Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

Jakob Nielsen has an interesting observation about the value of long articles (or posts) vs. short ones in the competition for reader’s attention. He finds that online readers prefer short posts except when they really need the info. So his final conclusion is that a mix of 2/3 short (600 words or less) and 1/3 highly informational long pieces is about right.

Now the stats this affects are both time on site and pageviews. If you want to increase pageviews, thus increasing ad impressions, considering writing posts in which the first 600 words stand alone as an article then use the ‘more…’  option to continue that article in more depth. You’ll straddle both worlds and keep all your visitors happy.

While I typically agree with those who find Business Week to be a great contrarian indicator (get lauded on the cover, watch your your stock go down), this article on the impact of applications on iPhone and the Google Phone OS gets it.

Basically, software developers don’t like to develop for mobile because the phone industry is too greedy and too fragmented. Every carriers wants their own piece of the pie, a big one, and they want the apps customized so they only work in their network. In my own experience working for a web-based email provider we found that the telecoms we sold private label versions to would only pay a few cents per user. For the average developer this simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Now, with an SDK (software development kit) coming for iPhone and the rumored Google phone operating system, we’ll have environments on phones to run apps that are not associated with the networks. This will re-engage those software developers who walked away from phone apps. The key to this, as anyone who reads this blog knows I am obsessed about, is the full browser on the phone.

Bye bye .mobi.

Hello web 3.0 on a mobile device.

And cheers for not requiring a laptop just to check my mail and the web while traveling… Next year everything changes again.

Frank Schilling has a great piece on a long time domainer who understands where this whole thing is going. It’s worth the read just to see his sites which blow away the average parked page.

The fascinating thing about this piece is how it demonstrates how primitive and early stage the entire domaining market is. Putting up simple, well-designed affiliate sites on domains puts someone five years ahead of the rest? Frank is a very successful domain entrepreneur so I respect his POV but this is ridiculous- If people are making millions just parking thousands of longtail domains and trading, imagine what the untapped potential is?

Prediction: Some big money is going to come in and back someone with a vision and change the whole model. The challenge is manufacturing highly relevant content and matching it to relevant domains. Parking companies try to automate this but just end up with generic content based on primitive keyword matching. On the other end we have things like blog networks who are figuring out the content generation side but don’t understand business strategy. The people who match these two things and add in a strong monetization strategy that is highly relevant to the domain subject will be the leaders.

This is why our business has a founder who understands SEO, SEM, design and programming and a founder who is a writer/producer with strategic marketing skills. You need both to move beyond what will soon be laughably primitive models like the current parking systems. It will be a lot more work but the values will be exponentially higher.

This great post about growing a business without creating a larger footprint is revolutionary, IMHO. We’re entering an era of business efficiency in terms of resources that means you can build a substantial business without a big footprint. 37 Signals does it by constantly improving their customers’ ability to self-serve:

• Easily sign-up for services online without assistance
• Easily find answers to Help/CS questions online or in the app
• Design User Interfaces (UI) that are completely obvious and self-explanatory

In others, build a business that works so well that you don’t need to constantly hold your customer’s hands.

37 Signals has eight employees and million of users.

Or build a business like ours that doesn’t need customers (I’m still thinking about whether this is true!).