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At the risk of interrupting a bashorama to stimulate discussion 
of issues instead of platitudes, I offer for comment this 
list of the 10 greatest myths surrounding online publishing today.

#1 Bandwidth will increase and costs decrease.

   It might, but if it does so will the cost. The alternative uses 
   (principally, telephony) of reliable, sequential bandwidths above 
   6KBps are so potentially lucrative that very few experts  -- in 
   particular, lead economists of major telecommunications firms -- 
   expect current, relatively low-priced net connections to survive 
   should technology allow such rates on a routine basis. 
 
   Expect to pay substantial premiums for prevention of massive packet 
   buffering and consistent transfer rates. In other words, when a 
   28.8kbps modem hits full stride and stays there without slowdowns,
   you may be doing about as well as commodity-priced net access can 
   ever be expected to do. And this is true regardless of the hardware
   infrastructure -- cable, fiber, wireless, etc.

#2 The prime audience is an untapped generation of non-readers.

   In fact, the dominant audience is composed of voracious readers
   who seek out the net as a source of augmentation for other 
   material already available to them in traditional form. Indeed 
   there are many who surf to find glitz and jazz, but these people 
   rarely return and very seldom are they the audience advertisers 
   seek. They'll try anything, but when it comes to closing a sale, 
   the completion rate they generate is so low as to make them 
   worthless readers, consuming more bandwidth than the revenue to 
   be made off of them can justify.

#3 Online readers demand rich audio-visual presentation.

   In fact, they demand efficient presentation. Decorative sensory 
   material may appeal -- ONCE -- to a surfer, but the bread and 
   butter of any site is its return visitors, and they are drawn 
   by efficiency. This doesn't mean abandonment of all sensory 
   material, but it does mean stressing the informational content 
   of such material and making certain that it is an efficient use
   of bandwidth. Have you noticed how the big advertisers and big
   sites, which have been at this long enough to conduct their own 
   research, are now talking more and more about limiting their 
   graphics, not expanding them?

#4 Ads work best at the top of a page.

   In fact, that may be their worst position. Ads work well when 
   you catch a reader right after he or she finishes looking at 
   something or right before he or she decides what to look at. 
   Typically, readers go to a page for some reason. Putting an 
   ad at the top means you've positioned the ad in the worst 
   position -- inbetween the reader and what he or she is looking 
   to find.

#5 Even if they don't work best there, agencies demand it.

   Actually, many of them are perplexed as to why sites 
   insist of putting ads there. They've run the numbers. They 
   understand the theory. Ads at the tops of pages are yet 
   another attempt by journalists to try appease marketers 
   rather than think as they do and arrive at a mutually 
   beneficial conclusion.

#5 Search engines are great advertising media.

   If you understand the previous two points, you'll know why this is 
   a myth, too. Only targeted "advertorial"-style ads, which 
   give prominence to a site that would have showed up anyway in 
   a search, fit within the locus of locations that work 
   best. Proctor & Gamble's refusal to pay Yahoo's impression rate
   is strong evidence not of a lack of proper accounting tools 
   but of the poor performance of ads placed in the middle of an 
   informational transaction.

#6 It's tough to audit hits, impressions, clicks and users.

   Total nonsense. Except for caching and use of the browser 
   back button, anyone who's ever written a keyboard macro can 
   probably set up an ad placement and tracking system that will 
   deliver far more reliable readership data than could ever be 
   delivered by a broadcast station or a print publication.
   Most ad auditing services produce results that are far less 
   accurate than the logs created by shareware programs.
   The problem has not been the technology but rather the comments
   made -- sometimes with the intent of deceiving -- by people 
   who really don't understand the technology.

#7 The more hits the better.

   Only if you're selling bandwidth. Quality of impression is 
   far more significant to advertisers, as it leads to sales 
   completions. Moreover, is this not something that journalists 
   care about, too? We want our message to get out to the people 
   who need to hear it. Can we really be that proud of getting 
   a gazillion people to look at something stupid when our basic
   news message does not get out? The advertiser doesn't want a 
   gazillion useless hits anymore than we do -- unless, of course, 
   all we want to do is bring about size. (Sound familiar, women?)

#8 Readers want interaction with information providers.

   Not really. What they really want is to be able to consume 
   the information interactively. That's a key difference. Sure, 
   a handful want to spout off, writing an electronic letter to 
   the editor. But all forms of reader feedback have been 
   of steadily decreasing popularity for more than 90 years. It's 
   not the talkback that's important. It's the ability to gain 
   some control over how the information is received.

#9 Community builds loyalty.

   Rather, the reverse is true. Again, advertisers have come to 
   understand that content -- not disnonace reduction -- 
   is the key to online success. Yet editorially we are mired in 
   creating little boxes on the cyber-hillside into which we can all 
   gather and engage in ticky-tacky conversation. (Apologies to 
   Mellencamp.) 

#10 Web publishing demands greater technical skills.

   In fact, the skills may be less technical that those needed to 
   publish traditional. And certainly the theoretical mindset is 
   less complicated. Online is a medium of total individual 
   expression. It should be a medium of de-specialized skills, of 
   integrating simple forms of presentation across many specialties
   rather than mastering any one marginalized specialty. The 
   problem is, we have become so rooted in the tools we use that 
   we have forgotten why we use them.

OK. If you can't find something better to talk about after all of 
those grapefruit-size pitches, offered without the corroborative 
evidence that could be used in rebuttal, maybe all you do want to 
talk about is ticky-tacky. 
   
----------------------------------------------------
                  N E W S L I N K
  Online news research, consulting and publishing
----------------------------------------------------
Eric K, Meyer               4,000 media links & more
meyer@newslink.org           http://www.newslink.org
----------------------------------------------------
    Preview acclaimed guide for online publishers
            Write to report@newslink.org
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