Why Darwin Beats Danny Carlton

Danny Carlton writes a little known personal blog under the pseudonym “Jack Lewis” at jacklewis.net/weblog. But don’t try to visit it if you use Firefox, because he’s banned users of the popular browser from visiting his site. Firefox users are now redirected here.

Why? Because he objects to the fact that some of those Firefox readers are using an ad-blocking extension to block ads showing on the site. To counter the problem, he’s thrown the baby out with the bathwater and kicked 13% or so of the Internet off his site.

While Carlton is certainly enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame, in my opinion this is not a good strategy to build a blog. Users are solid gold. Even the ones that block ads. They sometimes write comments, which is free content. They link to you from their own blog. And they tell friends about your site. All that leads to more readers and, ultimately, more revenue. If a user wants to skip the ads and is willing to go to the trouble of installing ad blocking software, so be it. I still love ‘em. And I gladly hand them my content for free.

Carlton doesn’t agree, apparently. Although I wonder why he continues to provide a full content feed, sans ads, at jacklewis.net/weblog/atom.xml (and it has been reposted here). Those users are “stealing” his content, too. What about them? Perhaps he’ll now turn his attention to the evils of RSS.

The Internet will certainly be a less colorful place without Carlton’s passionate editorial. A perusal of his blog posts (via Safari) tells me he thinks Barack Obama is a communist and that “fourth graders can be lied to and told the Theory of Evolution is a fact.” The problem is, Darwin was right. Only the fittest survive. And Carlton just made his blog an endangered species.

USAToday’s Social Network Experiment May Not Be Paying Off

When USAToday relaunched its site in March as a social network around news, I and others thought it was big news.

They integrated Pluck’s new Social Media Suite, a group of social networking products that a number of high profile news sites have adopted. Overnight, USAToday went from being an old school news site to something much different. Readers could now create profiles, comment on articles, vote to recommend articles to others (very Digg-like), etc.

On Pluck’s Social Media Suite product page, the number one selling point to publishers is “Drive site traffic and increase page views.” Given the insane ability of social networks to drive traffic, this seems like a fairly safe promise to make. But so far, the data we have says it hasn’t paid off in terms of unique visitors or page views for USAToday.

Here’s the Compete.com data, showing monthly visitors down from 14 million in March to about 10 million today, a 29% drop in unique visitors. I added in the New York Times and Washington Post for comparison purposes - both are at about even levels with March.

Comscore also shows a decline, although a smaller one. March unique visitors were 7.3 million; June was 6.3 million - a 14% drop. Total pageviews were 70 million in March v. 59 million in June - a 16% drop.

Neither Comscore or Compete are perfect, but the trend seems to suggest the relaunch isn’t performing well. At the very least unique visitors and page views aren’t spiking upwards, perhaps as USA Today and Pluck anticipated. There is no doubt that the Pluck products are very solid products, but perhaps news and social networking just don’t mix.

Update: USAToday issues a press release saying traffic is, actually, way up.

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