10 Web 2.0 Ideas That Failed

fastcompany.com

8 points·thedob··8 comments

I hope drawing out a 1 page article over eventually 4 fails.

For some reason, this is becoming an increasingly common pattern amongst the websites of "mainstream media".

It's like they all got the same memo one Monday morning: Hey, if we break up our articles into 5 pages, we get 5X as many page views!

Even if you don't like the page views metric, people are looking at "Time on site". Have to make a reader load a new page every 150 words will definitely increase that!

I was reading a Perry Marshall book the other day and he talks about how there are five groups of people visiting your website:

* People who will never buy ("Noes")

* The No-Maybes

* The "Maybes"

* The Yes-Maybes

* The people who will buy no matter how many barriers you put in front of them ("Yesses")

The people reading all four pages of this article are the Yesses w/o a doubt. No casual reader wants to click, click, click, click, click, click...

Aye, people should link to the print version - single page, minimal graphics. The way the web was meant to be :-)

Luckily, you can usually just hit "print this article" for a cleaner and single page version of the same article. Nytimes has a single page option in addition to the print version.

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/923003/print

When the title explicitly declares the content of the piece, the content should adhere to whatever format is implied. I'm looking for 10 actual ideas that I can scan through, not 10 witty headers like "Get Off the Couch."

Live expo was a total failure. Good riddance.

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