Vote for this article. What is this?

Ninemsn have added Flock to the footer of all of their news articles. Digg style article recommendation, they’re using the results to feed ‘The Flock’, a Med Rec sized visual display of their ‘most flocked’ articles. It looks pretty nifty as the news circles fly across the screen, but when you need a legend to explain how it works, you’re losing the users already. And it’s easy to skim over this movement in a ‘banner blindness’ state, given there’s no actual content until you mouse over. More importantly, to ‘Flock’ something isn’t an adjective 99.99% of ninemsn users are going to understand. Brands need to stop trying to invent their brand as an adjective and focus on user-centric terminology. To many are striving for ‘to Google it’ type brand recognition. But Google don’t need a ‘What is this?’ link beside their search box to make it dead clear what you’re there for.

I don’t think ‘voting’ for articles works on the publishers. The incentive isn’t there, where’s the reward? My thoughts are you measure the clicks driven from the index page hyperlinks and search-engine article specific traffic to derive your most-popular. It doesn’t measure the quality of the content, you leave that in the hands of the editors, but it does derive what users are deeming important.

So it drops another piece of realestate in the sandbox that is the baseline of your articles along with all those other icons that are breeding down there. To Digg, to Flock, to Share on Facebook, Messenger, del.icio.us, email. Some of these icons I can’t even decipher. I use del.icio.us frequently, and I have never used this icon, there’s a big fat button in my browser that serves me fine.

News.com.au has a smorgasboard of icons at the base of all articles, yet at the moment on IE 7 none of them are even clickable. I’m sure no-one has noticed. * emails to product team *

So who actually uses these icons? No-one. Those that do use these are probably the same type that don't visit portal sites to consume their news. It’s half-assed social media sharing with more return for the publishers than for the users. Replace that strip with a list of ‘like’ articles, breadcrumbs to related news and attempt to increase the session times on your site. Or just remove them all together.

Over the over the page (OTP) advertising

I see over-the-page ads as the nearest format we (online) have to a TV commercial, interrupting our regular programming with a forced advertiser message.

It’s a short-term shotgun approach to online advertising, agencies love them because they provide reach, publishers love them because they provide super CPM rates. Users hate them. If you ask a novice user what is “online advertising”, they’ll often mention these ads. In a digital world that offers so much, it’s a shame we still have to resort to these formats.

Like watching a great TV commercial, there are OTP’s that generally make good viewing (see Soap’s Jumper launch, great example of online specific video done well) however a majority are poor flash projects that add little value or fully exploit the medium. Red flags also to Virgin Money and Sony, who both have over-zealous marketers running over-the-page style advertising on their own sites. Crazy.

What’s made worse if their lack of standardisation – in size, in duration, in mandatory inclusions. Ninemsn allow up to 10 seconds for a full page OTP, a lifetime in online. The IAB goes further offering maximum 15 seconds. And there is no mention of ad frequency, as publishers continue to bump up their frequencies from one a month, to one a week, to frequency of one throughout a week. I’m sure the usability departments in all of these publishers have fought and lost the war when it comes to these formats – too much revenue at stake.

But it’s a short term strategy, he who wins the user, wins the game. Users can and will move, when competitors are only one click away. As RSS and News feed widgets continue to gain in popularity, back door entry to publishers content via these links will become increasingly popular, effectively avoiding the homepage onslaught.

As Dr Schmidt highlights, while Google’s astronomic revenue is derived from their advertising model, the “number one priority is end-user happiness”. Publishers needs to get smarter about their ad units and return more focus to the user.