Radio Free No More

Today at an NADA session on online media I caught some news from the presenter with insider info as it was breaking (or very shortly there after). Pandora – the online jukebox that grew out of the Music Genome project – will now be adding in-stream ads to their content. You can read the complete story at WIRED.

The folks at Pandora didn't come to this decision lightly. This is just their latest attempt to monetize their site, no doubt brought on with renewed urgency by the troubled economy (Pandora recently let staff go). Personally, I'd thought that they'd had some recent flashes of ad brilliance with well-executed portal takeovers by Dos Equis and Apple. However, it seems that this combined with their display ads have failed at moving the needle significantly thus the addition of the in-stream ads which takes away one of Pandora's unique selling points (for $36 you can subscribe to their premium service which remains ad-free).

What do you think of this? Does this reduce what used to be unique online radio to ... well, radio radio? Are their other ways to monetize a website other than just placing ads on it?

No Means No

I'll get to a more meaningful post very soon. Apologies for not keeping up. It's been a busy March/April. More on that later. I had to toss these two screen caps I found recently as examples of unintuitive web design and really ... just general online avoidance and trickery.

The first offender was when I was creating yet another online account. I get cranky about account creation. I have SO many. Right now I'll do anything that Google offers so that I can just use my Google account. Anyhow, I got to my email preferences and didn't want their newsletter and it came back at me with the red text below.

Yeah ... I read your offer the first time. Leave me be! No means 'no.' Don't question my choice because it tells me that you think I'm stupid and I can't read. I made a decision. Move on. Now I'll never subscribe.

Second offender - slightly worse in my opinion. I was on a site and confused this particular online merchant committed a two-tier no-no. First, they didn't have a phone number. Call me old-fashioned but I think every site needs a number where you can reach someone if everything goes wrong. Worse yet, I go to fill out the email contact form and after I click 'Submit,' it gives me this little message:

Grrrrr. I'm basically lost in your store and you won't let me ask for directions. This was extremely aggravating. In my personal opinion it never should have made it this far because they should have covered the phone number thing and at the very least had an easy-to-use contact form.

I guess both of these are pretty good reality checks for your next site design. They seem like no-brainers but go back and check your potholes. Can users easily sign up for an account without being guilted into you spamming them? Does this sound like a real sturdy opt-in to you? And, can a user ask for help easily at any point throughout your site and get some form of immediate response? A dedicated phone line or some sort of live chat would be ideal. A contact form that didn't try to get you lost further in the site would do also ...

Again, more on other things very soon.