I normally read all my blogs with a RSS reader, however, today I went to go look at blog entries on Fast Company Now as I have been very briefly reading them over the past few weeks and wanted to catch up. Let me say that I am a big fan of the content that Heath Row and other provide on the Fast Company blog, but I was dismayed when I went to the site to see the middle of the page taken up by a large advertisement and no normal blog entry page. Even after reloading the page several times, the ad did not disappear, so I clicked on the ad thinking that it would then allow me to the main blog page; it did not. Recent entries to the blog were available to the left of the ad, but that it is terribly inefficient to read a blog entry-by-entry rather than having the opportunity to peruse posts and drill down deeper by clicking on those that interest me.
I am a very big fan of getting people to read blogs via RSS. However, I certainly would not replace the main page of this blog with a large advertisement and only allow you to read my posts by clicking through the recent entries. There are 200-300 people that read my blog daily by visiting the site directly (I still can't track RSS readers) and I don't feel that I could, in good conscience, attempt to profit from those of you that opt into viewing my blog via a web interface.
On consulting projects I have learned that the primary driver of magazine revenues is their advertising, and the Fast Company blog is certainly a component of the Fast Company magazine. That said, I'm sure that there are thousands of people that choose to view the Fast Company blog via a web interface and it seems somewhat counterintuitive to drive advertising revenues by effectively punishing the people that don't use RSS by forcing them to view advertising every time they land on the main page.
Perhaps this is a programmatical mistake and I just caught the site in the middle of some sort of error or programming transition; I would like to think that I did.
Just my $.02.
2 comments:
I just checked, and I don't see any problem. There are some ads along the right side, but the blog entries seem to be "normal."
BTW, thanks for the good stuff you put up!
Because of a corrupted database and an over-full Web server, our Web site was down for awhile last week. While we were able to put up a placeholding home page quickly, it took awhile longer to debug the blog errors. Add to that Moveable Type's settings, in which we display the last 3-5 days of entries or so, and you came to a page that had no entries posted to it given the mishap. Everything should be sorted by now. We certainly didn't intend to replace the blog with an ad -- horrors! Thanks for reading FC Now.
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