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."

Comments

Lol.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerd website complains that new nerd section in other website isn't nerdy enough. News at 11.

Just catering to their demographics

[asmkm22]

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.

Re:Just catering to their demographics

[LWATCDR]

Actually the amount of vile idiots in the comments of the mainstream news sites is about the same. 95% CNN, MSNBC, and FOX comments are total dung heaps. Frankly they all make Slashdot look like a bastion of polite, openminded, and levelheaded people.

Re:Just catering to their demographics

[ShanghaiBill]

Frankly they all make Slashdot look like a bastion of polite, openminded, and levelheaded people.

Try reading Slashdot at -1. The idiotic vileness is still here, it is just hidden by the moderation system. I have never understood why more sites don't use a Slashdot like moderation system. It isn't perfect, but it is way better than an open spigot.

Re:Just catering to their demographics

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trying to be facetious, it does seem that way to me. Perhaps it says more about us than them?

What it says is that those who are on the fringe or lean towards the extreme spectrum of <insert political, religious or other personal point of view here> are frequently proselytizing. They're also trying to find like-minded individuals so they don't feel as defensive as they do when surrounded by those who don't understand the truth about things or who haven't seen the light yet.

Surround yourself by those who agree with you and you'll always know that you're right.

Re:Just catering to their demographics

[timeOday]

I just googled the Rolling Stone article you alluded to, and I admit it is more leftist than I expected to see. That said, the pendulum swings back and forth. The people pushing the policies leading to todays out-of-control inequality should have looked at some history themselves, and the traction that outright communism was gaining after the Great Depression until some fairly mild measures in that direction (the New Deal) were adopted. Boomers enjoyed the benefits without acknowledging them, and dismantled them (through inadequate funding) in order to line their own pockets, at the expense of the millenials. Now the pendulum is going to swing back a bit. But we aren't going to become the USSR, regardless of anything Rolling Stone says.

More Yahoo nonsense

[bigjarom]

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.

Re:More Yahoo nonsense

[Charliemopps]

No, the big boxy thing is the hard drive you dolt!

Site Dilution

[edibobb]

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 /. ?

I'm both.

[queazocotal]

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.

Re:I'm both.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even want to know I live in a world where people like you are alive!
I rooted my car, looked under the hood of my tablet, fiddled with the color settings of my CPU and overclocked my TV. And I make my own test equipment, thank you.

Re:What do you expect?

[khasim]

Not just him. Go to that website:
http://www.yahoo.com/tech/?ref=news

It's wall-to-wall crap and ads. Literally wall-to-wall. It fills the page with graphics slammed up touching to each other. Up-down-left-right.

It's what you would get if a douchbag spec'ed out a site.

Re:What do you expect?

[i kan reed]

Reminds me of Windows 8, actually.

Re:What do you expect?

[ericloewe]

Uses my whole 27" screen? Check.

Shows more than it would on a phone? No.

Is it usable? No.

Does it have any noteworthy content? Not any that I saw before my eyes started hurting and I closed the tab.

There are different levels of "normals"

[ErichTheRed]

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 found the problem

[TheCarp]

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.

The big problem with his map?

[QilessQi]

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/

I’m talking about Goodsearch. Goodsearch is run by Yahoo, which, against Google, gives comparatively poor search results. But the return for using Goodsearch is that for each search you make, the company donates one cent to the charity or school of your choice.... This is a great conservative alternative to Google, which yesterday, instead of using its daily Google graphic to honor Easter, they used it to honor a day that not only does no one celebrate, but which nobody has heard of: Cesar Chavez Day.

Ok, maybe I'm reading more into that map than I should, but they certainly opened the door for speculation. :-)