Visual Discovery
notes on publishing content in Indonesia
The first reason to choose Medium was simplicity. I like things simple and easy to manage. Blogspot was good for a while, I use it since before they’re Google’s but it’s simply getting old.
Twitter was also once great but now it sucks. I liked it too in the beginning because Twitter was simple. 140 Characters and no more.
Neither was designed for visual content and nowadays both make simple things feel stupid. Twitter for one, was beautiful because it strictly deals with text. You never had to worry about pictures.
Then came pictures to the timeline and now also people tagging. I figure it’s time to quit. That was the reason why I left Facebook.
Blogger was for writing and continue to behave like one. Which is usually fine if you only want to go only writing and maybe do a few bit more of tinkering but generally, they suck at making things look good.
Commercial web sites, in Indonesia particularly, they don’t even try to look good. All the major sites have a jungle for navigation, primitive discovery methods and and most elementary automation (That often feels more like duplication).
In the Indonesian domestic internet scene — ‘Rapid growth’ usually refers to outdated SEO/SEM tricks. ‘Scaling up’ means introducing complicated domain and sub domain structure for traffic partitioning, which didn’t really work (will explain why later).
The end result looks simply awful, monstrously taxing in resources and naturally priced for peanuts.
It’s not like they don’t know this either. Media conglomerates who own these properties regularly introduce “New Front Page” in the biannual conferences and claim it New Innovation.
I’m not entirely sure where the idea came from but surely people from the print industry should understand that you don’t alter your magazine cover every year?
It should be obvious: you don’t want your product to be lost in the mix with competition. It requires a commitment to the creative process for brand building, dogged consistency and persistent relationship with the readership. Magazine people used to understand this very well. They should be doing this better online, not worse.
The other part of it is much to do with technology. Publishers need to build and develop their advertising capabilities, audience engagement measures and monetization models. This is where things get murky.
The top Indonesian #5 sites all command north of 1 billion in total inventory each. More than 70 million Indonesian people are already online. So presumably, the “scaling up” — at least in market terms, is there already? Likely so, but maybe slightly different to what you think.
You see, the practice of splitting traffic across domains and sub properties work only if you have a fresh audience acquisition strategy — to gain new readership, — and a content discovery strategy so you can direct and target those audience. The industrious process of flooding the interweb with repeated low quality crap from high school bloggers doesn’t count much to expand your reach.
So while your web site might look all mighty with all the tons of millions of inventory, it matters very much when you can only sell them as blind inventory and getting rock bottom floor price advertising value from it.
For smaller websites, well, there are a lot you can do to fix the damage, prepare for mobile shift and get competitive against the larger players. If I am correct — and history in every other developed Internet market shows — just such price dynamics will tend to be disruptive (and destructive) on the larger players and will give competitive advantage to the smaller ones to take the lead. They will need better technology, better people, better cost structure to reflect the different market and get really competitive.
Someone, will eventually get it right.
So yes. From now on, I’ll be writing on Medium. The other sites will stay where they are for a while. It’s just that much beter for writing and posting stuff (and playing with pictures).
disclaimer: I work with a number of publishers in the country and they all have their sites and their people. What I write on my own page is my own personal view and does not reflect on any one organization.
