Bastardising the often mocked moral mantra of middle America to pose the question ‘What would Google Do?‘ was a masterstroke of simplicity by blogger and author Jeff Jarvis, but when it comes to news, features, galleries, videos, audio and any other editorial content there’s surely a better question to ask when considering how to improve your digital offering: What would Amazon Do?
Helping visitors find interesting content online should be no different to helping shoppers find attractive products on Amazon. Yet where media companies have clearly learned from Amazon and other e-tailers in the past – think Most Read, Most Watched, Most Commented widgets – old media’s digital offerings have fallen way behind in terms of innovation.
Launched in 1995, Amazon has not just revolutionised where we shop (web v high-street), but also how we’re sold what we want, and what we didn’t know we want. Newspapers have merely swapped paper for screens, sections for channels and page numbers for links. Nowhere yet has any media company realised we want to consume our news in a new way. And no, I don’t mean bloody video, another old-media hangover caused by number-loving advertisers who fear change because it’s hard to sell on something you don’t understand.
Whether it’s music, movies, websites or articles, people are now used to – and want – recommendations and the ability to use customer feedback to inform their choices.
Click through to a product page on Amazon and you won’t be left stranded there with no option but to go back to the previous page, buy the product, start to search for a new item or just go to a new site.
No, Amazon are cleverer than that, because of one simple understanding: why sell you one thing when they can sell you two, three, or more? Visit Amazon’s page for The Wire season one DVD boxset and you’re told…
- Which other items customers often buy with The Wire season one, plus the option to buy them all together
- What customers ultimately buy after visiting The Wire season one page
- How popular The Wire season one is in the meta and less specific categories (number one in all, obviously)
- What customers also bought when purchasing the boxset
- Customer suggestions from other categories
- The ability to search other products customers have given the same tags they’ve given The Wire, and
- How other customers rate the product.
Quite a comprehensive number of ways for Amazon to encourage you to buy many other related products.
Now compare those options to the ones available on a popular newspaper site and it’s staggering how little editorial producers seem to care about moving you around their site to other content. And, considering that an average of 60% of visitors to newspaper website come directly to article pages from referrals (generally from Google, not that you’d know it right now given the moaning coming from Murdoch et al) it’s essential that newspaper websites get their article pages right before their perfectly packaged homepages.
What if a newspaper site realised Amazon’s techniques can apply to them? What if content was treated like a product that was tagged? What if subject matter was treated like product lines? What if, when I read an article about the new Star Trek movie on a newspaper website it told me that other visitors had gone on to read a review of The Watchmen? I for one would like to know that. What then, if through the tagging system and a decent recommendation engine, a LoveFilm ad could suggest I rent a Star Trek movie, or even all of them together for a discounted price? Or Futurama because there was a Star Trek parody episode and Leonard Nimoy is a regular guest?
Sure, targetted ads aren’t anything new, yet the idea of targetted content based on user behaviour – which would genuinely be useful for visitors, not to mention improving the targetability of ads – is nowhere to be seen.
And how else can you drive readers down the long tail of content?
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