The Point Of Diminishing Returns
Clint Lewis, CI Editor
Taunton Press arguably puts out the best print magazines in the world. Their
magazines cover topics on building, cooking, gardening, and a host of other
areas. Taunton early on developed a format where all the advertisements were
grouped together at the beginning and end of the magazine. Once you reach the
articles you can keep reading the rest of the magazine without encountering
another ad until the end of the last article. And even the ads are tasteful.
Email newsletters started out this way. In fact, they started out with no
advertising. It doesn't cost much to send out an email to hundreds or thousands
of users, so for product companies it made sense to develop an email list of
users and occasionally send them an update on the companies direction and new
products. That's why it was called a newsletter. For websites like ZDNet that
offer communal topics of interest it also made sense to 'push' content to the
community in order to attract them back to their website where they could be
ensnared in the other distractions the site has to offer.
At first, email newsletters were sent in an informal and personal way that was
genuinely useful to the target audience. Such early newsletters were pure ASCII
text and loaded quickly into one's email reader. They were easy to read, easy
on the eyes, and with just a modicum of skill could be presented in a simple,
pleasing format. They tended to stick to the subject at hand and provided a
comprehensive informational whole. That's mostly changed now.
Many websites make it easy to enter your email address in order to sign up for
their newsletter. Increasingly, Advertising Letter would be a more
accurate way to describe what you are signing up for. What's being sent now in
the guise of 'news', is a cacophony of content and advertisement, separated by
dashes, and asterisks, html, rich text, and whatever else the junior designer
thinks is cool to separate the content from the advertisements.
I don't know what idiot (there's that word again) started this trend but I'd
like to phone him up during his dinnertime and give him a piece of my mind.
Come on people, we can do better than this! Does every nook and cranny of every
part of life have to contain an advertisement? I've even heard Nike wanted to
float a banner ad in space. My advice: just don't do it.
If you've followed AnchorDesk on ZDNet, you'll know that Jesse stopped writing
excellent content and went away to form an entire industry based on target
email. Yeah, you're supposed to make money now on the web to survive but if you
really think interrupting my reading with an ad is going to help you do that,
think again. And for those who are going to ask me what I'm complaining about
since I can just unsubscribe to newsletters, don't bother, I already have.
My advice to those who feel they must include advertisements in their
newsletters is to put all the ads at the bottom of the article prefaced
with ADV. And please, hire a text design expert if you can't keep away
from the squiggly keys on your keyboard. Finally, like many do, always give me
the choice (it should be the default) to receive text-only newsletters so I can
more quickly read and delete them.