In 1998, splash screens were cool.

SEO wasn’t a factor. You could manipulate Alta Vista, the Google of the day, by messing with your meta tags. What was on the page didn’t matter in the slightest.

Web users weren’t jaded, and in fact the odds of someone viewing your splash screen actually being in the process of visiting a website for the very first time were actually pretty high.

The “oh cool” factor as your logo and content rendered not only existed but might even trigger user to call a friend over to see an effect that no one had ever seen before.

1998 was really quite some time ago. Things have changed.

Now a website is as much a utility as Microsoft Excel. The function is different, but the underlying idea is the same: Get the user to the thing they want as quickly as possible.

In addition, people’s attention spans are shorter. No one complains when syndicators (Hi Sean) cut the intro to Two and a Half Men (sorry for bringing that up) to just a few seconds to make room for more spots. It’s not why anyone was tuning in, and I suspect even in first run the intro falls victim to TiVo fast forward more often than not.

Imagine if every time you started your car, you had to sit through a 10 second “welcome” animation before you could do shift into drive. Some cars have this for their electronics packages and no one likes them. If they’re even aware of them, they don’t care. If they are aware, it probably bugs them. No one sits in awed anticipation for the lens flare on the Prius logo. (Citation needed, but I challenge anyone to find me a statistically relevant sample that disagrees).

And now, in addition to annoying if not driving away users, it annoys if not drives away the GoogleBot and negatively impacts the SEO.

Certainly there are things you can do to mitigate that.

Certainly you can key your site to set a cookie and only load the branding intro one time… but given how much time, effort and expense goes into creating an intro like that and mitigating the ill effects why do it at all if everyone’s only going to see it only once?

Flash is a great technology and can greatly enhance a website when used properly.

Video production is cool too, but you have to use it appropriately. What if every time you wanted to brush your teeth your bathroom mirror played a :15 for Colgate before the holder would release the toothbrush?

A website is there to draw users in. Some sites are there to engage users with their content. A splash screen puts a barrier between your users and your content or functionality, and I haven’t seen anything since circa 1998 to justify the cons.

My two cents, and I’d love to hear an opposite opinion. Like this email I received back in about 2000 from the true guru of web design: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail51.html (won’t work on an iPad, sorry, blame Steve Jobs)

The first is from the always thought-provoking Mark Ramsey about the dearth of content on radio station websites.

http://www.markramseymedia.com/2011/01/when-radio-has-no-idea-what-to-put-on-its-websites/

He’s spot-on with everything he says in this article, but the truth is that radio’s content problem runs deeper than the station website.  Hold that thought for a second.

Switching gears, we’ve got this article:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/06/fly-or-die-flipboard-tryx-windows-phone/

There are a few products reviewed, but the one I’m focusing on here is Flipboard – an iPad content app that allows the user to pull together content from all kinds of places (RSS feeds and social media both) and display them in a fairly elegant magazine-style layout.  It’s an aggregator, meaning that the “product” is really a combination of content from other sources presented in a seamless fashion.  The original source is less important to the user than the overall experience.

Aggregating content is exactly what radio used to do.  It still does with music, but most of the other elements have been removed.

A radio station in the 80′s and 90′s certainly played plenty of tunes, but people tuned in for more than that.  Dominant stations had a personality all their own, with the air talent, promotions, news, imaging and relevant info all forming an intricate patchwork right along with the songs.  Over the years, a lot of those other elements have been stripped away from far too many stations, leaving really just the music to carry everything, and it can’t.

It was possible to be successful as  a “more music” station before internet radio, satellite,  iPods,  etc., but in most cases even back then such stations played second fiddle to the personality driven powerhouses.

Nowadays, if you just want to hear music there are far better options than an FM radio station.  There are still stations and shows doing it right on the air, but I can only think of a few stations and shows that have successfully incorporated online into what they do, and most of those are syndicated and not about the stations they’re on at all.

I brought up Flipboard because of the irony that yet another “hot new thing” is actually something radio used to do well back in the day.  Sure Flipboard is visual and radio is aural, but the concepts behind them were once exactly the same, back before Radio got addicted to the heroin that is music.

Yes, I just compared music to heroin where radio is concerned.  Why?  It’s an easy thing to put on the air and helps get ratings that makes the execs feel good while their business goes down the toilet, and when things get worse the only solution most stations see is to do more of it.  I think the comparison is apt.

Sure, radio stations can hire bloggers… but to blog about what?  (Hint: NOT MUSIC.)  There’s got to be more happening on the air than does on most music stations now if bloggers are going to have anything interesting to write about.  If there’s nothing on which to build a community of listeners, why wouldn’t a blogger just go to Tumblr, or WordPress, or Blogger, or one of the other dozen or so blog platforms out there that let them do whatever they want?  It’s got to go beyond music, and right now most stations just don’t.

A great radio host builds a community of listeners who identify with the themes of the show.  Even outside of the traditional talk show format it’s possible to create a bond with the audience, but it’s happening less and less as radio companies tighten up playlists and push “formatics” designed to get ratings vs. connect with listeners.   (Don’t start me on Arbitron, this is supposed to be a short post and that one won’t be.)

If radio can get over its music habit and starts approaching product from the standpoint of providing something people in their market might want to listen to, the problems with web content will be gone before they know it.

After a quick point about old media’s shady marketing practices, the article makes a couple of interesting points about the need for “digital newsstands” but stops short of asking why such newsstands would need digital newspapers or magazines on them.

This begs an important question that I haven’t heard anyone ask yet:

Why not just get content directly from the authors and skip the unnecessary middlemen of the actual papers or magazines.

When I say “middlemen” I’m talking about those involved in the process whose job isn’t to actually create the content, but to print it on paper or mail it to your home.  You know, the job that no longer needs to be done in a digital world.

Think about it, If it’s all in one place, why would it need to be organized by the now-obsolete delivery mechanisms of the past vs. something useful in the present, like author and category?

People today don’t really care about the delivery mechanism that provides the content to them, and with just a few exceptions I’m not sure they ever did.

I’m not sure the publishers even realize this.  Most of the ones I’ve worked with personally don’t seem to.

Some perspective:

Consumers don’t seem to have a whole lot of respect for the great institution of the newspaper.  I’m not sure how it was before my time, but for as long as I remember it’s worked like this:

After being purchased for less than a dollar and usually only partially consumed maybe one time, most copies of the newspaper kept a standing appointment with the recycling bin, perhaps with a side trip lining the cage of Max, little Timmy’s new puppy in the process of being housebroken.

Newsprint (or a magazine) was simply the accepted method for distributing information to people on a regular basis.  Of course specific papers (employing specific writers and editors) achieved a certain reputation and respect among their readers, but never enough to stop this morning’s copy from a rather inglorious denouement at the hands (well, paws, with one held aloft) of man’s best friend.

What consumers do care about are actual people who create content, like for example Oprah, Jon Stewart, and Howard Stern.  They care far less about, if at all, the actual pipe the content comes in on, such as Comedy Central, Sirius/XM, or and virtually every single radio channel, TV channel, and newspaper in existence.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s take an example from recent history:

TV content has even more middlemen than the newspaper, who enjoy even less respect from the consumer.  Look no further than last year’s Conan/Leno debacle for proof.

Brands involved:  NBC, Your local NBC affiliate, and the 50 year old late night institution, “The Tonight Show.”

Humans involved:  Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien.

I don’t recall anyone coming up with catchy slogans like “I’m with Channel 5,”  ”I’m with NBC,” or even “I’m with The Tonight Show.”  The truth is, anyone who cared followed the host they were attached to.  The people who didn’t simply left the TV where it was while they fell asleep.

The lesson here is that in most cases consumers just do not care about the vast majority of the brands involved in delivering the content to them.  If they don’t care about those brands in print or on TV, why would they care about them on an iPad?

So with that I’ll make my first bold prediction of 2011, though there’s way too much momentum for the change to finish taking place this year.

The successful digital newsstand will not focus on newspapers or magazines.  It will focus on authors, topics and articles.  Do you think anyone cares if the “Los Angeles” category on such a newsstand is branded “LA Times” or just “LA News?”

Perhaps brands will rise around specific authors that organize by ideology or a credible source, but they probably won’t be the legacy players. They’re far more likely to be personality driven brands, like say, Michael Arrington on TechCrunch.

Why?  The publishers will be too busy trying to milk the last drops out of their dying business models and whining about how it’s not like the good old days to notice that the name at the top of the masthead isn’t the reason people used to subscribe.

Don’t get me wrong, busy turned out to be a very good thing (mostly) but one of my resolutions for 2011 is to get a blog post out about something or other at least once a week.

Oh, and this one doesn’t count.

The article tells the now-familiar bleak story of a broken business model and dwindling revenue, and then laments that it seems unlikely that people will want to pay for news online.

I can state with experience that there are several extremely intelligent people in various media companies who believe that people would indeed cough up a few dollars a month to do just that, and I hope this study finally dissuades them from said belief.  The thing is, those people are just a subset of a much larger group who think that the solution to local media’s problem can be found by focusing on content in the first place.

Now calm down, I’m not saying content isn’t important.  No media model can work without it, even Google’s.  What I’m saying is that the content isn’t really the problem, and until media outlets realize this and start focusing their new-media initiatives on solving their actual issue, we’ll have to keep reading articles like the one above.

News Flash for the News Guys:  The actual core business of local media, be it radio, TV or print, is not, nor has it ever been, content.  The core business is advertising.

Shaking your head?  Think about it.  The total amount spent by everyone in America for the privilege of  watching Walter Cronkite for the entire span of his decades long career is exactly $0.00.  People pay that same $0.00 to watch NBC4 or listen to KFI640 in Los Angeles, and they pay a few cents a day to get the LA Times.  In the case of the paper what they’re really paying for is a physical object, and frankly for a lot of people the only reason that even flies is because they’ve been paying for it since before they had a choice where they got their news, and it hasn’t occurred to them to stop.  Why anyone would expect people would tolerate paying for online news in a world where these things are true is beyond me.

From the above, one might even postulate that local media outlets aren’t even in the content business at all.  In a radio or TV station budget, content is listed as an expense, and there’s no corresponding line item for revenue earned.  It’s a little more debatable in print, but I’d argue that newspapers are actually selling ink, paper, and a home delivery service, not just content, if content at all.  The fact that people aren’t willing to pay for the exact same content online would seem to support this perspective.

Local media outlets monetize the content they produce via their actual business, which is advertising,.  It is only by addressing the problems in this area that they can save themselves.

The core problem with traditional media on the internet, in my opinion, is that they’ve mainly been trying to simply move their old model online, but it’s a different world.  Put in its most simple terms, that model boils down to expecting advertisers to pay for the media outlet to drive their audience to their own website.

Think about that for a second.  Would a store owner pay for a direct mail campaign that encouraged those in receipt to show up at the office of the company that sent it out?  Probably not.  It would get even sillier if the provider’s office was painstakingly designed to get people to stay as long as possible but had pictures on the wall (in some of the rooms, anyway) inviting people to the store when they were finished.

Now go to virtually ANY radio, TV or newspaper website.   The above is essentially the scenario the media company expects their advertisers to tolerate, and their sales department to sell.  There are probably many reasons why this is the case, but it seems like this is another instance of key decision makers believing themselves to be in the content business, and thinking that war is the one they need to be fighting.

The solution seems simple enough.  Media companies need to focus the energies of their interactive groups on figuring out ways to drive audience to their ADVERTISERS.  People who buy advertising want exactly one thing:  To sell their product.  That product may be online, that product may be in a store, that product may even be an event, but at the end of the day getting it sold is their only priority.

The media outlet’s job is to influence consumer behavior on behalf of its clients, who are emphatically not there because of content.  The content is the first part of that process, not the whole.  Also, for the process to work at all the content must be available to as wide an audience as possible, and that means keeping it free.  To do otherwise goes contrary to 100 years of history, and people will just start getting their news from someone with a clearer idea of what business they’re in.

Suffice it to say, I’m not sure why the Pew Study is news at all.

It’s been something like 10 years since I had a website to call my own here at www.russgilbert.com.  Back in those days I had something resembling a blog, though I’m not sure that “blog” was even a word at the time.

It’s good to have a home on the web again, I hope you like it!

Help Getting Lost is my first personal blogging project since the late 90′s when I retired the previous version of this site.  When I moved out to CA in fall 2009 an unforeseen side effect was making the weekly Lost-watching viewing get-togethers I hosted in Chicago significantly less practical.  It was also pointed out to me that since I generally sent out a detailed write up following each episode anyway, I may as well turn it into a blog. www.helpgettinglost.com is the result.