Sex Blogging In The Stream
ErosBlog has been paying attention to Anil Dash for a very long time. Indeed, the second ErosBlog post ever quoted his 2002 musings on the masturbatory uses of hand-held shower nozzles. So I’ve been mulling his Stop Publishing Web Pages article for about a month, now. Specifically, he talks about how mobile apps tend to present stuff to the user in a highly-functional stream that’s just more useful and easier to process than standard web pages are. I don’t consider myself much of a media company, but I recognize ErosBlog in this unflattering description:
Most media companies on the web spend all of their effort putting content into content management systems which publish pages. These pages work essentially the same way that pages have worked since the beginning of the web, with a single article or post living at a particular address, and then tons of navigation and cruft (and, usually, advertisements) surrounding that article.
Users have decided they want streams, but most media companies are insisting on publishing more and more pages. And the systems which publish the web are designed to keep making pages, not to make customized streams.
And I recognize myself (and my behavior) when I read this:
Pay attention to the fact that all the links you click on Twitter, on Facebook, on Pinterest, all take you to out of the simple flow of those apps and into a jarring, cluttered experience where the most appealing option is the back button. Stop being one of those dead-end experiences and start being more like what users have repeatedly demonstrated they prefer.
The Google Analytics for ErosBlog reinforce this unwelcome sense of familiarity. Not only do I click back in horror when I land on an old cluttered web page that doesn’t play well with my smartphone, but so do you. The ErosBlog bounce rate (a measure of people who arrive at the site and very swiftly leave again) is already an unflattering 61 percent, but for mobile users, it’s an even worse 68 percent.
What’s less obvious is how to streamify the ErosBlog experience. Even Anil (much smarter about content management systems than I could ever hope to be, having been the first employee of the folks who invented the once-famous Moveable Type blog software) admits:
Obviously, I’ve written this in an old-style content publishing system, and this piece lives on my website as an old-fashioned HTML page. But if I had my preference, I’d write up an article like this, and it’d seamlessly glide into a clean, simple stream of my writing, organized by topic and sorted with the newest stuff on top. Blogs have always worked this way, but they were shoehorning this stream-like behavior into the best representation possible under the old page model.
I don’t have a tool I can use to run my website which will output a stream that works the right way…
Of course it’s been three months since he wrote that. And (to me, at least, who may not be understanding what he’s saying as well as I should) it looks as if there’s no theoretical reason why smart HTML5 templates in a properly-constructed WordPress theme couldn’t do the job. Has anybody written them yet? Not that I’ve found, but I keep hoping.
I’ve been tinkering for more than a year on various efforts to make ErosBlog more mobile-friendly, but my coding skills deficit has proven too large, and so I’ve not really gotten a lot of traction. I’ve done a lot of not-so-idle Googling for solutions coded by others, but haven’t seen anything that really does the job the way I want it done. And that’s when my vision was simply to make something that “looks like ErosBlog” while making more efficient use of small screens. Then Anil came along and convinced me I was thinking too narrowly. Now the goalposts are moving, because the app ecosystem is teaching people to want/demand new functionality in the ways their media is displayed to them.
Do I have any idea how to get ahead of this problem? Nothing concrete, I fear. As I tinker with this, my skills get better (so slowly!); that helps my feeble efforts, and on top of that I take heart from the notion that smarter people than me are working up awesome templates and themes that I’ll eventually find and put to use. All suggestions gratefully considered!
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=8871
is tumblr not just a thing, but the thing for accomplishing this? I’m not sure of the answer but it seems like the best solution I’ve seen so far.
I’m perfectly happy with the format of erosblog. It’s the best I’m aware of in the erotica/porn genre and that’s what keeps me coming back.
I don’t need to read your messages/musings on the go, so my desktop computer serves extremely well.
“Bounce rate” 61% so what??
I come on over, take a look at the latest posting, maybe open a link or two in new tabs which I then close, throw the dice a couple of times because I have only recently discovered erosblog and there’s an awful lot I haven’t seen yet.
Then I go on about my other daily activities.
Man, do I like it “the old way”! I get hopefully lost in tumblrs and twitters, not to mention facebook-like horrors. I also know I’m in the minority, though, ’cause everybody’s telling me I am.
Utharda, Tumblr has a huge problem in that it’s somebody else’s web service; if you publish there, you don’t control your content and they can delete it at any time. Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control. Or, as Anil put it: “My site would have to run on their infrastructure.” He also points out that he’s talking about more functionality than Tumblr offers; for example, proper streamified content allows the user to follow, say, just one category of posts from a blogger (like, say, all the vintage porn at ErosBlog but not the posts full of breezy half-clueless ramblings about blogging technology).
Philip, thanks for the kind words. Rest assured that I don’t have any actual intention to “stop publishing web pages”; what I’d like to do is stop publishing dead and stupid web pages that don’t work for people who have been trained by their apps to expect a more dynamic set of interactions with the stuff they are reading. Loyal visitors like you who still take pleasure in my web pages are the core of my audience; I’m not going to take that away. I believe it’s possible to have my cake and eat it too, by serving data the way visitors want, via a smart mix of dynamic device-sensing templates and user-selectable options. Unfortunately none of the WordPress themes and plugins I’ve studied closely have been sufficiently sensitive to user choice; most throw their vision of mobile paradise at every mobile device whether the mobile user wants it or not, and none that I’ve seen offer the option of streamy-style services to desktop users who might prefer to opt in.
The “bounce rate” statistic is important because it’s measuring people who land on an ErosBlog page and immediately go “What the hell is this shit?” and click away to somewhere else. Often this is legitimate and doesn’t reflect on what’s here; somebody follows a blind link and lands somewhere they weren’t trying to go, they are gonna bounce no matter what. Philip, by viewing a couple of pages, you become someone who does not bounce, which is the goal of any publisher. I don’t know what industry-wide bounce rates are these days, but a few years ago my own bounce rate was under 50%, so something is changing. Perhaps I’m just that much more boring, sure. But I suspect there’s something to Anil’s theory that more and more users expect more from their content delivery than crufty web pages are delivering.
Rafu, don’t worry. I still have a lot of readers like you and I’d hope to always keep offering pages “the old way” to people who like them that way. What I’m groping for is better ways to figure out who wants what, and then let my content management system serve up my stuff the way people want, so that you get what you always got and the folks who want more/different get that.
Some thoughts:
– about the bounce rate:
Wouldn’t the bounce rate go up when many people already know your page and just come by once a day to check if there’s something new? I know I mostly just come here to see if there’s anything new (yeah, I know there are rss feeds nowadays), and just go again after I’ve read the latest post(s).
– about the “stream experience”:
This interaction model IMO fits well with “time sink” sites like twitter, where there’s an unlimited supply of content and a relatively low interest rate per single entry. I.e. a stream is really good if you just browse through a large number of very short posts where only a few are actually interesting.
“Streamified” sites are often written with mobile devices as first-class citizens in mind, so they usually work well with these. That said you can have a really great mobile experience without a streamified interface. Just look at wikipedias mobile site. Their content-model would never work as a stream. Nevertheless they have done a great job at providing a good user interface to their content for both desktop and mobile clients.
One potential problem with streamified sites is their reduced linkability. Just ask yourself: how many times do you link to “traditional blog posts”, and how often do you link to twitter messages or those new streamified tumblr sites?
That said, a good mobile experience is ever more important for a site. Having to scroll by a giant block of sidebar links before one can view the actual content is guaranteed to drive away potential visitors. I guess it should be no problem to put those at the end of the mobile page and make them click-to-open like the sections in the mobile wikipedia.
Also, the image header and other non-background and non-content images look nice on the desktop, but are annoying on the mobile edition. If those images were excluded from the mobile edition the site would look much cleaner.
If you finish this off with a thumb-friendly button to view earlier posts at the bottom of the page, erosblog would be much more accessible on mobile devices without impeding the strengths of the desktop version…
Random poking about turned up:
http://net.tuts...le-2/
…’how do I point it at wordpress RSS’ stuff in the comments.
Endymion, you’re right about another benign reason for the bounce rate, but that’s been true forever, so it doesn’t really explain changes in the bounce rate.
You’re also right that a better mobile web experience (interface tweaks for mobile users) will go a long way toward satisfying stream-accustomed users even without the true streamy stuff that may not be the best fit for my fairly-low-volume content. Some of your suggestions are very much on my to-do list!
Your mention of the streamified tumblr sites reminds me: a bad implementation is worse than no implementation. One of the computers I use is an older computer with very limited memory, and those endlessly-scrolling sites cause it to choke up and (eventually) crash like hell. When Tumblr-ing on that computer I just have to not view those sites, or remember to close the tab after letting it autoscroll no more than two or three times.
I hear you. The challenge of managing a lot of content and staying social while at the same time respecting Bacchus’s Law (to the extent that I am able) is getting to be a real head-scratcher.
Perhaps it’s time for me to start looking for programmers as well as artists.
Faustus, one of my frustrations is that many times, there’s already good, sometimes even free, software out there to do a thing, but there’s no good way to discover it because there’s no standardized vocabulary to describe what it does. Worse yet, a lot of the time I’d be using the software to do something it can do, but in a way that’s different from what the authors intended to do with it, so they never thought to describe its features in the words I’d be using to search for it.
I guess what I’m saying is, don’t be *too* hasty to dive for custom code. But searching for tools can be very very confusing and frustrating, that I’ll cheerfully admit. That’s one of the reasons I write posts like this one; I always hope that when I say what I want, somebody will go “oh, you could do that with XYZsoft, I think.”
An increasing bounce-rate should not be necessarily feared as in any way ominous, until one has determined the cause and meaning.
As you build a larger/more loyal following, wouldn’t those followers logically likely check (“bounce”), the site more often for posting changes? …Say maybe even up to a dozen times a day or so, thereby skewing the numbers?
Also, you have more competition with every passing day I presume? Do you have any stats for the bounce rate of “illustrated” versus non-illustrated postings? Are you perhaps statistically posting more “non-illustrated” articles these days, as your journalism becomes more serious?
I realize that most people buy Playboy for the articles (ha, ha, ha, snort, he, he…), but in my advertizing psychology classes, it was basically confirmed that indeed a picture is more often worth a thousand words, and people are usually more likely to devote their attentions to images over mere terms. This is a sound-bite society these days, People are busy, attention spans are shorter! You have to grab people’s attentions before you can communicate with them (ask “king-of all-media” Howard Stern…).
People want to be “entertained” whatever that means… THEN you can teach them something. Lady Gaga understands this, hence the recent stripping
( http://www.nyda...04049 ) and the success of songs even as “preachy” as “Born This Way”.
I suppose you could always hire a market research firm to determine exactly why your bounce rate seems to be on the increase… If they are any good at what they do, they could find out!
Quite frankly, I don’t buy it. There is a place for ‘streaming’ – breaking news and the like. But when I hit one of those sites that use the ‘scroll down forever’ style, especially if I am a new visitor, I think long and hard before bookmarking it. Effectively, you can’t visit the archives – going too far back will crash your browser, be it mobile or desktop. It’s not easy to determine if you’ve seen a post before, either. Having an RSS feed or something that notifies of new content is fine, but the main page of a site should be just that – a portion of the content that is easily accessible and readable.
Pages have evolved the way they have, with navigation on the left, content, and ads on the right because it makes sense to have those things there, at least on a desktop screen. On mobile devices, it’s much more difficult to choose where to put the elements and what to keep and what to leave out – because mobile devices have much smaller screens.
The only bouncing I do when I visit your site is with glee–frequently, a *lot* of it.
I come here on PURPOSE.
Aw! Denise, that wins you the “Favorite Commenter Of The Month” award. Made my morning. Thanks!