More than Numbers

Japan's solution to unemployment

Just tell the unemployed to leave. I guess if all unemployed people left, then the unemployment rate would in fact be lowered. The program applies to foreigners of Japanese descent and the way it works is that the government basically pays you to leave. The fine print states you can't return to Japan unless the economy gets better. Ouch. This would absolutely never fly in the US.

Oh and Japan, with a shrinking population as it already stands, it may not be the best strategy to encourage even more people to leave.

Was Oscars viewership really lower than expected?

32 million viewers in one evening. In the scale of web analytics, getting 32 million visitors in a few hours would be amazing. In big time TV broadcasts though, it's rather disappointing. Especially if it's for the Oscars. There were evidently high hopes as ABC was selling 30 second spots at over $1.8 million.

I was one of those 32 million, but in all honesty I wasn't really paying attention. It was just kind of on in the background. There were no crazy Oscars moments that stood out this year. I even twittered my dissatisfaction with the broadcast.

Part of the reason was probably that I really didn't see many of the big nominated movies this year except for Juno and Sweeney Todd (both of which I loved). It seemed like it was really only 4 other movies that were pretty much nominated in every other category.

But still I think the main reason really lies within the writer's strike. Sure the strike is over, but I think over the last few weeks, people started to diverge their behavior slightly. With no new shows, people got bored with TV. I know I did. When at home on the computer I'm usually on the couch in front of the TV. But lately I've been there with the TV off. Instead, I opt for music or silence. TV got boring. There was no new content. And because of this, I just really wasn't ready yet to watch.

How does this relate to user experience on the web? Fresh content is necessary if you want people to return to your site. People will not consistently return to your site and engage themselves if they're looking at the same old thing time and again. Freshen the content, freshen the design. Make the experience new and exciting again. Or people might just get bored.

Why not a blogger's strike?

After thinking about the recently ended Writers Guild of America strike, it got me thinking that some of the reasons behind the strike were in actuality similar to the situation that many bloggers face.

Part of the strike was about being compensated for material delivered via new media, mainly the Internet.

At a high level, there are two types of blogging platforms where revenue is concerned. Paid subscription or license, and free ad-supported. In the paid group, there are sites like Flickr (where you can pay for a pro membership), Livejournal, and TypePad. Under the free group are sites like Vox, digg, Myspace, Facebook, etc. Actually pretty much every social network is included in this group.

It is the free group of sites that I do see a problem with. These sites are made up almost entirely of user generated content. It is really the content that fuels traffic to these properties and not functionality. This fact explains how MySpace, which is usually broken functionally, manages to surge in traffic. As said many times before, "Content is King" when it comes to social media.

As the number of active users increases, so do page views to the site. For these ad-supported models, we can also assume that revenue increases at a correlational rate to traffic. How is this fair for users?

Take Vox for example. It has come to a point where the amount of ads being thrown at you is ridiculous. Snap is even used to monetize every link you have within your blog post. Vox profits more and more as it's user's content becomes more interesting. Good business plan for Vox, bad business plan for users.

I'm not saying that people only blog for money-- that would be completely untrue. And I'm not saying users should get 100% of the ad revenue they generate either. That would also be unfair. There are obviously development, hosting, and overhead costs to run a site. But it does make sense for ad-supported sites to be able to share their revenue with the content creators. If revenue is not shared, the site is taking too much credit for content it had nothing to do with.

Pay services are better. You might pay for the amount of bandwidth you wish to use. You might get additional functionality at higher tiers. But the big difference is that users are not punished for having popular content like they are with ad-supported models.

A few weeks ago, YouTube broke ground by announcing a revenue sharing plan for content creators. I feel that this really needs to be the direction that many of the other popular sites have to begin to take. Don't let those "free" sites take advantage of your amazing content.

I think we need to call a blogger's strike if that's what it's going to take to get them to listen.

Double bagging.

It seems like some grocery stories love to always double bag their items no matter what. I understand how certain heavier items might require two bags but from my observation it seems like things always get double bagged whether they require it or not.

I'm a little baffled by this behavior, especially seeing it happen at places like Trader Joe's. For one, it is wasteful for both the environment as well as financially for the company. And second, assuming that everything really did require the strength of two bags would it not just make sense to produce thicker (or stronger) bags? This would at least have the benefit of saving time to place one bag into another.

It should be noted that I am a huge supporter of reusable grocery bags.