Newsflash: Users are Lazy! Make Them Work at Your Peril

As a big college football fan, I frequently visit Rivals.com to catch up on the latest news or chat with other fans on the message boards. Rivals.com is free for anyone to use (you don’t even have to register), but to chat you need a user account, and to access premium features (like recruiting news) you have to pay an annual fee.

I’m a registered member, but I let my paid subscription lapse a few months back. Last week when I tried to visit the site to read the message boards, I got an annoying jump page from Yahoo – Rival’s new owners. It basically asked me for my password and to accept the new terms and conditions of the site. Without assenting to these two requests, I could not access the site.

So what did I do? Rather than digging through my email accounts to find a password I haven’t needed in a year, I just left. I went to another sports site to get my college football fix.

I’m sure there are good legal reasons for this page, but I’m equally sure that there are good alternatives to forcing users to update their registration and consent information before they can access any part of the site (imagine if Google updated their Ts & Cs and they required every user to click “I agree” before they could do a search on Google).

The result: Yahoo’s lawyers are happy, but Rivals is probably losing users in droves, to the delight of their competitors. Rivals-Yahoo has violated a cardinal rule of Web sites – don’t put anything between a user and your site.

An even better example is Plaxo, the online Rolodex for your connections. A few years ago, Plaxo and LinkedIn were probably pretty even in terms of usage. But Plaxo requires you to download software to participate – and requires your contacts to also download software. All you need to do on LinkedIn is register online.

By forcing users to take the extra step of downloading an application, Plaxo made a big bet: once we get people to download our software, the switching costs are so high that we’ll have them as users for life. LinkedIn took the opposite approach: let’s make it as easy as possible for users to participate, knowing that we are also making it easier for users to switch to another service.

The results have clearly favored LinkedIn. As you can see from Google Trends, Plaxo is on the decline while LinkedIn is on fire. When you create extra work for users, in most cases they’ll just decide that your site is not really worth the effort.

Users are protective of their information and they are equally protective of their time. The moment you interrupt their surfing experience with an unnecessary user registration demand, software downloads, acceptance of Ts & Cs, or behavioral targeting surveys, you are giving consumers a reason to go somewhere else. Don’t let your greed prevent you from being successful.

 

Yahoo is Better than Google at . . . Sports! But Does it Matter?

I was hanging with some fellow Search Marketers this week and they were telling me about Yahoo Fantasy Football. Apparently, for something like $10 a season, you get this wicked-cool amalgamation of stats, reporting, video, etc. If I cared about the NFL, I’d probably buy it, I figured.

What I care about is college football, though, and I do use Yahoo to check on the latest scores and stories. The only other site out there is ESPN.com and frankly I find that site to be too difficult to navigate. As far as I’m concerned, Yahoo Sports is the best.

And kudos to Yahoo for not resting on their laurels. They recently acquired the Rivals Network, a collection of college sports chatboards, and they’ve started to integrated “Yahoo Answers” into the page. No doubt they will also eventually integrate Flickr in here as well, so that we can see a combination of professional and fan-produced pictures of our favorite events. It goes without saying that sports is a huge industry – online and offline – and Yahoo’s strong position in this vertical is something they should be working hard to maintain.

So let’s see – lots of eyeballs, multiple monetization opportunities, Yahoo’s #1 . . . hmm, doesn’t this bring up a particular question . . . where’s Google? We pondered this a bit, and we came up with two good reasons Google has never attempted to get into online sports.

First, Google has mostly stayed away from content sites. Aside from Google News and Google Finance, Google has (so far) resisted the urge to become a portal, at least in the traditional sense. Is this the right decision? Well, I’d say yes and no. I say yes because Google has a bad habit of going in too many directions at once, and trying to create a bunch of topic-specific portal pages would be yet one more direction to go.

On the other hand, whatever Google touches generally turns to gold, many times regardless of whether their offering is even that good. The Google brand is so strong that opening up sports.google.com would immediately grab 20-30% market share, simply because people would assume it would be a better online experience. Just imagine how much money Google could make from a combination of Google AdSense and Google Fantasy Sports. Online sports is big business.

The second reason Google hasn’t created a sports portal is probably the most relevant one. To quote my fellow SEMer, “Dave, they’re nerds. They don’t care about sports.” Sadly, this is probably as good a reason as any. True, Google has a nice fitness center and sand volleyball courts on campus (and people actually use them), but the DNA of Googleplex does not ooze sports.

You could, perhaps, say the same thing about Yahoo for the last 7-8 years – the DNA of Yahoo has been “content” and “community” and not “tech innovation.” Thus, in 2001 as Google was still getting its sea-legs, Yahoo could have developed a better search algorithm, but that’s just not what the company was interested in.

I think it’s inevitable that Google will someday want to grab traffic away from Yahoo’s community portals – sports being one of them. And I think that they’ll be successful, even if Yahoo’s product is superior. For now, however, this is one instance where Yahoo is winning. As someone who bought Yahoo stock instead of Google stock in 2005, and someone who supports a college football team that once had 19 straight losing seasons believe me, every victory counts.