6 ms·

The death of the homepage

45 points by Isofarro 12y ago

bobfunk 12y ago
Seems this homepage died at least...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jonalmeida 12y ago
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yZWURXyIeIUJ:martinbelam.com/2014/the-death-of-the-homepage-in-one-simple-graph/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yZWURXy...
lmg643 12y ago
The homepage isn't dead exactly - just have different requirements. Drudge Report is a big driver and example of this. Arts and Letters Daily is a highbrow example. Basically, there is still demand for a curated home page, just with a lot less fluff. The other day, I was looking at the WSJ website and wishing they would just put all the content on one page so I could scan it more easily. I want to see everything they have to offer as easily as possible. Bloomberg.com is moving in this direction - about time for the others. As for handwringing about the content of page one at the NYT - the physical edition of the paper is going to continue to decline in importance until it's gone, so they would be right to stop worrying about it so much. Give readers a page of consolidated links to all current articles - they're likely to browse.
- marincounty 12y ago
  Yea--I feel the pendulum has swung too far. I like a home page with a lot of stories, and links. Actually, I wanted a old fashioned front page with links to the papers I read, so I put up newsranch.mine. It's a terrible website--doesen't work on mobile devises, and has a bunch of dead links, but it's my homepage. Please, don't go to it and tell me how bad it is; I don't care. I'm it's only visitor. One day I will clean it up, and fix the dead links. My point is I don't like homepages with just a few headlines, or links. I'm really surprised Google didn't do a better job with their news site. I really want to like it. I just figured they would do a stellar job, considering the talent they have.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  But half the point of newspaper lead journalism is curation. What is supposed to be most important right now. I don't have time to scan every news feed and assess the relative importance, and despite pg's best efforts crowd sourcing the results also is not good enough. So far the only way that works even vaguely well is to take intelligent young people and pass them around the world, seeing the best and worst of humanity and writing about it each day. After 30 years they get pretty good at sifting the important stuff. We then make them editors. There may be a better way. Maybe an algorithm. But I would like to take a generation of two of parallel running just to be on the safe side.
  - dreamfactory2 12y ago
    The way to do it is to combine manually-selected articles and auto generated (dynamically based on things like topic, date, time of day, popularity, visitor's locale, visitor's behaviour, visitor's preferences, commercial promotions, segment etc etc).
    - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
      really - that sounds like a recipie for self-fulfilling prophecies and an ever shrinking bubble of my initial interests.
      - dreamfactory2 12y ago
        Manually selected by editorial staff aka curation. This mix of manual and auto with high granularity of content reuse is what all the big publishers either do or want to as it drives up pages per visit (ad impressions, measure of engagement).
Theodores 12y ago
I think you have over-evangelised this blog spam from buzz feed. I think the NYT situation is a million miles away from your conclusion that the homepage is dead, far from it. Walk into any British office at lunchtime and, on people's screens, you will see the BBC news homepage (but never the BBC homepage), the Daily Mail homepage and The Guardian homepage. People go to those places to read the news. They might go onto Facebook, HN or a myriad of other places later. However, outside of the offices of Trinity Mirror, nobody goes to the home page of The Mirror or this abomination 'ampped' that you have blog-spammed here. As a small child I was appalled at the standard of the content in the tabloid newspapers (I could read the short articles in the Guardian at quite a young age). It seemed the reading age was below my own. It was and, although initially unimpressed, over the years I have been able to better appreciate their craft (particularly if the story is an exciting human interest one e.g. the downfall of yet another child molesting BBC personality). Much like how you can respect a casino for the work they put in to make sure all their customers spend as much as possible, morals and ethics can be put aside and respect for the craft seen for what it is with British tabloid journalism. Done well, there is an art to it. You might not have page 3 girls in this new 'ampputated' effort (I forget the name), however, it is the worst abomination ever in the history of British journalism. It isn't even journalism or what you might call news. It is a Wordpress blog light on content with a pastiche version of the Metro/classic tabloid print presentation. Content is king, journalism still rules. Get it right - BBC, Guardian, Daily Mail, (The Telegraph to a lesser extent) - and people flock in droves. They fire up the homepage out of choice. It is where they go for news. The also-ran, dead-zombie British press is: the rubbish from Murdoch, the trash churned out by the idiots that work for that porn baron who happens to own the Express, that me-too rubbish from Trinity Mirror and whatever The Independent is these days. All of it rubbish. Nobody thinks 'I must see what news the Mirror is reporting', do they? Or if they do, do they then hop on over to 'myspace'? Or 'Friends Reunited'? I am sure you have figures showing how many trillions of people read the Mirror online, but the myspace people could probably show you similar numbers proving they are bigger than Pinterest. On to the NYT. The NYT is one of those bits of internet furniture like Wired, Buzzfeed or countless other places where the homepage is no longer a destination. They have got the secret sauce wrong and people prefer somewhere else to go to for their news. However, they do have plenty of readers who do find the quality beyond the homepage and those people do post whatever it is that they find to plenty of other places. If you follow HN you find yourself reading articles in Forbes, Wired, the NYT all the time. But you never think to start your leisure browsing at those places. It just does not happen.
gone35 12y ago
The post is confusing and buries the lead (which is surprising coming from an editor), but I think what he is trying to say --despite the linkbaity title-- is precisely the opposite: that the homepage is not dead in the panicky sense of the general reaction to the leaked NYT report. Instead he seems to put forth a more nuanced claim about declining readership as a proportion of total viewer referrals, while explicitly acknowledging the legitimate editorial and branding role of the home page. I had to read until the very end though, so it's easy to miss. Here are the key excerpts: "I don't think that New York Times graph says what everybody thinks it says. (...) What we've been saying for years is that homepage traffic is going down as a proportion of your overall traffic. We started in a world where people navigated to a homepage (...) and then clicked links and found stories. Then we moved to an SEO-driven world where traffic started coming through the side-door via search. Now (...) Facebook and Twitter is a massive traffic driver. All these developments should have been pushing down the proportion of your users who ever visit the homepage. (...) You should be treating every article on your news site as a homepage. And homepages are still important as a brand statement –-you are visiting our site and this is what we have decided is important today. There's definitely still a place for that. Sadly it seems to me, it looks like this leaked graph is going to be taken for evidence that 'the homepage is dead' –-but for all the wrong reasons."

45 points by Isofarro 12y ago

bobfunk 12y ago

Seems this homepage died at least...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jonalmeida 12y ago

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yZWURXyIeIUJ:martinbelam.com/2014/the-death-of-the-homepage-in-one-simple-graph/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yZWURXy...

lmg643 12y ago

The homepage isn't dead exactly - just have different requirements. Drudge Report is a big driver and example of this. Arts and Letters Daily is a highbrow example. Basically, there is still demand for a curated home page, just with a lot less fluff. The other day, I was looking at the WSJ website and wishing they would just put all the content on one page so I could scan it more easily. I want to see everything they have to offer as easily as possible. Bloomberg.com is moving in this direction - about time for the others. As for handwringing about the content of page one at the NYT - the physical edition of the paper is going to continue to decline in importance until it's gone, so they would be right to stop worrying about it so much. Give readers a page of consolidated links to all current articles - they're likely to browse.

marincounty 12y ago
Yea--I feel the pendulum has swung too far. I like a home page with a lot of stories, and links. Actually, I wanted a old fashioned front page with links to the papers I read, so I put up newsranch.mine. It's a terrible website--doesen't work on mobile devises, and has a bunch of dead links, but it's my homepage. Please, don't go to it and tell me how bad it is; I don't care. I'm it's only visitor. One day I will clean it up, and fix the dead links. My point is I don't like homepages with just a few headlines, or links. I'm really surprised Google didn't do a better job with their news site. I really want to like it. I just figured they would do a stellar job, considering the talent they have.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
But half the point of newspaper lead journalism is curation. What is supposed to be most important right now. I don't have time to scan every news feed and assess the relative importance, and despite pg's best efforts crowd sourcing the results also is not good enough. So far the only way that works even vaguely well is to take intelligent young people and pass them around the world, seeing the best and worst of humanity and writing about it each day. After 30 years they get pretty good at sifting the important stuff. We then make them editors. There may be a better way. Maybe an algorithm. But I would like to take a generation of two of parallel running just to be on the safe side.
- dreamfactory2 12y ago
  The way to do it is to combine manually-selected articles and auto generated (dynamically based on things like topic, date, time of day, popularity, visitor's locale, visitor's behaviour, visitor's preferences, commercial promotions, segment etc etc).
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    really - that sounds like a recipie for self-fulfilling prophecies and an ever shrinking bubble of my initial interests.
    - dreamfactory2 12y ago
      Manually selected by editorial staff aka curation. This mix of manual and auto with high granularity of content reuse is what all the big publishers either do or want to as it drives up pages per visit (ad impressions, measure of engagement).

Theodores 12y ago

I think you have over-evangelised this blog spam from buzz feed. I think the NYT situation is a million miles away from your conclusion that the homepage is dead, far from it. Walk into any British office at lunchtime and, on people's screens, you will see the BBC news homepage (but never the BBC homepage), the Daily Mail homepage and The Guardian homepage. People go to those places to read the news. They might go onto Facebook, HN or a myriad of other places later. However, outside of the offices of Trinity Mirror, nobody goes to the home page of The Mirror or this abomination 'ampped' that you have blog-spammed here. As a small child I was appalled at the standard of the content in the tabloid newspapers (I could read the short articles in the Guardian at quite a young age). It seemed the reading age was below my own. It was and, although initially unimpressed, over the years I have been able to better appreciate their craft (particularly if the story is an exciting human interest one e.g. the downfall of yet another child molesting BBC personality). Much like how you can respect a casino for the work they put in to make sure all their customers spend as much as possible, morals and ethics can be put aside and respect for the craft seen for what it is with British tabloid journalism. Done well, there is an art to it. You might not have page 3 girls in this new 'ampputated' effort (I forget the name), however, it is the worst abomination ever in the history of British journalism. It isn't even journalism or what you might call news. It is a Wordpress blog light on content with a pastiche version of the Metro/classic tabloid print presentation. Content is king, journalism still rules. Get it right - BBC, Guardian, Daily Mail, (The Telegraph to a lesser extent) - and people flock in droves. They fire up the homepage out of choice. It is where they go for news. The also-ran, dead-zombie British press is: the rubbish from Murdoch, the trash churned out by the idiots that work for that porn baron who happens to own the Express, that me-too rubbish from Trinity Mirror and whatever The Independent is these days. All of it rubbish. Nobody thinks 'I must see what news the Mirror is reporting', do they? Or if they do, do they then hop on over to 'myspace'? Or 'Friends Reunited'? I am sure you have figures showing how many trillions of people read the Mirror online, but the myspace people could probably show you similar numbers proving they are bigger than Pinterest. On to the NYT. The NYT is one of those bits of internet furniture like Wired, Buzzfeed or countless other places where the homepage is no longer a destination. They have got the secret sauce wrong and people prefer somewhere else to go to for their news. However, they do have plenty of readers who do find the quality beyond the homepage and those people do post whatever it is that they find to plenty of other places. If you follow HN you find yourself reading articles in Forbes, Wired, the NYT all the time. But you never think to start your leisure browsing at those places. It just does not happen.

gone35 12y ago

The post is confusing and buries the lead (which is surprising coming from an editor), but I think what he is trying to say --despite the linkbaity title-- is precisely the opposite: that the homepage is not dead in the panicky sense of the general reaction to the leaked NYT report. Instead he seems to put forth a more nuanced claim about declining readership as a proportion of total viewer referrals, while explicitly acknowledging the legitimate editorial and branding role of the home page. I had to read until the very end though, so it's easy to miss. Here are the key excerpts: "I don't think that New York Times graph says what everybody thinks it says. (...) What we've been saying for years is that homepage traffic is going down as a proportion of your overall traffic. We started in a world where people navigated to a homepage (...) and then clicked links and found stories. Then we moved to an SEO-driven world where traffic started coming through the side-door via search. Now (...) Facebook and Twitter is a massive traffic driver. All these developments should have been pushing down the proportion of your users who ever visit the homepage. (...) You should be treating every article on your news site as a homepage. And homepages are still important as a brand statement –-you are visiting our site and this is what we have decided is important today. There's definitely still a place for that. Sadly it seems to me, it looks like this leaked graph is going to be taken for evidence that 'the homepage is dead' –-but for all the wrong reasons."