. The slots between segments of the Super Bowl are famously the most expensive and sought-after TV ad-spots of the year. (On the official site, linked above, a link to a video of the commercial slots was the top item when I looked!)

The Internet and the Super Bowl last intersected so heavily ten years ago, in 2000, called — at the time — ‘dotcom bowl’, when ten heavily-funded, but mostly impractical internet start-ups spanked $40mn in venture capital in order to secure the slots, at an average of $2.2mn for 30 seconds. Twelve months later, all but two of those start-ups had gone bust. Internet companies have tended to avoid the Super Bowl since then for obvious reasons.

So you might take this appearance as an indication that either Google has given in to Old Media; or conversely that the value of old media has dropped so low that even the biggest advertiser on the Internet will give it a go.

Personally, I take it as a sign of changed understandings of old and new media and of how persuasion through advertising works. Hell freezes over indeed.

Firstly, dividing old and new media into two separate, enemy camps that will have nothing to do with each other is nonsense. You aren’t a Luddite if you use TV; you aren’t progressive if you use the Web. This false dichotomy has held both sides back for too long. Old media still have massive reach compared to the Web: and telling more people about your stuff is mostly good, especially if you have a consumer product, like a new web browser, to give them. To give an example: the highly favoured Compare the Meerkat campaign — created by VCCP – had digital end-locations but depended on a massive TV, newspaper and outdoor campaign to create its success (400% increase in traffic and 80% more quotations given for client Compare the Market).

Second, Internet advertising isn’t a very good platform for persuasion. Sorry. You have one five-or-so-word opportunity and (maybe) a graphic that has to fit into a fairly small space. Most people ignore you. The people that click on your ad are stupid, bored and poor. Or are your competitors and their agents. What’s good about it is that it’s so cheap that you can throw a small amount of money at it (compared to traditional media) and create a lot of clicks, it generates great CPA information and, if correctly targeted at long-tail keywords, then yes, it sells.

It won’t change people’s minds, though. You need longer periods of time and richer engagement to do that. I read today that cinema advertising revenues went up 5% [PDF] last year. What’s that about – apart from creative agencies loving them? It’s about the realisation that advertising-as-experience (and therefore, ‘something that might influence someone’s opinion’) still doesn’t happen very often, predictably or inexpensively on the Web.

This is the truth. We live our lives not offline or online, but inline. We’re continually in both spaces and don’t draw much distinction between them, contrary to what a lot of commentators would have us believe. This is especially true of younger people, who’ve grown up with the Net at their side. We don’t ‘jack-in’, as Neuromancer and countless successors imagined, we accommodate.

[PS. Throwing irony upon irony, this is also the year that Pepsi, long a Superbowl standard, decided not to bother and devote the money to social media *cough* philanthropy instead.]

[PPS. What I wonder about is why Google cares so much about Chrome? It’s given none of its other products, consumer or business, remotely the same funding or attention…]

On most news organisations’ websites, you’ll find a widget called ‘most read’, ‘most shared’ or ‘most commented’, possibly all three. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist experiment suggests an interesting alternative.

Typically, the content found in the most-X sections provides a salutary — if depressing — reminder of humanity’s baseness and stupidity. What tends to get flagged is not ‘Picasso retrospective opens at the ICA’ or ‘Proposed Amendments to Digital Economy Bill’: it’s ‘footballer shags team-mate’s wife’. If you’re seeking the Wisdom of Crowds, look away now.

Here’s the latest from the BBC:

Even worse is the equivalent list from the Telegraph:

Not to mention the Daily Mail:

Oh dear, oh dear. Showbiz, trivia, sport, sex and weirdness. And these aren’t tabloid publications. The Telegraph, in particular, paints itself as a serious business and politics paper with a concern for moral values. Its readers, on the other hand, appear to prefer sex scandals and weird animals. I can’t imagine its editors are especially proud of these results but ultimately have to shrug and be grateful for the extra page-views.

The Guardian has a similar widget, which isn’t as lowlife as the examples above, but again favours the funny and the odd.

Newspapers and news organisations are in a strange position with regard to these most-popular lists. The short-term value is that they flag up the items that new visitors are most likely to click on and enjoy. They get more page views out of their visitors and thus more advertising inventory to sell. They help the organisation bolster their claims to advertisers that their sites are busy and popular. Readers get what they want quickly and leave happily.

On the other hand. There’s a long term devaluation coming out of this for serious papers. When they sell to advertisers, they aren’t just selling so-many million eyeballs much of the time. They’re selling a certain quality of readership and particular brand values. For readers, there’s a similar brand attachment. They go to a serious news site because they trust the brand and want serious coverage. If they then end up then clicking on the story about a funny-looking gorilla, then that’s their own affair. Maybe, rationally, they should have gone to weirdanimalpix.com, but they don’t see themselves as the sort of person who does that.

What’s more. Papers don’t really have an ad-inventory problem. They generate thousands of new pages and hundreds of thousands of impressions a day and rarely sell more than 20% of what they have to offer. The only real reason for driving page views is the arms-war between the Nationals over who is the most popular. And being the most popular isn’t a great argument to advertisers if you are simultaneously claiming that your readership represents an elite, as is likely for any serious news site.

So maybe it’s a good idea to find a middle-ground; a way for serious news organisations’ websites to highlight popular items that doesn’t make them look like a zoo for morons: for readers or advertisers. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist – launched today – is one attempt to find that middle ground.

The idea is that it blends populism and curation. The most popular stories will appear on the grid, as you’d expect, BUT:

• The different sections of the site – news, features, opinion, sport, etc. — remain balanced in the proportions conceived by the editors. So if 90% of its visitors are looking at Sports stories, it still only occupies 2–3 slots on the grid.
• Like is compared with like. For example, Charlie Brooker’s satirical swipes at popular media are perennially popular on the site, but will only hit the grid if a particular column is more popular than the norm.

Guardian communities editor Meg Pickard explains:

…we’re analysing and combining all sorts of things; where people come from, where they go to next, how long they stay on a particular page, if the page is getting passed round twitter and other social websites, number (and rate) of comments and so on.

We’re taking a range of these variables — enough that a single datapoint doesn’t skew the results — and mushing (that’s the technical term) them all together to get a value of “Zeitgeistiness” (another technical term) for each content object.

But — and this is the important bit — each content object only gets compared to other items in the same section, which in real terms means that Football articles only get compared to other Football articles, Technology blogposts against other Technology blogposts and so on. In fact, we go one step further, and take the type of article and day of week into consideration: an Environment gallery on a Monday only gets compared to others of the same type/section also published on Mondays. Because we’ve been storing and analysing this data overnight for a while now, we’ve got a good baseline to work from.

It’s early days for the Zeitgeist experiment, and I’m afraid it’s rather buried away from most visitors to the site, so it will be hard for them to see how popular the idea plays out compared to the regular ‘most-read/commented/shared’ widget. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting project that shows how news organisations might protect their brand at the same time as playing to the cheap seats.

picture credit: Joi

In mitigation of my not being able to think of anything interesting to write about today, I shall pass on several thousand words by other people, published by The Society of Digital agencies (SoDA). It’s a survey and editorial on what members of the society think 2010 holds for digital media marketing.

It’s a 70-page PDF, but don’t worry too much about the apparent weight — it’s all microchunked into big charts and easily-digestible 500-word thought pieces from the leaders of a number of digital agencies.

Overall, the outlook is bullish:

• 81% of Brand Execs expect an increase in digital projects for 2010
• 50% will be shifting funds from traditional to digital media
• 78% of global participants believe the current economy will actually spawn more funds allocated to Digital

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

hat tip: iboy