Should the Post Be More Like Politico?

Here in Washington, many are jumping on the sale of the Washington Post as an opportunity to highlight the success of Politico as a missed opportunity. When I worked at the Post's web site in the early 2000s, the politics section was already one of the larger verticals within the site.

Part of the problem with sustaining a politics based site is the advertising cycles are very cyclical around elections. There were dozens of 'dot-bomb' era efforts that hoped to capture just a portion of the online advertising, then would have to lay people off  after the election was over. The fact that Politico has become a moderate success is the exception rather than the rule in my mind. While Politico may have done well in the 2012 election season, they need to survive a dry spell at least to get to 2014 in my mind. In theory, you could say that the Post missed the chance to launch PTI by letting Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon go work at ESPN.

At the same time, since Politico has launched, the Post has built a Wonkblog site around Ezra Klein and a small team of bloggers, and more recently a tech policy blog. So it is not as if it has ignored the success of Politico. There was also a previous iteration of the tech policy concept called WashTech, which was eventually shut down. The Post even hired writers such as Joshua Topolsky of Engadget and The Verge to write a column in print. But the Wonkblog model seems to be more viable, as ESPN has sort of done the same thing with Nate Silver, and to some extent, the New York Times' elevation of Andrew Ross Sorkin.

If anything this seems to be the model of the moment. The Atlantic has done something of the same thing, partnering with Richard Florida to launch its Cities site. But the Post hiring some one like Topolsky or Barry Ritzholtz to write something for the 'dead tree' edition on weekends doesn't do much for me.

Here in the Post's own back yard, the Marginal Revolution site has a fairly passionate following. At least online, I'd like to see them elevating some like Tyler Cowen to the level that the Times has with people like Paul Krugman. I also would like to see Jamie Mottram doing something on the sports side, as he is a native Washingtonian. Tim Stevens also comes to mind as the person who most recently left Engadget.

Lastly, the Post is late to the game in erecting a paywall. Part of me thinks this is a mistake, as sites like the San Francisco Chronicle are actually abandoning their paywall scheme, which I'm guessing wasn't even breaking even. Building the e-commerce backend around a paywall isn't cheap, and you are certainly going to see your ad impressions go down, so it doesn't seem like a great idea for a mid-tier newspaper to spend all that money hoping that paid subscriptions stop the bleeding. Even Andrew Sullivan's paywall adventures have been far from a grand slam, and he has a relatively large following.

If I want to pay $100 a year for news content, I will subscribe to the Economist. But if you offered me a $4.99 per month plan that gave me full access to the New York Times, even with a little advertising on it, I'd probably do that. If that doesn't pay for itself, then I probably would say don't bother with the paywall. Would I rather pay $80 a year for Amazon Prime or a subscription to the Washington Post? Pretty sure I'd rather have Prime.

Season 2 of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

If you own a Roku or some other streaming device, you may want to add Crackle just for Jerry Seinfeld's series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee." The second season has been decent so far, with some slightly younger faces, including Sarah Silverman, Seth Meyers and Chris Rock, in addition to the old guard guys like Don Rickles.

I did try to watch Da Vinci Code on Crackle using my old Roku 1, and either our connection was bad or there were just way too many ad breaks, but Seinfeld series gets it right, with just one ad at the beginning and then another towards the end.

I also like how the Acura sponsorship works in a way that isn't super annoying. I used to work with the AOL Autos team, and it was always a challenge to present content that encouraged new car buying in a way that wasn't too over the top. Given the high ad impression goals for the channel, this became increasingly hard to do, especially when some of the advertisers were not exactly the top tier brands.

I used to be a fan of Acura's in general, but I think they've become more of a yet another SUV dependent car market, as the MDX is really the only model I would think too seriously about. I don't think there's anything great about the TSX, TL or RL at their pricepoints, but then I'm slightly in the bag for Audi at this point.

USATODAY Ends 'Green House' Blog: Where Does 'Green' Content Fit In?

This popped up in my Google Reader, but I was not surprised to see that yet another in a series of 'green' blogs bites the dust.

At one point when I was at AOL, we had 'green' blogs for several different content verticals, whether they be home improvement, autos, careers, tech, finance ... the list went on and on. They often were chasing the same stories and never built much of a following.

In some ways, this was a reflection of the 'green washing' that has gone on at least for the past decade, where things like corn-based ethanol are touted as an environmentally-friendly solution to something that is inherently not green at all.

That is not to say that there isn't real progress being made in the 'greening' of America. But some of the concepts just didn't make a lot of sense as content categories.

Perhaps an exception to this would be something like the movie 'No Impact Man' where one writer takes some of these ideas to the extreme. But even something like this has a limited appeal to a broad audience.

The Gray Market of Twitter and Facebook Followers

I have seen a few articles on the topic of fake followers on Twitter and Facebook. Particularly on Twitter, a significant portion of the population seems to be either spambots or dormant users who only follow a few users and never tweet or retweet.

Case in point, Lebron James. According to analysis by Big Lead Sports, only a third of King James' followers appear to be real active users. Serena Williams did even worse, at less than a quarter of her users. She appears to have more 'fake' followers, than real ones.

That's not to say that they necessarily paid for those users to follow them in bulk, but it does indicate that the engagement of their followers may be lower than others. 

On the other side of the coin, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Shaq, where were among the first to join Twitter, naturally have more followers, real and fake, because they have been their since the beginning. 

But it does show the potential value of a lesser-known athlete or blog or individual who's audience is really engaged compared to a big-name property that drive a lot of low-quality eyeballs.

For example, a graphic designer I worked with at AARP, Erin Freedman, was recently named one of the 20 Most Influential People on Pinterest. Even with (only) 600K followers, she has established herself as one of the tastemakers on this burgeoning platform.

Flight of the Conchords Do New Song 'Feel Inside' for Charity

The stars of HBO's 'Flight of the Conchords' quit after just two seasons. But they are still doing their thing, with Bret McKenzie earning an Oscar for his work on the recent Muppets movie.

Saw this on Vulture and BuzzFeed, but thought it was worth posting.



I hope the movie happens.

Case Study: Washington Post Announces New 'Games' Section

In my time with AARP, it was well known that the Games section was by far the site's biggest page view driver by a wide margin. Thousands, if not millions of users, had bookmarked their favorite free games, whether it be Solitaire, Mahjong, Soduku etc. Of course, these users also spent much more time on the site, compared to a user who would read an article or two and then move on to something else.

So I wasn't totally surprised to see that the Washington Post is getting into the same 'game' at least online, offering many of the same games in addition to their own crossword etc. One thing to note, these games are all Flash-based, so most will not work on mobile. In the comments on the blog post above, one user notes that their employer is blocking Flash-based sites.

News sites have often tried to create original games, such as Marketplace's Budget Hero, with varying levels of success. I'm sure the New York Times Crosswords section is a huge driver of repeat traffic. In fact, it appears to be a decent revenue driver and it's own iPhone app. There's a documentary called 'Wordplay' that is almost an infomercial for the hallowed NYT crossword.

Features like weather, games, and to a certain extent, comics and photo galleries, are not always sexy, but they are often crucial to building repeat visitors.

HT: Potomac TechWire

McSweeney's on Writing Better

Thought this was an elegant, simple post from McSweeney's Internet Tendency on improving your writing. Originally posted back in April, it has remained among their most popular posts.

One part that is particularly compelling is just the simplicity of the first point: Write Every Day. Just the discipline and the mechanics of writing something every day can't help but improve your technique.

If you aren't familiar with the chapter from the book Outliers about the 10,000 hours it takes to attain mastery, it can be simplified into practice makes perfect. This is why tennis players hit a ball against a wall when they don't have one to volley with, and why comedians search out multiple open mike nights in one evening, because they need the repetition to get better.

It also seemed like such a perfect post in the context of the 826 charity that author Dave Eggers started, which encourages inner-city children to read and write more for any number of reasons.

For those in the D.C. area, if you have not visited the Museum of Unnatural History, which is sort of a fundraising/gift shop for 826DC, it's worth a visit.

ESPN Films on Netflix Streaming

Happy to see that almost all of the movies from the ESPN Films collection, including the 30 for 30 series, have been finally added to Netflix. Some of them, including The Announcement, are fairly recent, and more should be on the way.

My favorites include Unguarded, Pony Excess and Once Brothers. But even something like Into the Wind, a story I had zero familiarity with, was pretty interesting.

Most of them are less than an hour long and well worth your time.

When people say there's 'still nothing good" on Netflix's streaming library, either they aren't looking very hard or they aren't open to seeing something that wasn't a huge box office hit. Although Netflix is certainly doing better in the latter department, adding movies like Thor and Captain America in the past few months, the sweet spot is more for documentaries and indie movies you probably wouldn't go way out of your way to see in the theater.

It is also great for "binge watching," where you get into a TV show that you've never seen. Plus, there's no commercials! I doubt I would have gotten through Arrested Development or Battlestar Galactica without Netflix streaming.

If anything, I find it annoying that Netflix only has season one of shows like The Walking Dead, but Netflix and AMC don't particularly get along.

Comedians in Cars: Seinfield's Still Got It

Watched the first episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David and loved it. Great to see such a simple, yet well executed concept for web video.

There's also a bootleg copy of Seinfeld's HBO show Talking Funny on DailyMotion if you haven't checked that out.

Have We Reached Peak Iron Man?

I was watching the original Robert Downey Jr. "Iron Man" recently. The origin story was done very well, but you didn't have non-stop pointless action or lame villains the way that "Iron Man 2" did.

So, when I hear about a sequel for both Thor and Captain America, both of which were pretty lame in their first iterations, then a third Iron Man, a second Avengers, an Ant-Man movie, plus a movie for a more obscure group of heroes called the Guardians of the Galaxy which include a raccoon and a talking tree, it seems to me there's a growing bubble of inflated expectations for Iron Man and the many related offshoots of the Marvel Universe.

If you aren't familiar with the idea of a "peak," here's a post about the most famous: peak oil.

This is not particularly surprising, given how poorly thought out the Batman iteration was in the '90s, which finally ended in the abomination of "Batman + Robin," which hardly any one ever brings up to George Clooney now (and also may have been "peak Chris O'Donnell," an actor who people may tend to forget was a pretty big deal in that decade, then didn't do a single movie for four years and is now mostly known for an NCIS spinoff.)

In the same vein, the "Fantastic Four" movies seemed to flame out pretty quickly, with the second movie being horrible. The Matrix trilogy also comes to mind.

At one point last year, there were literally four Iron Man-related cartoons on basic cable. There are still two that remain, and an animated Avengers reboot that is already in the works. There was even talk about doing another release of Avengers in some kind of Director's Cut because $600 million wasn't enough for the studio.

To some extent, you see the same thing with the Wolverine character and the X-Men, where no one is particularly interested in another X-Men movie about any one except Hugh Jackman's character, although there is supposedly a "First Class" sequel in the works. There were also three Wolverine-related cartoons last year, none of which were particularly successful.

At this year's Comic Con in San Diego, Robert Downey Jr. seemed to intimate that "Iron Man 3" will likely be the last in the current run. But, right now, there seems to be no limit to the potential prequels and sequels, some of which could even be done direct to video.

But I wouldn't be surprised if either one or all of these movies under-perform at some point, especially after the big budget flops of "Green Lantern," "Battleship" and "John Carter." At a minimum, there has to be diminishing returns.

This post at IO9 essentially makes a related point, that there are only so many viable super heroes, and Guardians of the Galaxy likely aren't one of them: There are only a half dozen A-list superheroes.

GigaOM: Is the Future of Retail Is Showrooming?

Thought GigaOm's headline on this article was spot on. If you think about stores like Apple, Ikea, William Sonoma etc., they combine customer service, on-site education and the ability to browse items with a soft sell approach. Even Microsoft is essentially copying Apple with their Windows stores.

Certainly, there are some instances where you need an adapter or a case or a gift card immediately, and you want to be able to buy it the same day (Last minute Christmas shopping comes to mind). 

But, most of the time, if you can look at an item in a show room and then buy it from Amazon with free shipping and a fairly low price, that's what you are going to do. This is the antithesis of car shopping, where you are essentially trapped once you enter the showroom. 

I've had friends tell me they liked being able to look at items for their wedding or baby registries at a physical store like Crate & Barrel, but then the registry exists online, and the shipping and gift wrapping is all handled. Considering how much money is spent on these registries, you would think more retailers would adopt this approach.

Seems so obvious, yet look at JCPenny's struggles to adopt a more Apple-ish approach. 

Another store that drives me insane is REI. While their customer service is great, the way their stores are laid out is generally horrible. It is great that they offer free shipping with in-store pickup, where you likely end up buying something else.

This as Amazon is apparently considering same-day delivery in some areas.

Case Study: AARP Tax Tips

AARP Tax Tips

Helping seniors with their taxes is very important to AARP. They offer free tax advice through their Tax-Aide program.

I arrived at AARP in the fall of 2010 and we almost immediately started planning for the upcoming tax season.

I had previously led the tax coverage for AOL Personal Finance. There was already a lot of legacy tax content in the Money channel, and we had more coming, both in the form of free content from the IRS and premium content from Kiplinger.

How could we get all of this great content to the as many people as possible?

- I created subject pages around tax tips and the most popular federal and state tax forms as additional landing pages for promotional and search traffic.
- I conducted an audit of the existing content, adding internal links to focus promotional and SEO traffic on the most important articles and subject pages and paginating where appropriate.
- We came up with a list of 90 individual 'tips of the day', each of which had a relevant article with more information. We promoted the Tip of the Day on the Money channel and also had the social media team send the tips to Twitter and Facebook from January 15-April 18 (Tax Day 2011.) We ended up repeating some of the tips and not using all of them, but we knew that we had more than we would need.
- This area was promoted multiple times across the AARP.org home page, email newsletters, social media and SEM.

Key Metrics (January 15-Tax Day):
- Traffic to the Taxes subchannel page, as the main hub for the daily tips etc, was up 100x from 2010 to 2011.
- The AARP hosted version of Most Overlooked Deductions article got more than 400K page views alone.
- The three subject matter pages got more than 200K page views over this period, primarily from SEO.

Summary: 90-day content campaign doubled traffic to Tax area year over year, primarily leveraging existing content partners and existing tools, but integrating social media, SEO/SEM and promotional platforms.

'G.I. Joe' Movie Delayed to Add 3-D

After the box office disappointments of 'Joe Carter' and 'Battleship', and with the oncoming onslaught of summer blockbusters like 'Avengers' and 'Dark Knight Rises', etc., you can imagine movie execs scrambling to avoid another failed blockbuster this summer.

According to Deadline, a big part of the decision was to add 3-D to the mix, which is more popular internationally than domestically. I've been really surprised to see how much globe trotting Will Smith has been doing to promote 'MIB3'. So it will be interesting to see how the latest installation does without 3-D.

The only 3-D movie I've ever seen was last year's 'Conan: the Barbarian' remake. As you can see, the international box office numbers were actually better than the (terrible) domestic numbers. Imagine how much worse those numbers would look if they weren't charging you those extra dollars for 3-D. You can see that 'Avengers' is sneaking up on 'Avatar' in the 3-D gross department, passing Toy Story 3. 

This likely also means next year will mean more Titanic 3D type re-releases.

Look at the numbers for 'Journey 2' ... blah.

Update: Supposedly the main reason they are reworking the movie is because of the rising star of Channing Tatum. Not sure which is a more ominous reason.

HT: Vulture

Monetizing Free Content: Marc Maron Box Set

As it approaches it's 300 episode, the first 100 episodes of Marc Maron's 'WTF' will be re-released as a collector's edition box set for $50. Considering that premium episodes cost $1.99 each and are often broken up into two parts, this actually represents a pretty good deal.

Although I can't imagine there are huge profit margins for Maron, this seems like a great way to monetize content that was previously free while also giving fans something tangible. Bill Simmons' Grantland has done something similar with Grantland Quarterly, where they are converting some of their longer articles and/or blog posts into entries in a book.

I remember when the Nerdist podcast first got going, they did a limited-edition t-shirt. I'm actually kind of bummed that I didn't get one! Planet Money has also been talking about doing a t-shirt, but that project seems to have been bogged down.

It looks like This American Life has also put out CDs in the past, so it's not a huge surprise that Maron has taken a page from Ira Glass' playbook, whether it's live shows or box sets or a donation page.

Pre-order the CD at AST Records

Welcome to Widness.Blog

This is primarily a content curation blog in the vein of Marginal Revolution, Kottke.org or Daring Fireball. For those unfamiliar with my work, my background is in newspaper and online media, focusing primarily on general news, personal finance and real estate.

I have previously worked for the Washington Post, AOL, AARP and Verizon.

I currently work in Georgetown as the director for online content at Urban Land magazine.

My personal interest include media, technology, investing and sports.

Thank you for visiting.