October 19th, 2008, 4 Comments »
Anyone paying attention to the web over the past five years ago is aware of the rise of crowd-sourcing and all its permutations. Whether it’s the amateur editors at Wikipedia or zillions of reviews on Amazon, it’s become commonplace to rely upon the wisdom of crowds.
I do this all the time. Before going to the cinema, I consult aggregated reviews at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. When booking holidays, we’ll check hotel reviews on Travelocity or Expedia. And when I want to dip my toes into what the web’s talking about, I visit popurls or Techmeme or twitt(url)y.
We Need a Lot of Stuff
As regular readers know, we’re building a house. And, as you might expect, that house is going to need a lot of stuff: fridge, stove, dishwasher, TV, stereo, washer/dryer, etc. No matter how you slice it, the cost of this stuff adds up.
So how to choose the right stove or television? We’re pretty ignorant on this front, and I don’t fancy visiting a ton of showrooms. We could rely on the wisdom of crowds, but in this case, that seems a bit insufficient. Instead, we’ve bought a subscription to Consumer Reports. My family has relied on this publication on and off for as long as I can remember. I can picture the photocopied and highlighted pages, complete with dense little graphs, that would kick around my father’s desk.
It’s $25 a year for a subscription to the Consumer Reports website, but really it’s $25 for piece of mind. I’ll still google for opinions of the stove or TV we choose, but I’ll do so with the experts’ opinions in my back pocket.
I guess, at the end of the day, I can’t place all of my trust in the crowd.
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August 26th, 2008, 5 Comments »
Every August or September, I buy one to three hockey pool magazines. These feature in-depth previews and predictions about the year to come, ostensibly compiled by experts. As magazines go, they’re fairly hefty and not cheap. I paid $10 for the Score’s Sports Forecaster, which runs to 162 pages.
There are four or five publications that come out, all more or less covering the same ground. I usually read The Score’s because there’s the most analysis on individual players. These magazines have a peculiarity–each city or region gets its own cover. This no doubt makes the hometown buyer feel good about seeing a familiar face (or eyes in the case of my issue–a masked Luongo is on the cover).
It must be a considerable undertaking to assemble one of these magazines. There’s probably 900 players to report on (NHLers plus prospects) and 30 teams, plus a huge schwack of statistics to massage and display accurately. It’s really a big technical writing job, with a little hockey insight thrown in. There’s a good newspaper feature in visiting one of these publishers to report on how the process works.
Few Ads in Sight
Here’s the shocking thing about these magazines: they hardly have any ads. The Score’s edition has just seven full page ads for non-Score properties, from four companies. Any Cosmo reader will tell you that the average ratio of ads to editorial is more like, what, 60-40? 70-30?
The hockey magazines are, like a few others (National Geographic? What else?), about selling content and not about selling you ads wrapped around a few articles. This despite the fact that one can find all of the stats and most (if not more) of the analysis online.
Hockey magazines seem to fly in the face of contemporary attitudes about publishing. Of course, they could be on their last legs, financially, but they don’t seem to be.
This reminds me of what I recently read (and wrote) about Consumer Reports. They have three million paying online subscribers, and don’t rely on ad revenue.
The lesson? There’s still hope for curators and creators of really useful content.
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December 9th, 2007, 4 Comments »
I just read an interesting story on CNET about Consumer Reports, a site that bucks the advertising trend in online content:
A reader of the printed magazine might be “someone who generally wants to be a well-informed consumer,” said Giselle Benatar, editor in chief of online media. “But on the Web site, we’re attracting very transaction-minded consumers. They are shoppers. They’re looking for a product, they want ratings, they want recommendations, and they want it now, not once a month.”
Growing up, my family were huge users of Consumer Reports, the magazine. Maybe I’m blurring things in my head a bit, but I don’t think my parents made any big purchases without first consulting Consumer Reports back issues down at the library.
The article indicates that the average online user is fifty year old, which is a little worrying for their longterm sustainability. Still, I’ll probably subscribe to the website when we’re building our house and spending cash on appliances and the like.
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