Sorry publishers, but your digital products suck
The vast majority of news sites or apps are filled with flaws that make the experience painful. Many are easy to fix.
I’m spending more than 1500 dollars/euros each year on a bunch of subscriptions for news websites and applications. They include all the usual suspects in English and French, plus some specialized publications covering business and tech. As someone who supports quality journalism, then, allow me to vent some criticisms. Constructive ones, I hope.
I’m not going to name anybody. First, because I know many of the people that are involved in these digital operations; they do their best in an often difficult environment. As I explained in a previous Monday Note (“Managing a News Operation the Netflix Way,” media companies are not run like Netflix, with its strong incentive to innovate, recruit and retain the best talent. They often deal with scarcity and the legacy of the past.
Second, it would be pointless to expose a shortcoming for otherwise offer great editorial content.
Here, then, for my readers with the power to fix them, is a list of bad features that could be easily improved.
Login, identification, and on-boarding procedures
In a typical case, a publication you subscribe to will ask for your login info each time you go to the site. They seem unable to manage a simple ID cookie.
Sometimes, the basic task of maintaining a clean subscriber database seems too much to ask. A famous business publisher has my name registered in two customer bases: it keeps sending me promotions for its print version at my Paris address, ignoring the fact that I’m a long-time digital subscriber. Even worse, the same outlet acknowledges me as a sub for its iPad app, but not for its website!
Recently, I wanted to subscribe to a newsletter from another notorious publisher. The reply was: “Allow us 10 days to process your request”. No! We are in 2021! I should get my newsletter immediately along with a welcoming message and access to past issues… That’s not a luxury. It should be the norm.
As for security… I recently received an email in which my ~€36/month subscription password was displayed openly.
Search engines
I would love to ask a digital manager: do you often use your internal search system? No, you don’t, because it’s a terrible experience. In case you wonder, your own staff and your readers use Google to unearth your stories. In many cases, there are no auto-complete or auto-correct functionalities, no advanced search features, and no search history. And I’m not mentioning the inability to filter a search by the type of article, like profiles of people for instance, or stories of a certain length and depth. If you try to find a great piece in publication XYZ from three months earlier about something that is back in the news, get ready for some digging. These people are unable to value their evergreen production.
This inefficiency continues to recommendation engines: I never met a digital manager who was happy with their own. Best case they do it by hand. Worst case, they hand over the task to Taboola or Outbrain, with mixed results.
No personalization, users are all the same
It seems that every site I go to on a daily basis sees me as a newcomer. It has the same home page, including sections I will never look at. I can’t mute a topic of no interest to me, like sports, real estate, or investment advice. The idea of getting the very same home page and section headers whether I’m a tech guy from France or a retiree from Phoenix is simply appalling. It’s like having always the same home page when you log in on Amazon or YouTube.
Apps poorly implemented
You open your favorite apps, then you board a train, a plane, or go somewhere with no Wi-Fi or cell coverage, hoping to read the six pieces you carefully put aside. Tough luck: your app will try to connect online even if you have opened all the relevant pages. Sometimes, even the stories you put in the “saved” folder can’t be accessed offline.
By the way, forget about data portability: if you suspend or cancel your subscription, the three years worth of articles you put aside are gone forever, you can’t export them to your desktop.
The same goes for sharing: I personally keep sending myself links, graphics, and occasionally full stories to make subjects searchable (in Gmail, an alternative to the on-site search engine). But for many news services, I can only do it when I’m on web pages, but not within the app.
There is no logic to these restrictions. It must come from a marketing egghead that found himself very clever to have devised a system that protects his employer’s content. What does he fear? That I will pump the inventory of articles and spread them via email?
The fact is, many publishers offer a much less free experience online than for the print product. If I pay for a physical subscription to the New Yorker or Harper’s, I will be free to stack up the copies or tear out a few pages. Another example: I can’t share and read an online paper simultaneously with someone even when we sit across the same table, in the same way, we would split a section of the physical copy. That’s absurd. By the way, the French media I’m referring to requires a registered postal letter to unsubscribe — no kidding.
The jittering pages
Among my subscriptions, there is a wealthy publication that should not cut corners on software development. But its apps are so poorly designed that the rendering of the page is not even optimized: scrolling is jumpy, or the pages jitter due to a delay in loading advertising modules. The fact that such a bug went through the most basic quality testing remains a fascination to me.
. . .
Unsurprisingly, these shortcomings are more prevalent in companies where the print culture dominates. When digital is considered somewhat secondary, management is less prone to address problems, while the staff, who draws its prestige by showing up on page A1 or on a magazine spread, doesn’t care very much.
Most publishers or heads of digital operations will dismiss this list of flaws as anecdotal or not meaningful. They are wrong.
One, users’ expectations for digital interfaces are constantly getting higher. They are set by e-commerce companies like Amazon or services such as Google or Uber. Paying customers demand nothing less than the best services they use on a daily basis.
Two, news competes with a deluge of free content, and with a growing number of subscription-based products. Nothing should be spared to fight competition.
By ignoring this, publishers perpetuate the image of a news industry always lagging in the digital world. More importantly, these companies remain certain that they “own” their customers and therefore they should condescend to minimal efforts to retain them. This everlasting sense of entitlement is legacy media’s worst enemy.
They are not making the most of their audience. Instead of trying to maximize their revenue per reader (ARPU) by offering an enjoyable user experience, they maintain a great deal of frustration. In doing so, most of the publishers are engaged in a downward spiral where a poor experience leads to a low retention rate among subscribers. An indicator of desperation is the number of excessive discounted subscription offers that pop up everywhere.
— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com
Next week, back to my series about the New Space (Episode 1 is here). Episode 2: The expanding club of “space nations”.
