January 18th, 2008, 5 Comments »
I’m pretty sure that everybody in the mainstream media now appreciates that the web is a pretty big deal. Newspapers and TV stations have finally accepted that future corporate health and wealth depends significantly on their web strategy.
Why, then, do I constantly find broken links and unhelpful 404 error pages on mainstream media sites? Here are two recent examples that I know about because I had blog posts linking to them.
- The Kansas City Star is a biggish paper, with a quarter of a million readers. You’d think they could maintain links to articles (broken link, just redirects to their home page) that are less than two years old. In SEO terms, their article on horse soccer would have easily beaten out my blog post about their article. They could have had the 2000-odd visitors who have hit my site searching for that term in the last 20 months. Given that one example, how many thousands of visitors are they leaving on the table because of broken links?
- Here’s a more heinous example. TSN used to have a whole section of their website at http://magazine.tsn.ca. My post linking to their article about CFL salaries has gotten about 25,000 visitors in the past two years or so. Those visitors should have belonged to TSN. As far as I can tell, that whole TSN Magazine section is gone, and there’s no redirects or 404-handling in place. 25,000 doesn’t sound so bad, but that’s just one article. Imagine that there are 100 articles missing, each which could have drawn roughly that many visitors. Two more zeros gets you 2.5 million visitors–a non-trivial number.
It’s possible that there are some wacky IntarWeb things going on between Morocco and these sites (Islamists don’t want me to read about horse soccer and CFL salaries!), but I don’t think so.
Broken Links Like It’s 1998
Given how desperate mainstream media companies are for web revenues, it’s shocking how often I spot broken links on their sites. I have no idea how widespread the issue is. It’s easy to imagine that TSN or the Star is missing at least 2% of potential visitors (and thus advertising revenue). If I’m running their website, that 2% matters. A lot.
Everybody has broken links. It’s a boring problem, and hardly rocket science, but corporations should know better. Their websites need to handle the error gracefully. Why, in 2008, is that still thwarting media companies?
There’s also a kind of social responsibility angle here. Every time somebody breaks a link, it has implications beyond their own site. Now I have to go chase down new articles on horse soccer and CFL salaries. In the meantime, searchers are being disappointed. That reflects poorly on me and the destination site.
5 Comments »
December 3rd, 2007, 4 Comments »
Having spent the start of the hockey season in Malta, I regularly want to watch NHL (and in particular, Canucks) highlights online. This proved surprisingly challenging. I’ve made a lengthy survey of the alternatives, and here’s what I came up with. I have a relatively slow Web connection here in Malta, and I’m running a MacBook with AdBlock Plus, which can play havoc with Flash-based videos.
- Fox Sports - Decent Flash-based videos, though they’re in a popup window and you have to filter for ‘NHL’ before you can see any. They provide short clips and they only seem to cover the American teams. Grade: B-
- ESPN - Again, decent Flash player but they only cover American teams and their videos often aren’t up to date. It’s December 3rd today, and they haven’t posted video from yesterday’s games. Also, the clips are on the short side. Grade: C+
- TSN - It could just be my connection speed, but this site takes an eternity to load, and performs very poorly in Firefox and Safari on the Mac. The video itself is good, but getting there is too much trouble. Grade: D
- SportsNet - The videos simply won’t play on my Mac, in either Safari or Firefox. Under the blank video window I see the message “Flash is required for Sportsnet.ca video.” I obviously have Flash installed, so I don’t know what’s up. Grade: F
- CBC Sports - I’ve been watching these for a while, and they’re quite good. Yes, it’s an irksome pop-up window, but the Flash app is very fast, easy to use and the videos are lengthy and well-edited. Grade: A-
- NHL.com - It took me a while to find these videos, because a search for “NHL.com video” indicated that their latest video was from 2004. These guys are the winners. They have a fast Flash-based player, the longest highlights packages, and you can choose individual clips–goals, saves, hits and other incidents–from the game summary. Grade: A
My universal complaint about these video sites and micro-sites is that they always disclose the scores before you watch the package. I prefer to watch the highlights with the outcome in doubt. I ought to be able to click a button to hide the scores in the web app.
4 Comments »
April 10th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Maggie the macaque is the weirdest and my favourite aspect of TSN’s TV coverage of the playoffs. From Wikipedia:
Maggie was born and hand-raised at the Bowmanville Zoo in Bowmanville. At the zoo, she was trained to spin a wheel. In 2003, several executives and expert panelists from the Canadian sports broadcaster TSN decided that they would “do something random” with their show, and they ended up bringing Maggie onto their broadcasts to make predictions.
The absurdity of Maggie really appeals to me. Often times sports commentators take themselves a little too seriously, and the monkey really serves to undercut that. I wrote about her last year at this time, and she ran the table, beating the three sports pundits with a record of 9 and 6.
You can watch Maggie pick the first round winners online. Happily, this year she picked Vancouver to beat Dallas. Two of the pundits agreed with her, while the other three went with Dallas–it’s a split.
1 Comment »
