• Lincoln, an existing advertiser with The New York Times, has targeted 200,000 heavy readers of the newspaper’s website with an offer to sponsor their digital subscription for 2011. – I almost didn’t read this offer. It came up as an interstitial, between the homepage and the article I wanted to read, so the first two times I clicked by without actually seeing it. Then I belatedly noticed it had said something about the NYTimes paywall, went back and looked at the banner version on the NYTimes homepage, and clicked through to accept a gift from a brand that is basically irrelevant to me.

  It’s not that I’m not a good target demographically – MBA students fit “‘thought leaders’ in a younger-age bracket” and “the kind of consumers who are interested in the newer Lincolns” pretty much perfectly, I’d guess – but personally I don’t expect to buy a car in the next five years, and if I did it would be chosen for function not luxury. I feel a little weird about accepting the offer, and now feel some obligation to find out something about Lincoln to be sure I’m not dismissing it unreasonably. Reciprocity is a powerful trick (“techniques used in advertising and other propaganda whereby a small gift of some kind is proffered with the expectation of producing a desire on the part of the recipient to reciprocate in some way”).

• Chuck vs the delicious Subway sandwich – Chuck has been my favorite TV show for the past several years (funny, geeky, and the geeky stuff sometimes saves the day). It has repeatedly been almost-canceled, and one of the things that saved it was a relationship with Subway – aggressive product placement led to a fan campaign in which the show’s star participated (demonstrating to Subway that its sponsorship led to sales), which then led to more aggressive product placement.

  But they deliberately make the product placement stand out (not like the “oh, hey, it’s Windows Phone 7 and we’re going to linger on the phone for a really long time for no reason” placement I saw elsewhere this week), and they make it a joke all the fans are in on. One review commented, “I don’t know who is ever against product placement because every time the people at Chuck mention the greatness of Subway, I find it hilarious.” I’m aware I’m being sold, and yes, the next time I see a Subway around breakfast time I’ll try to go buy the relevant product, because I appreciate their sponsoring content I love.

• The Washington Post redesign – I’ve been reading the Post almost every day for 19 years, 13 of those online. I’m not a fan of the redesign. The links are black, making it harder for me to scan for things I can click on to get more information. They used all-caps for a long headline. It took me several days to pick out where they’d put the sections of news I care about and what parts of the page I could safely ignore. But most of all, that first day made it very clear what one thing I was supposed to do when I arrived on the homepage: click on the ads. This on a day when the main headline was about nuclear catastrophe.

  

  They’ve since added back photos to the top content area, so it’s not quite so much “there’s some boring black and white stuff and – ooh, shiny, a brightly colored ad! and another!” but it still looks visually like the right column, with ads and links, is the dark-colored important area. I’ve taught myself to be pretty ad-blind (see above about not reading the Lincoln offer), and the design makes it harder to ignore the ads in favor of the content that brought me to the site. The ads aren’t helping provide the content I want: they’re getting in the way of it. I’m the product being sold, and the Post isn’t even winking at me as they sell me. This isn’t the way I want to see sponsorship go.

There are plenty of issues with patronage models. Editorial independence is a big deal. But while selling lots of little ads preserves independence better, it’s much more demanding for the reader/watcher in terms of cognitive load. I’d rather have one sponsor; then I know whose influence I might have to discount – I’m used to that model from white papers, stadium names, and opinion columnists. With one sponsor, I know who I’m selling my attention to, and I can decide without too much difficulty how much weight I want to give their coin.

This book isn’t very good, right? Even distribution of ratings from one to five stars:

Except no, the two one-star reviews are both protest rankings because of the Kindle price:

Publishers might see bad ratings for their books and change the ebook prices. So Amazon does have an incentive to leave those ratings up and include them in its overall averages.

But the ratings now aren’t very helpful to consumers. If you’re buying the hardback, your questions are about the book’s content (and maybe format), not about the pricing of the ebook edition. Unlike seeing comments on the hardback when buying the paperback, the only purpose of the Kindle-specific protest reviews is to skew the star rating downward. I’ve seen a few reviews in the past complaining about the speed of third-party sellers’ shipping, which also cause ratings problems, but nothing as pervasive as the Kindle pricing issue.

So what could Amazon do?

• Only allow people to review a book if they purchased it from Amazon, instead of allowing them to “review” a book they refused to purchase because of price: probably a bad idea, since many helpful reviews presumably are written by people who bought at bookstores, etc.
• Try to filter reviews based on review content, and don’t count protest reviews in star ratings: too hard an artificial intelligence problem.
• Filter based on “helpful”/”unhelpful” votes, and only count reviews with a certain proportion of “helpful” votes (plus new reviews that don’t have many votes yet): would be fairly easy to set up and to justify to users, though it would require some kind of explanation by the star summary.
• Segregate Kindle reviews from paper reviews: it would be a bad idea to make them completely separate, since Kindle edition reviewers also comment on content, but probably a good idea to give separate ratings summaries. This would allow someone to say “great content, but the formatting is awful” and have their downgraded star rating only affect the Kindle summary.
• Other options?

As Kindle and other ebook sales grow, consumers are still going to look for reviews. It’s time Amazon figured out how to keep them reliable.

If you’re a fan of good design and of Apple products in particular, you might well have heard of Daring Fireball. Even if you haven’t, you’ll want to find someone like DF’s proprietor, John Gruber, and get them in your corner.

Today’s example of Gruber’s outsize influence on his tribe of readers is a Kickstarter project creating an iPhone tripod mount and stand: it took about an hour (according to Eric Hastings on the project comments page) to go from $6000 needed to fully funded once Gruber posted

Count me in for this Kickstarter project: Dan “The Russians Used a Pencil” Provost and Thomas Gerhardt have designed a combination stand/tripod mount for the iPhone 4.

That was it: no “go buy it”, no “get them funded”, just bringing an interesting project to his readers’ attention. The project is now $8000 $12,000 overfunded, and I fully expect the meter to keep running upward the rest of the day and beyond.

What gave Gruber such influence?

• His audience knows they’ll like the things he likes. He’s been blogging for a long time. He points people to multiple interesting things a day. He has a track record. He’s a perfectionist about design, so anything with his seal of approval is likely to be good.
• People enjoy supporting the little guy. Kickstarter is all about getting funding to do the project you always wanted to do. People like funding the projects whose authors are passionate about them. Something customized for a small audience will gain raving fans within that audience. And the Internet has made it easy to run small-scale, highly targeted projects.

Where do you find a Gruber to point people to your own project?

That’s both the easy and the hard part. Easy, because if they already exist, you find them, and your project is exciting to them, they’ll happily point people your way. Hard, because the commitment needed to build a following like Gruber’s is very high – it takes a lot of time and energy – and not many people have invested so much in their audience. And hard because your project has to be pretty exciting to deserve their attention.

So think carefully as you design your project about who’s going to care about it. Who’s going to care enough to talk about you to all the people they know? If you don’t know, then your project needs to be more awesome. Aim higher.

Should you follow the (small and passionate) crowd?

I supported the Kickstarter project. It looks like a great product – and if it’s not, I spent $20 encouraging people trying to build innovative new toys. If that’s something you want to see more of, go ante up and join me.

I don’t want the physical version of the paper because I hate newsprint smudges and I like reading articles online (normal procedure: open lots of tabs, read through them in turn). And asking people to pay for online content doesn’t have a great track record (Slate subscriptions, TimesSelect, etc.), although some organizations have managed it (the Wall Street Journal, Salon Premium, the Financial Times, etc.). But there ought to be something else the Post could ask me besides “help us kill more trees to get our circulation numbers up.”

I have a lot of brand loyalty to the Post. I’ve been reading it pretty much daily since seventh grade, first my parents’ paper subscription and then online when I went to college. I’m used to the way its writers think – I know who writes the most entertaining Style stories (Monica Hesse), who consistently likes the opposite movies from me (Ann Hornaday), whose analysis I trust on the health care debate (Ezra Klein).

So why don’t I have a convenient way to support the Post that doesn’t involve acres of newsprint? I think they’re still stuck in a commercial model, and wish they’d adopt a bit of thinking from the nonprofit world – even if becoming a nonprofit isn’t the way they choose to go. I already see the benefits of their work, I’m a supporter, so let me participate in the mission. I can imagine seeing a message one day at the top of the homepage saying “Following our international stories? Support our foreign bureaus.” A couple of months after that, I’d see “Whether you love the Kennedy Center or the 9:30 Club, support our local arts coverage.” I’d give them $20 or $30 every so often, happily. That has to be better for them than the costs of delivering a free Express every weekday. It’s probably even better than my paying $1.50 a week for six months for weekdays plus Sunday home delivery of the Post.

The idea isn’t perfect. First, with advertising costs dependent on subscription numbers and online ads not nearly as lucrative as paper ones, my eyeballs aren’t as valuable as my blackened fingers. Second, it takes a good bit of effort to run an effective nonprofit fundraising program, and a for-profit fundraising program would require the same message crafting and analysis. Third, especially in a town where so many people are transient, my brand loyalty may be quite the exception.

But some of the blogs I read have Donate buttons in the sidebar, and if the blogger says “hey, I need help with my car repair / my hospital bill / getting to a conference” I’ll probably throw something into the kitty. At the moment the Post can’t figure out how to ask.

This is odd, because it seems computers are going the other way. Dell had taken over the world with online shopping and customization, but now retail is newly popular. Apple created its own boutiques (all white and shiny), which took off. Now even Microsoft is planning stores.

And it’s not just the branded stores that are doing well; Costco puts its displays of televisions, computers, and cameras at the very front of my local store. They’re interested enough in the electronics market to have recently announced a program for recycling your old electronics – presumably in hopes that you’ll use your Costco Cash Card trade-in money on a new toy to replace the old.

So if we like buying consumer electronics in stores (whether at Apple or at Costco), why are the refrigerators going away?

Apple’s and Costco’s big advantage is their selective product lines. Apple sells only a few configurations of computers. Costco picks a few products that it thinks will be popular and on which it can get volume discounts. The Sears website tells me “1033 products found for ‘refrigerator’.” How much space is that on the floor? How much space is that in warehouses? Isn’t it easier to tell people how wide the fridge will be and make them measure their own space to make sure it’ll fit?

It’s a do-it-yourself age. Shop online, base your decision on other consumers’ reviews, and check if your vendor has free return shipping. The best tip I learned when shopping for a TV was to cut out a piece of cardboard so you could see if the screen was actually the right size in your room. Now I’m starting to wonder if there’s a market for sets of plastic images of refrigerator insides. “Look, with this one you’d be the right height to see into all the shelves.”

Maybe virtual worlds or augmented reality can step into this gap. Maybe we’ll rely on architects and interior designers, who have memberships to professional showrooms that aren’t so decimated. Maybe someone will notice that people want to know whether the corner of the freezer door is going to hit them in the head, and a new boutique refrigerator store will be born. But it’s a good thing I’m not planning to design a kitchen soon: I’d want to pull open the appliance doors myself. Unlike my next computer, no one’s interested in helping me try a refrigerator out.

Case in point: why did at least three major news sources decide today to publish stories about the Facebook 25 things meme? The New York Times, Time, and my local, normally-serious Washington Post all fell prey to this; anyone would think the meme had a gifted publicist. But how did I find out about two of the three stories? From a friend’s Facebook status. (The Post one I found on its website, in my daily “read the 15-25 stories I might care about” scan.)

I quite like the meme, as long as no one expects me to complete it – my friends’ random facts have been amusing (especially the 25 completely fictional “facts” one person shared). But if you care about the story, you know it’s happening because it’s on your news feed, and if it’s not on your news feed I can’t imagine you care about the story. So why spend precious journalistic resources on this? Is this the kind of content people will value enough to pay for?

Sure, it’s content that got me to write a blog post. And maybe that’s what newspapers and magazines value now. But eyeballs are one thing, and money to support your foreign bureaus is another, and I wish the people I rely on for news had a better idea how to keep delivering it.

Users don’t want to pay for anything, but that doesn’t mean nothing is ever paid for. Still, it’s particularly challenging to charge for social networks. They’re all scrambling for users, because the network effect ensures that larger networks will grow more quickly. Charging users reduces the number who’ll sign up, the number who’ll tell their friends to join, and your network’s attractiveness to potential acquirers.

So how can you charge for a social network? The usual way: you don’t have the most users, you have the most relevant users. It’s the same strategy used by business schools (a lot of whose value is in who you meet) and professional societies (where you can learn from others and be seen as a leader in your field). You’re paying to join a particular social network (in the offline sense) because the others in it are people you want to know. Oh, and there are some other benefits like classes, conferences, etc. The Well has had essentially this business model for years.

On the other hand, creating a network of most relevant people also works extremely well if you’re selling advertising. Look at ModelsHotel, a selective “gated community” for models from top agencies, profiled in the Wall Street Journal and then on TechCrunch in September. As the Journal says, “It’s this promise of exclusivity that is drawing sponsors to the site. Among its high-profile marketing partners: eccentric fashion design house Heatherette, Diesel jeans and luxury jeweler Piaget.”

So the upshot? Make your social network either big or specific, and specific is a whole lot easier to pull off. If you can get the right people to feel invested in your site, if you can grow a community, then yes, you can charge for access to that community. It’s up to you whether you charge the participants directly or take their time with (hopefully ever more relevant) ads – but I’m hoping in the current ad-a-minute glut that more places will opt to ask for my money instead of my eyeballs.

ETA: Jeremiah asks how much would you pay for a social networking service; Business Week discusses social networking with the elite.

ETA 2: Washington Post article says Online Networking Goes Small, and Sponsors Follow, 12/29/2007