It's a comedy club.
The arrival of the television laugh track, a mere beat behind the medium's instant commercialization, was a brave step forward into the modern age of broadcast television economics. The TV ad buyers of the early '50s weren't merely bidding for newfangled "time slots"; they were shopping for clues about a medium whose dynamics few could convincingly explain. Ray Earlenborn, one of the early "laugh machine" technicians, remembers the device being "a form of insurance": in the absence of a live audience, a manufactured one would have to do. It made the event more intelligible to the advertisers - not to mention to the real audience, gathered in millions of living rooms to peer at the mysterious little tube. A bald-faced con, but who's going to complain?
Forty years later, TV still has its fingers crossed and its eyes shut. Nielsen ratings, recall surveys, and focus groups have all been concocted to disguise the seat-of-the-pants guesswork of traditional media. But nothing beats the real thing. And with the advent of commercial digital media over the past five - well, just over three - years, media producers and buyers alike finally have the technology to do what they could once only dream about: turn the camera around and watch their real, live audience.
In today's retrofuturistic reality, the audience isn't just listening or watching. It's moving, jumping, hopping, hanging, and interacting. And not just via up-front "interactivity," that is, email, threaded discussion, chat, or any of the other shibboleths of classic computer-mediated feedback. Go out on the Net - on the commercial Web anyway - and your every movement is mapped, measured, and fed back into the never-ending loop that is big-time online publishing. Channel surfing is no longer something worried about by media makers and the advertisers who pay their way: it's something they watch, for the kind of information their TV grandparents could hardly have imagined.
What are they watching? Here are just a few of the measure-ments available at the touch of a button to any digital publisher who can afford a database system, a suite of tracking software, and an engineer to run it: Where users (singly or as a whole) came from. How long they stayed. What they did while on the site, how they moved from page to page, where they went next. The smallest and greatest numbers of users at any one time, and traffic for all times in between. The least-visited page on a site. The most -visited page on a site. The most popular route to a site. The most popular route through a site. The number of people who bought something, almost bought something, or never came close to buying a damn thing. What operating system they were using. What Net software they were or weren't running. When, if ever, they returned, and what they did differently on each subsequent visit.
In short: everything but an ordered list of Social Security numbers (and with a little user cooperation, even that can be arranged). All without ever asking a single question. All expressible as raw numbers, averages, trends, or even single-user case studies. And not for some "scientific" sample - for all users. Right now.
This is something very new in medialand indeed.
Public awareness of Web tracking tools is already widespread enough for people to start labeling them as privacy threats. They're not - at least not any more so than the video cameras in Macy's or the coupon crunchers at a Safeway cash register. What most alarmists miss is that while online users are indeed being tracked, they're mainly interesting as blips in a larger pattern. This is what advertisers really care about - they don't call it mass marketing for nothing. Sometimes users might be asked to submit some bits of personal information in exchange for customized content. But one dirty little secret of the new-media clickstream is that your "personal" information often says far less about who you are than what can be learned from watching how you behave online. From the publishers' and advertisers' perspectives, you are what you surf. And every link you click is worth something to somebody.
Some putatively informed observers are amazingly slow to get this. In the future-gazing "Next" issue of The New Yorker in October, an attempt to debunk death-by-bits-and-bytes dirges for the newspaper industry included a quote from the general manager of the New York Post, one Dick Hawkes. The migration of advertising to the Internet won't happen, Hawkes opined, "until there is some reliable and generally accepted way to measure the readership and response rates online." And then he added, "These things are both some time away" - a claim on par with a horse-and-buggy salesman critiquing Ford's Model T for its gas mileage. The frequency with which such howlers seep into the mainstream press suggests not so much insincerity as wholesale confusion. Maybe both.
The confusion is forgivable. It's true, there are almost as many ways of measuring traffic as there are Web sites that do it. In a new game, everyone tries to make the rules. And independent verification is an industrial niche still to conquer. But the publishers, engineers, marketers, and - yes - ad salespeople, whose livings depend on building and keeping traffic, are already tackling an issue much larger than the mechanics of user flow. What they're looking at is the rapid introduction of an attention economy unto itself - for want of a better coinage, the economy of clicks.
Much has been made, for example, about the conspicuous overlap between the lists of top Web ad sellers and the top Web advertisers - the big search sites like Yahoo! and Infoseek, and major on-ramps such as the Netscape and AOL homepages. Some people point to this as evidence of an insular, segregated market. But what it really suggests is that the outfits engineering the most movement toward their sites are profiting from the eventual movement of the same users out. Regardless of a site's intent - to sell software, cars, books, or simply to be an interesting place to spend time - its users come from somewhere. And, sooner or later, they leave. Both actions, invariably, are metered - which for a site's owners means making money both in the coming and the going. Paying less for users than you charge to pass them on is just the most obvious operating principle for any big commercial Web site.
But you can't herd all of the people all of the time. Sending potential customers toward advertisers is only one digital publishing goal. Another - getting people to buy things - is just as obvious, though still in its infancy. And then there is a third: keeping people on your site, a motive that constantly plays tug-of-war with the temptation to cash in by delivering them elsewhere.
The tension is simple. Advertisers love high clickthrough. That is, the number of people who click on an ad versus the total number of viewers. But most high-traffic sites don't charge by the click - they charge by "impressions," how many times an ad is shown, regardless of whether it's even noticed. The argument for that is straightforward: whose fault is it if an ad doesn't pull people in? But smaller Web publishers can often be strong-armed, if only because they never counted on making any money in the first place. They often agree to by-the-click ad contracts - generally with a bigger site, which takes the traffic and then turns around and charges someone else for the impressions.
What the larger sites are selling is - surprise - "mass" viewership, rather than a trickle of users, no matter how excruciatingly refined. That makes traffic within a site - or "flowthrough" - job one, just as it's always been in traditional media, with its exhortations of "stay tuned" and "don't touch that dial." On a commercial site, all hypertext roads lead to profit. The only difference is the user's trajectory: external versus internal, clickthrough versus pageview.
Over the past year, virtually every major search engine and many other high-traffic sites have begun doing both. With the boom in online sales of everything from used cars to software, profit-sharing has emerged as an obligatory component of any hip new-media business plan. Amazon.com's Associates Program pioneered this trend by offering any Web site, no matter how tiny, a small percentage of the sales from direct referrals. Fast-forward to the present and Amazon.com is integrated right into Yahoo!, Excite, and Infoseek - up against BarnesandNoble.com on WebCrawler and on Wired Digital's own HotBot. The quid pro quo isn't substantially different: By constructing order forms linked back to the referring site, the tension between clickthrough and flowthrough is ameliorated. Host, sponsor, user - everyone wins.
Once a question of mostly luck, building Web traffic is increasingly a science. People who visit big sites are prime clickbait, subjected to every new interstitial ad campaign and Shockwave banner, their real-time responses tracked by eager producers who peer into server logs like Wall Street bond traders with their Bloomberg machines. What works anywhere will invariably be scooped up and perfected on sites like Yahoo! and Excite. And what works for them - audio ads, pop-up menus, and simulated "error" messages - is quickly repeated everywhere.
It's anybody's guess whether today's popular Web content will be tomorrow's: whether text-based media will survive, whether push will devour pull, whether information will take a backseat to entertainment, or whether big bandwidth will recapitulate - more expensively - TV. But one crucial aspect of the Web's legacy can never be undone: the ways real people use media are no longer hypothetical, no longer extrapolated from 1,000 sample households, no longer fabricated with applause cues and canned laughter.
As TV and radio increasingly piggyback on usage-monitoring technologies born of the Web, the pursuit and price tag of traffic will only be better and better understood. Those who lament an age where opinion polls dictate public policy will be aghast at the populist mechanics of instant feedback, where every click is a vote for and every link ignored is a vote against. It's idiomatic among ad people that "we know half our money is wasted - we just don't know which half." Publishers could say the same, swapping for "money" all those lovingly crafted pages and beautifully produced footage once put before the fickle public on basically a wing and a prayer. That cliché is officially dead.
It all adds up to an environment closer to stand-up comedy than to a TV sitcom or to a coolly laid-back magazine. When you're dying onstage, the message arrives quickly and cruelly. When patrons start leaving in droves, the club owner's dissatisfaction will be just as unequivocal. But when everything clicks, when the drinks flow and cash streams across the bar, the Budweiser sign above the stage stays profitably lit - for everyone. It's interaction. It's live. And it's back.
