When you clicked over to this page, were you unnerved by the lack of a popup advertisement that you had to hunt around to find where the × was hidden to close? Did it make you uncomfortable that the top thing on page is the site’s name and logo and not an ad? Are you terrified at the thought that if you move your mouse out of the window that you will not be offered the chance to sign up for our newsletter? If so, you are suffering from the “Marketing Gimmicks Fad” syndrome.
Don’t worry. It isn’t a disease that you have; it’s a disease that website owners have. The problem is that you and all the rest of us suffer from it. But it’s hard to blame website owners. The truth is that advertising rates on the internet have always been too low and they have only gotten worse. So people are trying to stay in business. I just think that the use of such marketing gimmicks isn’t an effective approach.
What’s more, these things go in waves. You’ll notice almost overnight, a large percentage of websites will start using a new technique. But eventually they go away. I suspect that all of these tricks work at first. But then people get used to them and just close them. They are just one of many of life’s annoyances like the guy next door who plays his television loud enough for people in the parking lot to hear. But I can’t help but think that they do damage to the website’s brand.
My best example of this is Washington Monthly that I slowly stopped reading because there were so many ads that the pages took forever to load. It’s a great compliment to the site that I stayed with it so long. But there’s something more that should terrify website owners. Since that time, the site has been totally redesigned. I wouldn’t exactly call it a fast site, but it’s reasonable: in the middle of the pack. It has been for a while. I know this. Yet I almost never visit the site.
Once you lose a reader, it’s hard to win them back. The truth is that there are damned few websites that are so great that you will go no matter what. I read Greg Sargent’s The Plum Line every day. It’s mostly because I have a vague fondness for him. And it’s good to get a rundown of the news from a liberal perspective. But it isn’t that great. I could certainly find the same thing elsewhere.
What every website owner wants is to have a site that is so good that people will put up with anything just to get its amazing content. But we all need to understand that we are unlikely to attain that. (We should all strive, though.) And so we should do our best to not annoy our readers. If they are in the habit of visiting, let them keep up the habit. A short-term boost in profit is not worth a long-term loss of traffic.
Of course, I’m writing from the Frankly Curious perspective. For websites that depend upon ad revenue, regular readers aren’t that great. They are actually less likely to click on the Google ads that litter the page, because they are focused on the content. It’s the people who just showed up via Google who are more likely to click on a shiny advertisement. And annoying them is not such a big deal. If your regulars (who aren’t making you any money) disappear, so what? Well, for a blog like this, so a lot.
I’ve begun to see the internet as being divided in two: the commercial and the non-commercial sides. And even though Frankly Curious is certainly not the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it falls much closer to the non-commercial side of the internet. I think website owners should decide on this when they start a site. Because I see a lot of sites that clearly aren’t meant to make (much) money that follow along with annoying trends.
But if I’m so smart, why aren’t I rich? Part of it is my overall negativity. But I think there is much too much talk of making money on the internet anyway. A much smarter approach is to use the internet to leverage something else that you can make money off of. But I know that many of these marketing gimmicks are a bad idea because they come and go. If people are serious about making money from their websites, there are tried and true things that can be done. The smartest website owners work on them and don’t worry about these marketing gimmicks.
It’s of note, however, that it is often well established websites that use such marketing gimmicks. And that may be because they are being conned by consultants. That’s a topic for another day. But my advice to website owners is to focus your front-end on being user friendly. And grow your site by getting more people to visit by using the standard techniques of creating good content and developing backlinks. Or you can be like Neil Patel and help make the internet a progressively less useful place.
Image cropped from Ralph 124C 41+ by Hugo Gernsback (Modern Electrics in 1912). It is in the public domain.
Just yesterday, I wrote A Much Darker Take on Barton Fink. Now that was an article that I really could have put on Psychotronic Review. But it seemed like it went more here because it is more of an art film than a psychotronic film. Just the same, it would have worked — especially when you consider just how wide-open the definition of of the term is. And who knows: I may end up transferring it over there at some point. As it is, the new website is not going without love. Let me tell you what I did just over the weekend.
The main thing is that I created a page for the film Omega Doom and wrote an article for it, The Post-Apocalyptic Yojimbo. Omega Doom is quite an interesting film starring Rutger Hauer.
I’m almost to the point of saying that anything that Hauer stars in must be psychotronic. He has had an uncanny tendency to pick odd films. He really has the stature to have starred in more traditional films, but instead, he’s spent most of his career starring in what most people would call trash. It’s probably a matter more than he’d rather star in second tier films than to have a second tier role in a first tier film. But it’s nice to think that he’s just really into unusual material.
Omega Doom is hardly a great film, but I think you’ll be interested in checking it out after reading my article. There is much to like about it. And if you know Yojimbo, well… There’s been a cowboy version and a gangster version. So why not a robot version?
As a result of this, I moved a couple of articles from Frankly Curious to Psychotronic Review. Whenever I do this, I end up making some changes. In many cases, I make really big changes. One where I didn’t make much of a change was in my new page on Turbo Kid. It is based on an article I wrote pretty recently, Gory Post-Apocalyptic Nostalgia.
The main thing I did in adding the film to the site was putting together the credits for the film. I’m sure I knew this before, but it’s still remarkable: Turbo Kid was written and directed by three guys. I wonder how that was all done. The truth is that the film is fairly standard. You wouldn’t get the idea that it was such a group effort. It makes me want to get the DVD just to see if there’s any information about how they worked together. I suspect there wasn’t much to it: just three friends who decided to make a film.
I also managed to publish my third blog post for Psychotronic Review: How I Rate a Film: Yojimbo Edition. Now that’s an old article — one I wrote almost exactly five years ago. But it’s also one that I changed a lot. It’s interesting, however, to see that my thinking on film rating hasn’t changed that much. But the article did end up about twice as long as it was.
There’s still lots more to do. The problem is that nothing is easy. It isn’t just a matter of moving material over. I always do at least some rewriting. And then links and images have to be dealt with. And then there is the whole issue of making sure that the articles here (and for the older articles, the ones still on the Nucleus site) get redirected correctly to Psychotronic Review. Also involved in this is getting rid of them on Frankly Curious.
The reason for this last part is that this is a blog. So even though an article might get redirected, it will still show up in the blog roll. And in searches. For example, if I hadn’t removed the article on Turbo Kid and you searched for “turbo kid,” it would have displayed here. Now that’s not a problem for you, the reader. But Google would see that as duplicate content and penalize me. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but it does mean that people would be less likely to find my Turbo Kid page through Google.
Also, I could have started a more focused blog. Frankly Curious has almost 500 articles on film. That works out to somewhat more than one film article per week for seven and a half years. That alone represents a fairly successful personal blog. But I’m too interested in too many things. So I get myself into this trouble. That’s part of what Psychotronic Review is all about: me trying to do something structured. And really, at this point, it would be so much easier to spend all my free time working on that.
I Just Need Four Websites!
But I know I would come back here. Because I’m not a single-issue person. But I do think that film and politics is it. Oh, and grammar/writing. Maybe I will do that. I’ve got my film writing on Psychotronic Review. And I’m thinking of moving my political writing to Frankly Furious. I could put all my grammar writing on Frankly Curious Media. (Something needs to be done about it. It’s been in maintenance mode for over a year.) And then my random thoughts would go here.
And with the remaining hour per day, I could sleep!