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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.
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 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 /. ?
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.
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.
I think it is more along the idea of with out the tragic hipster culture. The Verge and Gizmodo are too involved with the lifestyle side of tech. For example when I listen to the podcast "It's a thing" I keep hearing about idiots dressing up like captain Nemo and talking about artisanal hardware. Where I live you just do not see fixie bikes and $300 backpacks. The Verge podcasts is full of never ending negative comments about "Red States" much the same as you hear in the comments on Slashdot.
So yes I can see the value of a tech site that does not live in the Hipster culture bubble.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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.
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"
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
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.