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David Pogue and Yahoo's "Normals" Problem
Nerval's Lobster writes "In a keynote talk at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, David Pogue (Yahoo's freshly minted technology columnist) suggested that the new 'Yahoo Tech' Website — a key part of the company's latest rebranding — would be targeted at 'normal' people as opposed to 'gearheads.' Based on a map that flashed on the giant screen behind him, which showed the 'normals' clustered in the middle of the country and the 'gearheads' restricted to the coasts, it's clear that Yahoo has embraced a divisive strategy that tries to equate Yahoo's brands with some sort of mythical 'middlebrow' audience that exists within clearly defined borders. (During his presentation, Pogue also flashed a slide that made fun of competing tech-news brands: The Verge was rendered as 'The Urge,' for example, while Gizmodo became 'Gizmoody.') The problem is that rigid audience of 'normals' doesn't exist, at least not in the way that Yahoo envisions. Large numbers of well-educated technology consumers — 'gearheads,' in Pogue's parlance — exist all over the country; to say otherwise is like suggesting that Wyoming is 100 percent Republican, or that everybody who lives in Florida hates snow. In other words, Yahoo's approach to tech content isn't merely schismatic; it's willfully unaware of the variety that exists among technology fans."
Anything but douchery from David Pogue?
Nerd website complains that new nerd section in other website isn't nerdy enough. News at 11.
One thing that has really stood out for me in the last 5 or 6 years is just how conservative their readers tend to skew. It's where the Fox News crowd goes. Just read the comments section of any random news story and you'll see what I mean.
The big question here is: Are the people of Louisiana finally as important to us as the bees?
I actually got mad while following live tweets of Pogue's talk. But then I thought, "Well, this is going to fail in few months anyway," so then I felt better.
...Yahoo Messenger for me. That's all. I already have friends moving out of Y!M towards Google Talk (which I loathe) but most of them are still there.
Apart from that, Yahoo! means nothing to me, not anymore.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Believe it or not, those flyover states have more intelligent technical people in them than you have in your company.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Yahoo Tech is going the route of site dilution, in which each site eventually dumbs down to something in between Gawker, Huff Post, and Fox News. The sites post the same inane, inaccurate stories, such as "supervolcanoes imminent". Uh oh... wasn't that on /. ?
Overlay the map with last election results and it appears that he thinks that Republicans are now normal, while Democrats are "gearheads", which may or may not be an insult :)
I find Pogue's theory's about the demography of normals a bit suspect, but conceptually its not crazy. Every business should know who their customers are and beyond that know who their good customers are (IE the ones that make them rather than cost them money).
In the case of Yahoo though a couple things come to mind:
Gear Heads are your customers customers in many cases. There seems to be two types of product pushed in online ads, scammy stuff sold to idots and highend ( or at least high margin ) stuff sold to various types of gearhead/*-ophile,foodie,junkie types. If you as Yahoo don't bring these eyeballs not sure why your actually customers (advertisers) would bother with you. I don't P&G pushing toilet-trees online a whole lot, and its things like toothpaste, frozen pizzas, and lawn fertilizer the "normals" spend their money on.
Lots of people like the think they are "gearheads" they think they want to feel like they are experts at their hobbies and such feel like they are dealing with fancy things. I am not sure deliberately not projecting an image of "elite" is really going to put people in a buying mood, again something advertizes won't love.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Serious question: Do people who do not care about tech care enough to read about it, even if it is targeted at them?
As I suspect are most people.
I'm a gearhead when considering electronic test equipment.
I'm more of a prosumer for commodity computer hardware.
I'm pretty normal for tablet use - I haven't even rooted my nexus 7.
I'm well below normal about how much I care about cars and TVs.
The notion that people care equally much about all aspects of a wide field 'tech' is barking mad.
"The problem is that rigid audience of 'normals' doesn't exist, at least not in the way that Yahoo envisions. Large numbers of well-educated technology consumers — 'gearheads,' in Pogue's parlance — exist all over the country; to say otherwise is like suggesting that Wyoming is 100 percent Republican, or that everybody who lives in Florida hates snow. In other words, Yahoo's approach to tech content isn't merely schismatic; it's willfully unaware of the variety that exists among technology fans."
Did they also announce that their "normals" site would be available in only red states? Oh, no? Content on the Internet is available uniquely and specifically to each person who requests it? So there is no reason why a conclusion like "there are a lot of normal people out there, therefore we should write in a way that appeals to them" should stand out as odd? Ah, I see, you were trying to be just as big of a divisive dickface as Pogue was. Nice.
So, they're trying to put together a tech site that isn't tech? Isn't that just, like, a site?
He achieved his goal by making you talk about his company. Free ads.
Controversy doesn't always sell, but that's the first time in weeks that anyone has talked about yahoo.
Just FYI, "Nerval's Lobster" is not a real user.
Slashdot uses that account to post articles on their branded content sites (Slashdot Cloud, Slashdot BI, etc.).
If you go to the userpage, you will find only submissions to slashdot.org/topic/*, and no comments.
In other words, they are trying to trick us.
Normal people don't care about technology. That's why his "gearhead" labels work.
That whole idea would immedeatly sound silly if you used another subject: What about "Yahoo Sports!" but not geared towards "jocks" but "normals"?
bickerdyke
Companies should be allowed to run risky/bad campaigns -- it's costly for them, but it's a free experimental unit for everyone else. Including the consumer.
Yahoo is launching a "tech" section? How cute.
Am I the the last person in the world who uses RSS readers to browse news sites for stories that I actually want to read? After all, 90% of everything is crap and I'm looking for efficient ways to find the 10%.
The visual clutter on that site is appalling, I thought Pogue had more taste than that.
That's one of the most losing business strategies I've ever heard.
But it's not alone. There's a lot of failed businesses that at some point when down the lunatic path of "But just imagine if the huge majority of people who don't have any use for service X were converted to using service X! We'd be rich!"
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
How is this a "rebrand". I'm one of those techie people, and Yahoo! isn't my go-to for... anything, as I suspect it already isn't for most other techie people.
So, Yahoo probably doesn't give a damn if it has the 100% solution. It's about getting more eyeballs to their site, not about getting all of them. There are certainly more "normals" than "gearheads", so for Yahoo, this looks like an improvement. On the other hand, those of us on /. probably won't visit them much.
Just another day in Paradise
In my younger years when I had more free time and disposable income, I invested in high-end audio gear. Now that I have kids in university and have nerve damage in my left audio nerve, my music system is much more modest.
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
No.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
And it actually is pretty slick. I can already tell that I'll be keeping that app around long term within my "News" group of apps.
It would be nice if they actually did cater to "normals." I keep having to help "normal" people navigate their shitty new interface.
I don't know, I think he might be on to something, but the red state/blue state map doesn't make any real world sense. Part of it seems like the typical NYC/California hipster bubble ignoring the rest of the country but the idea might be right.
Don't forget that in the 70s/80s, only real gearheads/nerds were doing anything with computers. This changed in the 90s with the Internet, and changed even more with smartphones in the 2000s. Now, the camps skew a little differently:
- True gearheads who want to know every little scrap of technical information about a technology product -- increasingly small percentage
- "Prosumer" users who like nice tech toys but aren't obsessed with the "how they work" part -- Small pecentage, but more than gearheads
- "Normals" who use technology on a daily basis and care even less about how it works -- Basically, the same surface area on that map redistributed across the continent
Part of the reason Apple is so successful is because the iPhone interface is accessible to normals. Everything complex about it is hidden. Android does this to an extent, and different phone/tablet manufacturers abstract the complexity even more. Any normal can pick up an iPhone, use the Facebook app, SMS, tweet, send old fashioned emails, etc. with a very low learning curve.
It sounds like Yahoo wants to be the 2010s version of AOL -- universally accessible content at the risk of alienating the gearheads, who don't read Yahoo for tech news anyway.
I'd visit that.
Why would I bother with another tech site?
99% of black voters voted for Obama.
Actually, I would argue the opposite. It's got nothing to do with the politics of their userbase, it's got to do with the UX expectations of their userbase.
"Gearheads" dislike the Yahoo approach of, well, slathering crap all over everything. You can use AJAX to make web sites better, but if you look at what Yahoo's done, it's the opposite: Flickr used to be functional. Now it's a infinite-scrolling, unsearchable, un-metadata-usable, load of crap.
"Normals", however, have an even bigger problem. Your stereotypical non-techie probably runs IE6/IE8 and misses AOL. Explain to me, Yahoo boffins, how AJAXifying Yahoo Mail Classic (which was antiquated, but functional, and worked fine even with Javascript disabled) is going to help this user?
The problem is exacerbated when you try to use something like the Yahoo Finance message boards, currently undergoing their second major redesign, reveals similar usability issues: users with older systems, non-current browsers, being left in the dust. Even with newer systems and current browsers, it's crap: the "ignore" (to ignore spammers and trolls, because Yahoo can't be bothered to hire an abuse department to police its message boards) function merely greys out the posting. A quick spam report now takes multiple mouse clicks, over a series of fields that glide up and down, making you wait for the UI to move the field into view before being able to click on the moving-target text, etc.
The "normal" user doesn't want change. Yet Yahoo's entire business strategy appears to be aimed at coming up with change-for-change-sake (perhaps the goal was an attempt to retain its few remaining technical employees?) that makes the product less usable for gearheads, and utterly baffles the normals.
Dafuq, Yahoo? It's not like you ever used to be cool, but you've gone out of your way to alienate both techies and non-techies alike.
Yahoo actually thinks it is "targeted" at "gear heads"? ROTFL
I know some very technical people who have worked AT yahoo. I don't know a single one that actually uses yahoo services (except occasionally for anonymous email accounts) or takes yahoo seriously in any way.
Yahoo is already, and has been for some time, the default home page of non-technical people above the age of 50. If they are looking for a problem with their targeting it is right there in the fact that they don't realize this....this is already their audience.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
My mom - who used to be a member of the local green party, and definitely on the low end of the income scale - ended up watching a bit of fox news with her boyfriend over the years. It was shocking how much she would complain about Obama and various liberal policies after a few years of propaganda.
I was a Pogue fan for about 5 minutes. Then I read his column. And saw him on NOVA. Ugh. He has a face for IRC and a style for grade school. Which apparently go well together.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Sounds like they are positioning themselves to be the next AOL.
Believe it or not, that map has more intelligent flyover states in it than you have intelligent technical people in your company.
Fixed that for you
It's a potentially politically-divisive map from what should be a non-political company. Focus on the US portion for a minute:
1. He shows the "gearheads" on both coasts in blue, and the "normals" in-between in red. Very much like a current political map of the US, where the majority of the center is red (Republican) and the coasts are largely blue (Democrat). As RLM puts it: maybe you didn't notice, but your brain did. I really don't think the red/blue choice was an accident. A lot of Yahoo management eyeballs would have seen it, thought about it, and approved it.
2. The map equates the positive term "normal" with red [heartland, Republicans] and the negative term "gearheads" with blue [coastal, Democrats].
3. The map shows a larger proportion of red areas than blue areas, suggesting that the US is far more "normal" than "gearhead". If it were really meant to show "normal" vs "gearhead" then it's obviously absurd: what about Chicago, Austin, DC, and other major tech centers? But it's certainly appealing for a Republican to look at a US map and see far more red than blue.
All of which seems designed to position Yahoo as a politically-conservative portal, meant to appeal to people that would prefer to avoid supposedly-liberal web sites like Google. Look at this article to see what I mean:
http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/04/the-conservative-alternative-to-the-liberal-google/
Ok, maybe I'm reading more into that map than I should, but they certainly opened the door for speculation. :-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
> It was shocking how much she would complain about Obama and various liberal policies after a few years of propaganda.
Pot kettle black. I love how FNC is propaganda and MSNBC/Huff Po/Move On are hard news.
Even after re-branding they still come off as a company that just doesn't get it. S.O.Y. = Same Old Yahoo
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
I stopped going to Yahoo ever since they went away from a clean, readable format to their flashy new designs that are far less friendly. Everything is aligned left and leaves half the real estate on my screen blank.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
A Yahoo is a legendary being in the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.
Swift describes them as being filthy and with unpleasant habits...the term "yahoo" has come to mean "a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person".
David Pogue is the perfect yahoo. He'll fit right in at Yahoo. Like them, he's constantly pulling stunts that he - and only he - finds amusing. Whether this is pure self-indulgence or just some sort of bewildered misconception of what he thinks the public wants is unclear, but it shows no sign of abating. And even when he comes up with some potentially interesting content, such as his recent NOVA segments, he manages to annoy and alienate the public to the point of making them switch to another channel. Just like Yahoo.
I don't understand why everyone thinks that people who create content should all be volunteers who don't get paid for their work.
It's funny but is it going to get them off of thier tractors?
-Gammabot
I think that pretty much sums up the situation.
Once thing that has stood out for me, is how many people confuse conservatives with Republican(TM)s. Fox News is Republican(TM), not conservative.
Conservative: "Central government should be relatively small and weak compared to what we have right now, with as many powers and responsibilities born by the individual states as is reasonably expedient."
Republicans: "Every single scientist is a liar, and they and everyone who listen to them, are going to go to Hell, as spake the One True God. Oh, and also, what that conservative guy said. Except when he said to end the federal drug war, or when he said that we need to protect and first and third through tenth amendments. Fuck that, though I do happen to agree with him on the second amendment, so at least that conservative guy isn't all bad.."
See the difference?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
This is about the stupidest strategy I can imagine. Ignore the high-earning techies and market yourself to "normal", presumably lower earning people?
If I was a stock holder for Yahoo, I'd be dumping it big time now.
Yahoo is still going and people still use it? Pogue is good for kids but, yes a douche for anyone past 15. The New York Times is an overrated and oft discredited rag. It just happens to be maybe the best of a very, very bad lot. And that was his last gig. His opinion does not matter. Next.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I always preferred Andy Ihnatko and Don Crabb to Pogue.
You've just stated your opinion just as those 'extreme' folks you opined about are doing. Simply making sure that your opinions fall more so in the middle (milktoast) than these other groups you've mentioned makes them no might valid. There are all sorts of people in the world with all sorts of opinions, ilk and such. Fine by me. Makes life interesting. Now, get back to being boring.
There are two rules that remain constant in society, and they are not death and taxes (*):
1) Those with power make the rules.
2) If the rules are too oppressive revolution happens, and a new small group takes the power.
Communism happened to a country that thought rule #1 did no longer apply; those with power took advantage of that ideology to their benefit. By the current state of affairs, it looks like the current elite that rules the world has forgot about rule #2, or they think that it no longer applies - all with their declarations about the end of history; or that there was a war between the wealthy and the poor, and the wealthy have won.
There used to be a rule #3 about foreigners invading the country and making society collapse, and totalitarian regimes using that fear to make their ruling more stable, but the world is too interconnected for it to apply nowadays. They are trying to replace that role with terrorists and pedophiles, but I doubt this is a stable strategy, as those don't have any real power to effectively make society fall down.
(*) The constants of life are actually three: death, taxes, and the bankers always win.
Ploop Ploop Ploop goes the poop
I don't think "gearheads" were even aware Yahoo had been trying to appeal to them.
The problem I have with Yahoo news is that the headlines are misleading. You get excited for a story, but it's junk. CNN is becoming that way. Google News is better as of today. But I guess no one pays for good content, so this is the best we can do.
Yahoo Tech: The Jay Leno of Tech Sites
I think you mean "A few years of Obama as president".
Well, good. If This is the strategy Yahoo! will use, and it is wrong, that should hurt their business in some way. It would be their own fault for not being critical of the pronouncements of one of their people.
In their stumble to differentiate themselves in marketing imagery, they should pay to get it wrong, if it is wrong.