I Think About the Internet

Marketing miss.

Jul 12th

Posted by Kevin Matheny in I Think About the Internet

4 comments

So Netflix hiked rates today, and people are upset.

I don’t get it. Why the angst? I looked, and as far as I can tell, it’s not a big deal – I’m finally getting charged a pittance for something I value highly.

Bear in mind, I signed up for Netflix back in 2002, and have had a 3-disc-at-a-time subscription the whole time. It’s $19.99, which is less than two premium margaritas at Don Pablo’s. On the other hand, I’ve had times when I’ve had a disc out for 3 months because I keep not making time to watch TV. When they introduced streaming as a free feature, I suddenly was getting ten times the value for my subscription. Taking the rate up to $23.99 for the same deal seems reasonable to me. If anything, I’ll drop the disc subscription (which I’m sure Netflix is just fine with, since they’re getting out of physical distribution as fast as they can) and actually save money.

It seems odd, though. Didn’t Netflix do focus tests? Did they leave out the nerds or something? I mean, your target market is “people who use the Internet a lot,” which means they have a disproportionate reach to their size, and the ability to create flash crowds with things like trending on Twitter. Even a small percentage of people who are really pissed off can make the story “people are angry about Netflix price hike” instead of the more desirable “Netflix clarifies pricing plans, increasing customer choice”.

I’ve met some of the Netflix people, (on the data and API side, not marketing), and they are smart, capable people. Clearly, though, somebody missed the key message that needed to go out. From the NYT article:

What cost $10 a month — online streams of movies plus one DVD by mail at a time — will now cost $16 a month, the company said…

No no no! The message you wanted to get out was “This is a 20% price cut on our most essential service.” Unlimited streaming for $8 a month? That’s a *great* offer.

Swing and a miss right there. Dig that back foot in, and watch it all the way to the bat next time. You’ll get ‘em.

Crossposted from Goodreads

Jul 10th

Posted by Kevin Matheny in Books You Should Read

1 comment

Trying out a crosspost from Goodreads, because I really like the observation I made in it. Sometimes I look back at things I have written and really like them.

The Social Life of InformationThe Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown

Reminding me very strongly of the reading I did in college for Sociology and Anthropology classes, with a focus on enterprise use cases.

I find it strange to read, in 2010, a book written in 2000 about the effect of the Internet on human behavior with information. I can see places where the authors were quite prescient, and areas where they got it wrong – in particular, their prediction that newspapers will continue to be relevant and successful. I think in that case it’s a matter of incomplete understanding of the business model of newspapers; craigslist and ebay have largely destroyed classified advertising, and that’s a big revenue loss.



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Velocity

Oct 1st

Posted by Kevin Matheny in I Think About the Internet

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Earlier this year, I attended the Velocity conference. It was a great experience – there’s something exhilarating about spending whole days talking to people who really get the kind of work you’re doing and have similar approaches to solving problems.

There is, of course, the danger of it becoming an echo chamber, but I think we’re still early enough in the process of figuring out how to make faster, more effective Web sites (and mobile web sites, and web-based applications, and other things that pretty much just use HTTP as a data transfer protocol) that there is room for health disagreement.

I had the chance to talk to Josh Bixby from Strangeloop yesterday, and we had a great conversation about measuring the impact of performance. He pointed me to a blog post he did that captured some of the best slides from the conference, and I wanted to share it.

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/07/01/the-best-graphs-of-velocity/

Location is not enough

Mar 16th

Posted by Kevin Matheny in I Think About the Internet

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I deleted Foursquare from my iPhone last night. This was the second time I deleted it, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be re-installing it.

I think location is a killer feature, especially for mobile devices. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about potential applications for location-aware mobile devices, including a great conversation with Omar Abdelwahed of Ubisoft about possible mobile games.

But location alone is not enough to make an application useful. Foursquare is trying, especially with the new “hot potato event” feature they added for South by Southwest. Essentially, Foursquare does two things:

1. It tells me where my friends are, if they remember to use the application. This is sort of useful and possibly interesting. Here at SxSW, I saw Oren Michels (@orenmichels on Twitter, CEO of Mashery) check in at a taco place, and I inferred that he’d be bringing breakfast tacos to the Circus Mashimus lounge.

2. It lets me get a list of people who have checked in a a given location using Foursquare. I can’t tell anything other than that they have been at that location – I have no idea if you’re interesting or not, unlike Twitter, which at least gives me some insight into who you are by letting me look at your tweetstream.

Foursquare does not help me grow my set of friends, because it doesn’t give me any more information than “this person is in (or was in) this place.” It does have gamelike mechanisms for encouraging usage of the app — badges and mayorships — but that’s ultimately self-referential. I’d like Foursquare to be cool and useful, but unless and until it offers something more than simply location awareness, it’s not making it back on to my phone.

(Edits)
Fixed an omitted word in the 3rd paragraph that changed its meaning.

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