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DEN, Boo: R.I.P. | page 1, 2
Ahhh, but wait, you say -- weren't DEN and Boo really just pilot projects for entertainment and commerce in the beautiful broadband future, when DSL and cable modems eliminate the wait for such sites? If so, they were awfully expensive pilot projects (DEN spent over $60 million in two years, less than Boo, but still mind-boggling.) To draw up a Web business plan today on the assumption that broadband has already become a mass market is to court DEN-sized disaster. This week, the Industry Standard offers a revelatory survey on broadband adoption, which includes the eye-opening finding (from Jupiter Communications) that only 5 percent of U.S. users have broadband access now, and 73 percent have no plans to get it, ever. You can look at broadband and see a business opportunity if you're in the business of selling high-speed Net access yourself; but if you're trying to reach large numbers of consumers or viewers, as DEN and Boo were, you'd better keep your focus on the "narrow" band until those numbers change -- a lot. Beyond cultivating a certain resistance to hype and flavor-of-the-month trends, you don't have to struggle very hard to figure out what works on the Web today. Just look at any of the leading sites, and what do you see? Text, text, text everywhere. Whether you're a portal like Yahoo or an information site like CNN.com or a store like Amazon.com, if you're reaching a vast audience, you've already figured out that text makes the Web go 'round. A new study of Web news site usage from the Poynter Institute and Stanford University confirms this principle. Users of news sites focus on text first and pictures later, if at all, the study found: "Where do eyes go initially after firing up the first screenful of online news? To text, most likely. Not to photos or graphics, as you might expect. Instead, briefs or captions get eye fixations first, by and large. The eyes of online news readers then come back to the photos and graphics, sometimes not until they have returned to the first page after clicking away to a full article." An important insight, yet one that's quite difficult to act upon -- just look at the home page for the study's own Web site, with its big photo dominating the screen and the text information shoved over to a narrow column on the right. On the Web, it turns out, a word can often be worth a thousand pixels. And all the pixel-pushing in the world can't save sites like DEN and Boo if they haven't figured out how to use words -- economically and persuasively -- to shape the experience of site visitors. Hell, if they're really good they might find that words can even create "mystery and sensuality." This has, in fact, even been known to happen outside of Web browsers.
- - - - - - - - - - - - Sound off Related Salon stories When help in the shop is a flop Why don't e-commerce sites offer real customer assistance, instead of clogging up bandwidth with cartoon helpers? Boo to Boo A much-anticipated site devoted to hipster fashion launches -- complete with some off-putting boo-boos.
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