When did the web get so…boring?
I love an ‘online experience’. I’m always a little bit excited when I arrive at a website and it tells me it’s ‘Best experienced with headphones’ and I have to sit and watch a loading bar. That means someone’s put some effort into it — worth the viewer turning the lights off and hitting F11.
The wild west web of the late 90s and the early 00s was full of these experimental, exploratory, sensory experiences.
So where did they go?
I mean, okay, okay, the FWA is still trying to showcase web experiences.
On there, today, I can see that Dime’s new album’s interactive experience, https://dimetrap.com/. But it’s just a bit of point and clicking.
Or Puma’s RS-0 game https://www.rs0playthegame.com/ (which is, disappointingly, basically the same as Google’s dinosaur game).
And alright, alright. I’ll confess. Google DO play. Chrome experiments are generally kooky and fun, but they’re generally not really telling stories.
And the Daydream stuff is great. But these are basically ‘games’ and VR experiences.
But it seems that the days of Hi Res’s Donnie Darko classic or Dorito’s Hotel 626 (the scariest horror game you’ll never play). You can Google them, but you’ll need Flash if you want to play them.
So, where did all that good stuff go?
Was it the emergence of YouTube? Did we swap interactive for vloggers? Or the whole of social media. The walled garden of Facebook offering limited interactive opportunities. Maybe it was just the maturing of the web. Bespoke creations giving way to content management systems and the focus then being on the content.
Maybe consoles are so great that who wants to go online for a second-rate web experience when you could be playing Red Dead II? Or mobile apps mean that we’re not even on a desktop machine, so why bother with a web experience when you can use an app.
Perhaps it’s Google who’s to blame. A static, bespoke website fading into obscurity because of its lack of search-engine-optimisability.
Was it the death of Flash!? When we fell out of love with a web format that offered rich interactivity, did we kill it?
Perhaps it’s cost vs reach. It’s quite difficult to get people to a web experience. And then more difficult to persuade them to experience it. Well, difficult compared to sticking a banner ad in front of them and racking up reach KPIs.
Or it could be the old marketing cycle. Perhaps a great web experience is something that will pay dividends over a three-year life cycle and it finds itself difficult to fit in with the quick win year on year life cycles of most marketing budgets.
I’m sure, it must be a little bit of all of those reasons. But I think we’ve lost something. A unique, accessible format for storytelling.
Perhaps it’s time for our social media platforms to open up their formats a little and help brands, storytellers and individuals experiment with those possibilities again?