I used to cover tennis, was in the stands as Andre Agassi teared up after his final tennis match as a pro, and can be a bit of a fanatic about the sport. So when I learned recently that The Times newspaper in the U.K. was going to carry excerpts of Agassi’s revelatory autobiography “Open,” I immediately logged on.
The Times had a story, based on the book, about his admission to using crystal meth while playing, but hadn’t yet posted the excerpts. Nor was there a link or any alert system to push information to me about when the excerpts would go live.
That, for The Times, was a missed opportunity. Had I seen something that said, “Sign up for an e-mail (or Twitter or Facebook) alert” when the excerpts were posted, I would have done so right then. Sure, I could have subscribed to The Times’ tennis RSS feed and periodically glanced through the headlines to see if the autobio had been posted (assuming that story’s headline even made it clear that it was the excerpt), or continually visited the site or checked Twitter and the like.
Instead, I just looked at Google News once in awhile and read Guardian and USA Today stories and whatever happened to come over the transom, thinking I’d eventually get around to the excerpts in The Times. But this wasn’t for a pressing deadline or job, so I never got around to it until now, more than a week later, while doing this piece.
Even now, the lead story telling of Agassi’s “drugs shame” doesn’t make it as easy as possible to get to the excerpts. Though The Times notes in its third paragraph that the book is being “serialised exclusively … in The Times,” it doesn’t link to the excerpts. Yes, lower down on the right is an image of the book cover, where it is on all stories in the tennis section. But clicking on the image brings one back to that same lead story.
I don’t mean to sound petty. I can see eyeballs rolling and hear people in newsrooms saying, “Look, it’s there. If someone wants to find it, they will.” Maybe they will.
But every little impediment is an opportunity for a visitor to leave, go somewhere else, forget they can get what they want from you. I’ve pored through enough Web analytics data to see how every hitch means that many fewer clickthroughs, that much less retention, that much higher abandonment.
Every few percent lost, cumulatively, means the loss of a lot of page views, advertising and other opportunities. Over time that means the loss of real money and all the other metrics people like to use, such as “stickiness” and “engagement.”
And it’s not like The Times can be sure I will find its story without help. When I search “Agassi crystal meth” or “Agassi autobiography,” The Times doesn’t come up on the first page of Google results. For the second phrase, competitor The Guardian did make it to the first page yesterday morning.
When I was on that story page a week ago, had The Times offered me a chance to be alerted when the excerpt was posted, not only would they have had my subsequent page views (and ad impressions), they would have had my contact info and valuable information about my interests.
Every news organization must make it as easy as possible for people to find and get what they want on its site. Of course, each site should have sharing apps, like the AddThis module at the bottom of the Agassi story that links to dozens of social networking and bookmarking options. The Meebo “drag to share” option that Mashable uses on its YouTube videos is great. (Here’s an example.) Other recommendation apps can work, too, to show, “If you like this, you’ll like that,” such as a Firefox add-on from Glue that publishers can modify or build.
But publishers also need to tailor their links and offerings as much as possible. Sometimes that will mean human intervention, such as a smart editor saying, “Hey, we’ve got the Agassi excerpts, they’ll be big, so let’s make it easy for everyone to find them and get alerted to them.” Increasingly, it can mean that new Semantic Web applications parse and “understand” stories and place relevant alerts, offerings and tailored feeds on them. In all cases, it should mean that someone looking for something on a publication’s site can find it as easily as possible.
