Things you can do to make your website unusable

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I’ve got sort a zen thing going with my job. Reading stuff on the Web is simultaneously an important part of getting my work done and a useful way of avoiding getting anything done at all.

This contrast puts me in a reflective mood. It’s a koan, like holding both tea and no tea in the same hand, or looking at the inside of a stone. It’s all very tranquil and helps to balance my harmonic energies, until my editor tells me how many weeks ago he or she expected my latest column . . . and then “poof” goes my hard-earned oneness with the ineffable.

Yes, it is a damned shame and thanks for pointing that out. But please, no sympathy for me; it’s my burden, not yours.

But back to the tawdry subject at hand. Through various subscriptions and aggregators I often follow links to several hundred different articles in a single day. Often, though, I never make it all the way to the actual webpage. It’s not the fault of a server refusing to load a page or a Flash plugin crashing my browser: it’s the way that the website presents the content. When something’s been made too difficult, or I feel like I’m being exploited as a user, or I smell trouble ahead, it triggers my “Do I Care Enough To Actually Go Through All This?” failsafe and before I’ve even really consciously processed the question, I’ve already clicked to the next thing on that long and constantly-expanding list.

Look at some of the ways a website can make sure I won’t get through to its actual content:

It’s a really long article and there’s no way to view it all on just one page.

I’m grateful for a sumptuous, 6,000- to 10,000-word piece. The fact that I’m so engaged with the writing and the topic of this magnum opus causes me to pay my highest online compliment: I click the “Instapaper” button in my browser, so the article automatically saved for offline reading on my iPad or my Kindle.

Instapaper slurps up the page’s text and turns it into an ebook. I don’t have time for a half-hour read right this very minute, but I’ll look forward to immersing myself in it later in the day, over lunch, or during a subway commute.

Splitting a long article across a half-dozen pages often foils services like Instapaper. My morning walk through a hundred different fresh links has to grind to a halt for a half an hour. Abort. I have to read it at my desk instead of in a comfy chair. Abort. I’m still half-focused on a dozen other things I’m supposed to be doing at my desk. Abort! The thing simply doesn’t get read.

There are workarounds to the problem but they aren’t foolproof. And it takes, well, effort. Did I mention that I was only a third of the way through my unread Google Reader subscriptions when I encountered that article, and I haven’t even gotten to the cache of this morning’s comic strips yet?

I don’t resent that a site is trying to maximize the number of ad impressions they get for this huge, expensively-produced article that they’re letting me read for free. But it’s like a library that keeps some of its best books chained to a table where the lighting is awful. There are other books that I can read more comfortably, so: I move on.

Slideshows for collections of things other than fullscreen, beautiful photos.

Now you’re talkin’ true resentment. Let me demonstrate the absurdity of these slideshows: “Frances McDormand, Geoffrey Rush, F. Murray Abraham, Faye Dunaway, Lee Marvin, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Kevin Spacey, Heath Ledger, and Olympia Dukakis.”

See? “10 Oscar-winners who have, at some point, roadied for Whitesnake.” I didn’t even need a whole paragraph for that. So why do so many sites spread the list across ten pages?

Yes, to maximize ad impressions. The moment I recognize that something is a slideshow, I close the window.

I have to click more than once to get to a linked article.

The same feeling of exploitation comes from this kind of flim-flammery, which you often see in “related articles” sidebars. Why, yes, Mr. or Mrs. Website! I would like to read about the German Shepherd who was entered in the 1976 Summer Olympics and was well on his way to winning a silver in the decathalon when he gave the game away by chasing after and then catching his own discus throw! Thank you!

. . . But if that click takes me to another page of Interesting Articles that contains that same link, instead of sending me to the hoped-for video wherein straw-hatted event marshals chase after a dog wearing the national colors of Romania, then damn your eyes: I’m out.

Nearly anything preceded by an unskippable ad.

I resent it. I’ve already invested 30 seconds of my time, and the site’s already won in the sense that the number of people who’ve seen the ad is now (n+1). And I still don’t know if the content is any good or not. It’s another thing that makes me feel like an exploited customer instead of an engaged member of an online community.

A site might get away with this once or twice. But if it happens often enough that I start to associate a certain site with these kinds of ads, I put the domain on a mental blacklist.

I can actually get a little childish about it. Some YouTube channels contain content that I know I’ll enjoy, but there’s a hardwired ad. I always tap the “Mute” button and look away. That way, the evil Green-Eyed Monetization Rabbit can’t get at me.

(I acknowledge it makes no sense. But it makes me feel better. Until Google Ads mandates the use of a Clockwork Orange-style eyeball apparatus, it’s a workable solution to the problem of unskippable ads.)

Unskippable ads are particularly galling when they’re attached to videos. Ads on a 45-minute episode of Conan? That’s fine. A 30-second ad preceding 1 minute and 20 seconds of a kid and his backyard friends learning about the Combustion Triangle the hard way? Seems like a bad trade for the viewer, though admittedly I have it a lot better than poor Jeffy did after he threw that canister of non-dairy creamer in the air.

Pages that generate undismissable JavaScript popup alerts.

Another element always associated with ads (“Are you SURE you don’t want to click on this outstandingly good offer?”). It’s always shady and they used to be confined mostly to the sort of sites that host Home Depot Apron fetish photos. But these browser-level alerts have been appearing on legitimate-ish sites and are damned-near impossible to block.

And sometimes they’re impossible to dismiss without clicking on an actual OS-generated “OK” button. I force-quit my browser every time I see one. Whoever programmed their ad or their site to do something so obnoxious might have also wired the button to do God-knows what else.

It’s another one of those “This is why I never click on links to your site”-type violations.

Sites with great, regularly-updated content that lack an RSS feed.

I just can’t do it. They’re doing everything right and delivering exceptional value for my time and attention, but I just can’t do it: I can’t get myself into the habit of clicking a link manually every day or every week or ever . . . well, ever, really.

It’s not a judgment on their work or even a petulant, childish act. If I can’t subscribe to your site via RSS in an online or desktop news aggregator, I will simply forget that you exist.

How bad is this problem?

I almost never read “Peanuts” any more. It’s my favorite comic strip. It’s one of the greatest strips ever and even the 40-year-old reruns are better than 99% of the new stuff being produced by other artists.

You can get “Peanuts” every day for free on GoComics.com. But the site doesn’t have an RSS feed.

It’s my favorite strip in the world . . . but that doesn’t even matter. I can barely even remember what day of the week I need to drop off my recycling at the depot. What chance do these non-RSS-ified sites have of getting me to remember to visit?

There’s a common thread to all of these complaints: ads. Even the RSS thing. The usual answer I get to the question “Why doesn’t your site have an RSS feed?” is “We’re afraid that if we give people an alternative to viewing our content on our site, we’ll lose all of our ad revenue.”

An RSS feed doesn’t necessarily need to cost a site its revenue. A feed can incorporate ads, and site announcements, and most of the other things that helps a site to make money. Or, the feed can contain just links that take me from Google Reader back to the new content on the original site.

The final argument is that the site can’t make any money from me if I’m not visiting it. And that’s the problem at the heart of all of this.

Here’s another one of those yin yang concepts for you:

I spend my days reading content and I want it all to be free. I also want it to be practically invisible, which means I don’t want any of the ads to be in any way effective. I don’t like it when the site collects and sells info about the sort of things that interest me on the site, even if it’s done unobtrusively and it’s the sort of information that can only tell an advertiser about the site’s overall audience instead of things about me, personally.

At the same time, websites do write me such lovely checks for the things I write. YouTube keeps offering to attach ads to my videos, too. I fill out a form and the firehose of ad money is aimed squarely at my bank account. Supposedly. Even if it’s just enough to cover one burrito a month ... hey, cool, free burrito!

Tea/No Tea.

Content producers will continue to try to find new ways to generate revenue and thus keep the gears that produce new content nicely greased. Some are succeeding handsomely; others are struggling, and often the two are using the same methods. At this stage it looks like everybody’s feeling their way around the margins of paid content and trying to piece together a new revolution.

You can take people’s money at the gate (via subscriptions) or you can take it from advertisers who want these people to see ads, or you can get these people so excited about the stuff you showed them for free that they’re willing to pay you for it in some other form. The only thing anyone knows for sure is that in the long run, you can’t make money producing good, original content if you’re chasing people away to begin with.