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By Krishna, October 26, 2009

Using the new StackExchange platform opened for beta, a few friends and I set up a new cricket question and answer site at http://cricket.kridaya.com. The site has been active for a few days now and it has been an interesting experience working with it in an admin role. I am a fan of StackOverflow, the programming Q&A site, but operating a StackExchange site gives you a different perspective and more insight into how other users behave.

One differentiating feature on StackExchange is the use of OpenID for registration. As a technical user, I like OpenID, because I don’t have to keep remembering the password for every single site I visit. A few clicks and I am logged in. What could be easier and more convenient than that? Everyone should use OpenID, right?

Not so fast. Here are some lessons from our experiences with talking to users who tried to use the site.

First, people have no idea what OpenID is. So they are confused and skip the registration step. People would feel less lost if you tell them, “Login with your Google, Yahoo! or AOL account” (and whatever other sites support OpenID). It won’t hurt to leave out the word “OpenID” itself.

StackExchange’s statement “Log in with OpenID” is more technically accurate than “Register with OpenID“, but it baffles users because they don’t understand how to register on the site. They don’t realize that a new account is created when they login with an OpenID account.

The standard expectation for users visiting a website is that they want to see a Login form (User name, Password and a Submit button), a “Remember Me” checkbox,  ”Forgot Password” link and a “Register” link. The last takes them to a page where they can submit their information including an email for validation purposes. There is a lot of friction, but this is what users expect. When they see something different, they get antsy and don’t know what to do.

Users have been participating on the site (answering questions) without registering on the site, despite the fact that the OpenID link is available on every answer form. StackExchange (apparently) does not provide the ability to force users to register before they can answer questions.

I don’t have any data for this thought, but I also wonder if users who click through for Google’s OpenID authentication get spooked and wonder if they are allowing another site access to their Google account, which is not true. In the traditional registration mechanism, there is a clean separation between one site and the other and so this issue never comes into the picture.

From an administration perspective, there is another problem. Users who login through OpenID and do not update their profile show up as “unknown (google)”. We don’t have their name, email address or any other information as a means to contact them in the future. Strangely, the system captures more information from the unregistered users who answer questions.

In conclusion, OpenID is good in theory, but may be a little premature for non-technical audiences.

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By Krishna, October 18, 2009

A friend sent over the news that IntelliJ IDEA is going open source with a commercial option. My first reaction was that while it would be helpful to Java developers to play with it, there was a distinct possibility that IDEA is already out on its way out. I have always been an Eclipse person, so I don’t have any strong views on IDEA either way, but from what I have heard, it is a very good IDE. The point, though, is that if it was successfully competing with Eclipse, why did JetBrains decide to give it away for free?

I have written about this before:

if you are a producer, how do you profit by giving away your product for free? At the moment you stop charging, you lose the revenue from product sales. So you only benefit by making more money via other means than you have lost by forgoing direct sales.

JetBrains may be betting on the scenario that there will be a greater adoption of the free product over Eclipse, which, in turn, drives the sales of the commercial product upwards. This may have been more likely if only the Community Edition had come without many features disabled.

It gets mind-boggling as you go down the comparison list. Almost all the features that would entice someone to ditch Eclipse for IDEA have been removed. Remember people, the biggest problem in Eclipse is not the editor, it is the senseless ability  to configure anything and everything that makes it so difficult to do something simple. So why in the world would you remove (from IDEA) debugging, language support for HTML and environment support for Spring and Hibernate, not to mention any application server? (The blog post mentions debugging, but the feature list has it as missing.)

It almost seems that there was an internal argument inside the company with some people arguing for open source and the other side worrying about cannibalization of sales. Finally, they struck a compromise by releasing a barebones version as open source, which doesn’t help either side of the argument.

The other possibility for JetBrains is that IDEA will attract developers working on Eclipse. Once again, with many important features removed, why should anyone bother? Re-invent the wheels that both Eclipse and IDEA (in the proprietary version) have already invented? I just cannot see it.

Cedric has similar thoughts:

I still see the move from commercial to open source as a sign that the business is struggling. A lot of companies have gone down that path in the past and all of them have tried to make it pass as a selfless action meant to help the community, but the truth is that they were just having a harder time selling their software, so making it open source is usually a last ditch effort to regain mindshare while trying to make money somewhere else.

I can’t think of a single example where a struggling commercial software suddenly started regaining market share when they went open source. Can you? [...]

Whatever side of the fence you stand on, one thing is clear about this move: it means less revenue for JetBrains for the foreseeable future. And what this means is that they will have less means to compete against Eclipse and less power to add features to either of the editions (the Community one or the Ultimate one).

And this is where a lot of companies make a fatal mistake: they think that making their software open source will automatically generate a ground swell of patches and additions from the community that will float them back to the top.

And in my experience, this never happens.

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By Krishna, September 21, 2009

Paul Graham has a strange take on publishing (emphasis mine):

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it.

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more? [...]

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books.

The premise that the cost of books does not vary is not true at all. You can verify this by going to Amazon and checking out the prices of books. There is a great disparity in prices. Textbooks, for example, cost way more than novels. Even in the same genre (novels or non-fiction), you can see some books selling at prices several times that of others. New books command a greater price than older books.

Book publishers do not set the price just based on production costs. They base it on the market. How much are people willing to pay? How many people would be willing to pay at a particular cost? Are there substitutes (such as second-hand books) that compete with the books? The prices, like those of any other manufacturer of goods, are based on the principle of profit maximization.

Some content may be much better than others (“Forrest Gump” versus “Armageddon”, for example). But in this case, the better way to maximize profits is to get more people to watch it than get people to pay more. The other aspect of this is to look at the second-hand or yard-sale market: You will find more poor movies in that market at highly reduced prices. People do not throw away their “Godfather” collection or sell it for $1.

Graham’s bigger point is relevant. Fewer people are likely to purchase content (books, music, video) when such content is available for free, as in pirated digital versions of the same content. With high bandwidths of this age, file uploads and downloads have become so streamlined. I continue to be amazed at the thousands of people who have willingly donated their hours to record and upload videos on YouTube and other places.

But the focus on publishers is misguided. Book publishers, movie producers and record publishers are easily vilified. But let us not forget the content producers like authors, actors, singers, musicians and other artists. They will be just as hurt by these changing models. The typical answer (give content for free and cash in on solid items like T-shirts) is not going to work for everyone. Nor is advertising.

Like Graham says, no one has an answer yet. But we can take some confidence from how software creators have tackled piracy by moving away from bundled software to web applications and services. Graham may say that programmers are now selling server CPU time, but that is the way it goes.

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By Krishna, July 16, 2009

I was amused to read the story of how somebody from Apple wanted Microsoft to stop the Laptop Hunter ads. Because last week, I was with my friend providing moral support while he was hunting for a laptop at BestBuy. Yes, he bought a Windows laptop, though not for cost – he needed a PC to do some of his development work. There were a few Apple laptops also on display and that started a conversation on our way back.

While at BestBuy, I noticed that the most expensive Windows-based laptop that they had was priced at $1099 – maybe there were more expensive models, but I missed them. I remembered the Laptop Hunter ads and told my friend that someone shopping on price alone would always choose a Windows laptop. For the time being, I am ignoring those who need a particular operating system for a specific functionality. Many people who buy computers are not familiar with the technical details and so may be more influenced by price.

So here was my argument:

Suppose a person walks into an Apple store and BestBuy store. In each place, they see many laptops at different prices. The normal customer wants something mid-range. They don’t want the cheapest computer because it probably sucks. The highest priced computer is a luxury item. So they would like to choose something in the middle. This is the behavior you see with most consumer items. When you buy a TV, you are most likely not to buy the cheapest or most expensive TV, but rather a price point in between that gives you the biggest bang for your buck.

So if you go into an Apple store, you get a MacBook for $999 and your MacBook Pro goes all the way from $1,199 upto $2,499. The mid-point seems to be around the $1,500 range. In contrast, the price range in BestBuy runs from $450 to $1,099 (as far as I remember) and so that is roughly $750. So the comparison between the mid-point prices gives the appearance that an Apple laptop is twice as costly as a Windows one. Worse, the most expensive Windows laptop is $400 less than an Apple.

Obviously, if someone wants a Mac or wants a PC for reasons other than price, they will know better. But what about the lay person who is probably buying a laptop to send email and write documents?

My friend didn’t agree with me and here was his argument:

It is all about branding. I would rather have the cheapest Apple laptop because there is the pride of ownership. You can show off your Mac which you cannot do with a Windows-based laptop. Think of Windows as a line of Toyota cars and Apple as a line of BMWs. You would rather have the cheapest BMW than the best Toyota.

Most high-school and college students beg their parents to get them an Apple because it is way cooler than a PC. The college student would rather get the lowly MacBook because in the end, it is an Apple.

He has a point. But I wonder how much of an effect brand has, when taking the price difference into consideration. I don’t mean that rhetorically – I am asking a question. How many customers does Apple lose because of its price structure and how many does it gain because of its brand? In fact, Apple cannot cut its prices to match Windows because it could affect the branding (If Apple costs the same, what is the difference?).

If the Microsoft executive is telling the truth, it suggests that perhaps the ads are hurting Apple in a measurable way, and  the price premium for Apple is above the brand effect.

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By Krishna, July 8, 2009

There has been much debate recently about what free means (see Anderson, Gladwell, Godin, Cuban, Shafeen, Yglesias, etc.) and the meaning of GPL vis-a-vis WordPress (Mullenweg, Jalkut, King, etc.) The primary question is, does a business benefit by allowing consumers to use its products (software or information) for free and, in the case of GPL, allow its products to be re-published under a free license?

My answer is: In terms of direct business benefit, generally “No” and sometimes “Yes”. The main beneficiaries of “Free” are consumers. Instead of paying for something, they get it for free now, the cost being subsidized by advertisers or other products of the vendor. In some cases, the cost is written off by the investors. “Free” only means no cost to one party in the transaction, it doesn’t mean that there are no costs per se. Somebody is incurring them and is either profiting via other means or losing money.

So, the question is, if you are a producer, how do you profit by giving away your product for free? At the moment you stop charging, you lose the revenue from product sales. So you only benefit by making more money via other means than you have lost by forgoing direct sales. GPL introduces a different complexity – you can still continue to charge for your products, but there is nothing stopping anyone from making unlimited copies of your software and re-distributing them for free or for a fee, perhaps not sporting, but legal under the GPL. Once again, can you make up for the reduction in revenues?

It is possible. The idea is that by making your content free, you reduce friction for your consumers and buyers. There will be more consumers of your content if it is not hidden behind a subscription wall. A GPL-based product is more attractive to users who can modify it for their needs without depending on you. You will gain more publicity and can drive traffic to sell other products that are not free.

But what if everyone does the same? What if all news were free? What if every software product was under the GPL? Suddenly, there is no special advantage being free. “Free” is therefore only a marketing tactic. And other free competition can erode that advantage.

The other rules of the marketplace also apply in “free”. “Free” removes the problem of cost from consumer consideration, but it does not solve time constraints, inertia, network effects, etc. For example, we often hear about the GPL success stories of Linux and mySQL. But there are other GPL operating systems and database applications. Why are they not successful? The reason is that the success of Linux has ensured that other free operating systems do not find the same success.

Take a look at WordPress. It has been extremely successful under the GPL. But no other blogging engine licensed under the GPL can replicate WordPress’s success. WordPress has built a huge eco-system (themes, plugins, etc.) around it that no other GPL blogging product can replicate. This is not to trash WordPress in any way (it is a great product).

Essentially, what this means is that the products in any space that benefit from a GPL license will drive out other GPL products in the same space. Similarly, the websites that benefit from giving away their products/information for free will drive out other such free sites. “Free” can allow you to gain a competitive advantage only for so long, because it can be imitated, so you must drive home your advantage while you can.

In some industries (such as news), there is no alternative to free. But it doesn’t mean that every news outlet which becomes free will be successful. Likewise, giving away your products for free or open-sourcing your product doesn’t guarantee success. It is generally beneficial to consumers, but not necessarily the producers.

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By Krishna, June 4, 2009

OK, take one guess as to what this could be:

_______ is a design philosophy that leverages existing investments in the creation of flexible solutions that are more responsive to your business needs.

Apparently, this is Microsoft’s definition of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture).

Does any technology market itself as saying that you need to ditch your current infrastructure and create rigid solutions that do not respond to business needs? If not, can the marketing folks at Microsoft start talking like human beings?

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By Krishna, April 19, 2009

Slate has an article on why we have not yet seen an online subscription-based service for movies:

Couldn’t the studios just sign new deals that would give them the right to build an online service? Well, maybe—but their current deals are worth billions, and a new plan would mean sacrificing certain profits for an uncertain future. Understandably, many are unwilling to take that leap.

[...] working through these [existing] contracts in order to build the perfect streaming service will take time. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s founder, told the Hollywood Reporter last month that it’ll be 10 years before we see a streaming service that offers any movie at any time.

TechCrunch retorts:

how can anyone really expect any of the online movie services to flourish under such restrictions? They shouldn’t, because none of them truly will until Hollywood changes these rules. And with billions of dollars at stake, Hollywood probably isn’t going to do it anytime soon. In fact, I’d venture to guess that the only thing that will force their hands is if services like BitTorrent, which people use to distribute pirated movies, continue to gain popularity as broadband access and speeds improve.

I am not a fan of BitTorrent, but it is ridiculous how the movie and TV industry are simply leaving tons of money on the table by not going fully digital. Consider the different ways in which they can make money:

1. Subscription-based streaming movies.
2. Targeted advertising in movies based on user profile and user viewing history.
3. Extra Low-cost downloadable content such as ring tones, blooper reels, star interviews, etc.
4. Allow bloggers and websites to embed video with advertisements, or license content at inexpensive rates.
5. Monetize through greater interactivity on the site, such as games and contests.

If you really dig deep, contractual issues are not the real problem. The true culprits are the makers of poor movies and TV series, because they will not be able to make enormous revenues by slick marketing and endless repeats on TV. Quality will become more important because only it has the potential to keep selling even after people have watched the original content once. Right now, those who have less confidence in their capabilities are the ones who are holding back on full digitization.

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By Krishna, April 5, 2009

I created a login on Twitter user two years ago, but I would still classify myself as a novice user. I blame Twitter for this because the folks at Twitter themselves seem to have no clue what the point of Twitter is. Almost every sentence in the Twitter homepage is an advertisement for not using Twitter.

Here is the text from Twitter’s “What? Why? and How?”

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.

• Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
• Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.
• Partying? Your friends may want to join you.

With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted.

Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

This raises more questions than it answers:

1. Shouldn’t I be emailing “timely” information to (or calling) family members, friends and colleagues? Especially if they have the ability to stop following me at any time and decide not to be interrupted.
2. What are the things that I don’t want my mom to know, even if she wants to know? Same for co-workers and friends? Does this one-size-fits-all really work?
3. How can Twitter be an “antidote” to information overload when I follow hundreds or thousands of my “friends”?
4. What if some of my friends aren’t on Twitter? Consider that among online users, Facebook has more than 10 times the number of Twitter users.

The standard way of using Twitter makes little sense if you are not a celebrity with a significant number of fans. If you are somebody who is famous in the real or virtual world, there will be many people who follow you and your happenings and eagerly respond to you. The number of responses to anything you say or write is directly proportional to how easy it is to respond to you. And Twitter makes that very easy.

You are not allowed to write more than 140 characters, thus avoiding the need for people to consider your message in any length when responding to you. In any case, they are also restricted in what they can write, so there is hardly any need for deep thought. Quite a change from having to write blog posts where words are free and you would have to defend yourself from not considered a particular viewpoint.

But if you are not a celebrity, using Twitter is like shouting in a desert. Hardly anyone responds to you. So forget about being hyper-connected and effective communication. All you are doing is maintaining a small diary of your life and thoughts. It is not that different from a blog except that Twitter makes it easier in some ways, but you also have to deal with the fact that Twitter doesn’t allow you to say very much, if you wanted to. Micro-blogging seems more restrictive and straitjacketed. You cannot even post links without them being TinyURL-ized. And you have to use 3rd party services for images and videos. Is it worth the hassle?

Following friends is better, but, like I said before, if many of your real-life friends are not using Twitter (or using it infrequently), you don’t gain much benefit. In fact, Facebook and LinkedIn are better candidates for Twitter-like functionality, because your friends are already there. The context of your messages (social or formal) are clearer and people are more active there, allowing for a better “conversation”.

You could use Twitter for following noteworthy people and companies. This seems to be the most popular behavior on Twitter: you can follow your favorite actors, singers, artists, politicians, etc. Following celebrities may seem vacuous and juvenile, but many of the top Twitter users are respected leaders in their field and it is useful to follow their happenings. You can also decide to follow people whom you find interesting, even though they may not be very popular otherwise.

This provides an opportunity for you to widen your social network from your real-life friends to adding new virtual friends. So instead of talking about yourself and using Twitter as a one-way broadcast service, you use it to discuss events with others. Theoretically, the more active you are on Twitter, the more acquaintances you could make and influence behavior.

Unfortunately, a problem is that Twitter use doesn’t scale well beyond a point. There is a threshold of users whom you can follow beyond which you are simply overloaded with information (so much for “putting you in control”). This threshold may be different for different people, higher if you are a journalist or higher if you are using a tool like TweetDeck, but you will hit it at some point because as a human being, you can only process and respond to so much information.

The natural tendency of human beings when confronted with information overload is to start ignoring stuff. For example, you don’t read every page of the newspaper or click every link on your favorite news website, do you? Although several pieces of information you ignore may be useful, interesting or important to you, you don’t care if you missed them. In the same way, beyond a point, you cannot keep up with the flowing bits of the Twitter river.

One strategy is to never get to that stage. Limit the bits by only following a limited number of people that you can keep up with (or group selected people from the bigger list). Many people do that, but what happens is that you get groups of people following and talking to each other and oblivious to other conversations. This is a strange phenomenon: The discussion is happening in public and you can follow every part of the conversation, but it is still a conversation among a private group. It is very much like watching a debate on TV. You are privy to everything, but you have no influence.

In terms of marketing, this leads to the situation that if you are not part of the select group of individuals that a person “really” listens to, you have no influence over their behavior. There are a lot of marketers trying to harness followers on the assumption that they can broadcast to them. This is a fallacy as they can be easily ignored. And there are too many people fighting for the top Twitter spots that could provide sufficient publicity to be accepted into a person’s sphere of influence.

Ultimately, from an individual perspective, what Twitter boils down to seems to be following a bunch of people, responding to some of them and ignoring the rest. It doesn’t seem very special and probably something that you already do on other social networks in different ways.

So why in the world do you need Twitter? The answer is that Twitter makes little sense at the individual level, but it has a huge impact when aggregating information at the level of thousands and millions of users.

Think about this. Each Tweet by a Twitter user contains very little information. It may be interesting, more likely not. But if that information is echoed by several thousand users, its meaning completely changes. For example, if Ashton Kutcher has a cold, that may not interest you. If 1000 Twitter users from Waltham, Massachusetts Tweet about having a cold, that probably means that there is a flu going around and you have to start taking precautions. If Mary Somebody is complaining about poor ad revenues this month, you may not particularly care. If several thousand people express the same concern, you may want to take a second look at that media stock portfolio.

To change your thinking about Twitter, you have to stop thinking “who” and start thinking “what”. Twitter is not about following people or having them follow you. It is about following events and understanding trends. Each individual Tweet has little value on its own, but when aggregated can provide powerful information. What are people thinking about? Reading? Watching? Buying? Dreaming of buying? Dreading? Irritated about?

Twitter is the ultimate instant news channel with people Twittering directly from the location of the event. Of course, Twitter has not achieved its potential yet, but imagine a scenario where everyone is Twittering with geo-coding and you can filter the news from people who are right there, instead of the chatter from second-hand reporters. This could be about a natural disaster, a mass shooting or rush-hour traffic.

I talk about Twitter’s potential because not only is everyone not on Twitter, but arguably we don’t yet have the tools to use Twitter effectively. Twitter allows us to follow search keywords, but it is not very intelligent about search. For example, I may be very interested in cricket events, but I don’t have a reliable way to filter Tweets based on the type of cricket or order the information based on the user’s authority on the topic of cricket. As Twitter continues to gain popularity, we will see more powerful tools, so these issues will be temporary.

Twitter’s revenue stream may, in fact, come from better data mining tools that can make sense of the enormous flood of data and decipher trends that they can sell to marketers. For example, they may find that mentions for Cereal A is far greater than Cereal B in winter or in the Mid-West, reasons for which may be found by digging further in the individual Tweets.

A final question would be: Why should Twitter be better in this respect than Facebook or LinkedIn? I think this goes back to my original thesis: Regardless of its intentions, Twitter is very bad as a social network for the individual, while both Facebook and LinkedIn shine in this area. People wanting to have a conversation or interact with their friends and business contacts will use the latter. But people wanting to report something will use Twitter. The all-purpose nature of Twitter puts no restriction on what a person may want to say.

And in the end, that’s why Twitter matters. Because it generates meaning by aggregating all those people shouting in the desert.

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By Krishna, March 17, 2009

The Creative Commons license has different attributes, one of which is “Non-Commercial”. It simply states “You may not use this work for commercial purposes.” The literal reading makes it very clear you cannot profit directly from the work, such as selling it as part of an image library. But what if you are using it on a website that makes money from advertising? What if you use an image for your company’s website, where it serves as marketing and promotional material, indirectly resulting in revenues? Is that use commercial enough to invalidate the use of such Creative Commons content?

Philip Lenssen explored this question last year and got an inconclusive answer:

I’ve asked the Wikipedia mailing list a while ago, and recently received another confirmation from Creative Commons’ Lawrence Lessig: yes, the CC organization believes this being OK is the best reading of the license. […] But it’s also a matter of how you display ads, Lawrence disclaims, saying that there could be certain advertising schemes that take it too far.

(It should be noted though that the Creative Commons organization does not determine whether a judge would agree with their interpretation, in case someone would get sued over using NC content on an ad-supported site.

As Philip notes, many blogs and even Google would be in trouble if you could not use CC images on ad-supported sites. Still it does seem like something to be more safe about now than sorry later.

Another problem I saw recently is that some people on Flickr repost photos (taken by others or professionals) under a Creative Commons license. They actually put a copyright notice stating they got it from AP or somebody, but the picture is under their account with a CC license. I suppose this happens according to their account settings, but it can be very misleading.

It is possible for people to change the copyright for their images from a CC license to a more restrictive CC license or basic copyright. It can be a pain to prove that you had used the image under the correct license. Image Stamper is one service that may be helpful in that. It records the license when you used it so that you can use that as evidence if you ever require it.

None of this should really matter for small-scale bloggers and non-commercial websites, because it is not profitable to sue them. But we have seen what the RIAA did in the music industry. And there is always a non-zero possibility of somebody creating problems.

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By Krishna, January 30, 2009

The reason why free markets work is that profit is a powerful motivator for economic activity. Supply and demand in the marketplace drive production, encouraging greater investment in goods demanded more by consumers. This is just as true on the Internet. There is a growing need for online services and information, and suppliers are rushing in to fill the need. Suppliers range from large Fortune 500 companies to small startups to individuals, each claiming a piece of the pie.

Different companies (and individuals) have created business models to generate revenue from the demand. In the case of informational websites and blogs, the business model usually involves making money from paid subscriptions or from advertisements in various forms (text ads, banners, etc.) or, in the case of some, questionable practices such as sharing user information with their marketing partners.

Paid subscriptions are increasingly becoming rare, as most companies find that hiding their content behind walls is not how the web works, and reduces their capability to attract consumers. Short-term border-line methods of generating revenue are simply that, just short-term. As consumers lose trust, they go away and the website dies a deserved death. Other ways to generate revenue like selling stuff (memorabilia, books, etc.), or simply asking for donations are also possibilities, but not every site can use them or will gain much revenue from them.

So we are mostly left with advertisements as the primary means for generating revenue. As I mentioned in a previous post, this has forced the bigger, multi-person blogs to change their layouts to display a lot of ads. Some of them have been able to maintain visual coherence and integrity despite the onslaught of ads. Others haven’t. Unless you are reading them in a blog reader, they are quite ugly looking and, in some cases, embarrassing because of the kind of ads that are displayed.

The popular single-person blogs have been less quick to move to such ad-prevalent designs. One reason is that many such authors are not professional bloggers, and make money elsewhere (running a company, working in a large company, funding companies, etc.) Secondly, of course, their expenses are quite low when compared to a dedicated blogging outfit and do not need to generate the last bit of revenue from them. Most popular bloggers have done a great job of carefully blending ads with the rest of their content to present a very consistent and aesthetic look.

So that is why it is so disappointing when I come across some single-person websites and blogs and find them literally plastered with ads over any available space. Take a look at the image on the right. This is a site which I marked into portions, where yellow stands for ads, blue for useful content and gray for meta-content. As you can see, less than one-fifth of the area is allocated for actual content, which is partly below the fold, because of the advertisements that come at the top.

If these sites were simply spammers trying to make a few easy bucks while serving stolen content, they would simply merit contempt. But these websites were created by people for blogging about their work or for displaying their resume or simply talking about themselves. It is disappointing because while they are creating unique content, they tarnish that legacy by imitating the ad strategies of spammers.

I simply don’t get it. These sites seldom attract the volume of visitors that would generate any appreciable amount of revenue. Because Google AdSense is typically used for advertisements (as it is easy to set up), the websites have a poor visual look and fail to attract repeat visitors or incoming links, thus defeating any purpose of using the website as a launching pad for bigger things. What they do instead is reduce (and even destroy) the brand value of the individual and the website in the minds of visitors.

To “paraphrase” a little-known politician speaking in 2002, I am not opposed to all ads. I’m opposed to dumb ads.