Radical idea: give people what they want

“Taking value away from users to try to force a specific action is almost always going to be less desirable than providing people what they want.”

But wait, there’s more:

“Offensive, Annoying Advertising Alienates Consumers, According to National Poll”

Okay, I’m playing with you; every used car dealer and direct TV marketer knows this one is false. You don’t need to read the press release picked up by Backchannelmedia, (“the only free web-based media search engine”) to know that! Okay, you might want to read it, just for a chuckle. Couldn’t be true, though, we all know that. After all, the survey of 1,000 18+, conducted by Opinion Research, sponsored by the outdoor alternative ad agency, Streetblimps, did find that 70% admitted that they were more likely to remember an obnoxious campaign — and 11% said they were at least slightly more likely to buy!

Back to that first quote: It’s from a post in Techdirt , but I picked it up from Amy Gahran’s Poynteronline E-Media Tidbits “Are You Feeding Your Online Audience Enough?”
. Both posts are discussing the impact and implications of the move of the great Freakonomics blog to the New York Times site, whose RSS feed forces pageviews by only showing you the first line or two. In its original home, the blog feed showed the full post. The solution proposed, is to put ads in the RSS feeds, not inconvenience the readers.

What do you think? Is there any doubt in your mind?