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Definition of Social Media

This is my bullshit-free definition of social media:

Web properties that amass a ton of users — ideally in the hundreds of millions, track their every move on the platform and give advertisers the opportunity to target them with sponsored posts right in the feed.

It doesn’t matter how users entertain themselves: with memes and photos of cats, keeping contact with long-lost friends and crushes, fighting about politics while trying to sound smart, with sexy photos of themselves, by self-aggrandizing or watching funny videos.

Nor does it really matter whether they are connected to people they know, in which case one should be speaking of social networks, or just with people they find interesting or sexy, celebrities or authorites in a field or just with more of the same funny, dumb videos.

All that matters is that there’s a proprietary platform, free or cheap user-generated bullshit (UGB), a ton of users, serious tracking, an in-house targeting system and the possibility to advertise right in the middle of the feed, or do what they call native advertising.

Lies and Bike Lanes in Milan

Milan went through 8 weeks of total Covid-19 lockdown, from March 8 to last Sunday, May 3rd. Did City Hall work on pop-up bicycle lanes in the meantime? Of course not.

But then it became cool. Bogotà was doing it, and Berlin, and Oakland was closing off streets to cars. Somebody got jealous. Milan told The Guardian they had a plan.

On April 21, The Guardian took the bait, well before Milan published their new plan for 35 kms 22 kms of bike lanes, on April 24, or the Strade Aperte plan, on April 30.

Apparently, the story was too good to pass. Or to check. The Irish Times, The Independent, CityLab, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Fast Company and the BBC all fell for it.

A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes

– Jonathan Swift

Gisela Méndez, an architect and urbanist from Mexico City, discovered that a year earlier Milan’s mobility manager had promised, but not delivered, 85 kms of new bike lanes.

Disappointed, she published a post aptly titled El día que Milán engañó a todo el activismo ciclista mundial, or The day that Milan misled the whole world’s cycling activism.

I did some further research: on the left, you can see — in light blue, red and purple — the bikes lines approved in late 2018; on the right, what we are getting, in 2020.

What does the future hold for Milan?

More of the same — more cars! On the day after the article from The Guardian, the city of Milan put its congestion charge and its (formerly) restricted driving zones on hold.

It will be cars, rather than bicycles, that are and always will be welcome in this city.

Links to documents:

Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan, 2018

Table 6 of the above mentioned plan

The New Bike Lanes Project, 2020

Setting the record straight on Milan

Home to iconic brands such as Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati and Lamborghini — plus Fiat, the company that put the country on wheels, Italy has a deep love affair with cars.

The Autostrada dei Laghi, built in 1924 to connect the city of Milan with Como, Varese and Lake Maggiore, was either the first or one of the very first motorways in the world.

Milan

Milan is home to 1.4 million people and 700,000 cars — considerably more, per capita, than in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Paris or Stockholm.

Parking space is insufficient. The guesstimate is that there may be as many as 100,000 illegaly parked cars in the city, for example on sidewalks. It’s rather ugly — Google it!

Continue reading →

Pop-up Ads and Banner Ads

About twenty years ago, pop-up ads were all the rage.

Banner ads had failed to deliver clicks. The very first banner ad, placed on HotWired, Wired’s first web magazine, had a staggering click-through rate of 44%.

Everybody was absolutely sure that they had found the right formula. For reasons nobody cared to explain, consumers apparently loved to interact with online ads.

That’s why they had gone online in the first place, wasn’t it? They bought new computers, clunky modems and paid an internet subscription to… see more ads.

It was off to the races. Just about everybody and your uncle crafted business plans centred around showing more banner ads to consumers, also called eyeballs.

As it turned out, the first AT&T banner ad on HotWired was a fluke. People had not changed, like they rarely do. They were clicking just out of mere curiosity.

Pop-up Ads

As curiosity died out, click-through rates plummeted. For a brief season, pop-up ads seemed to be the solution. Click rates were high and everybody got excited.

And why not? Those things were a thing of beauty, weren’t they? ;-)

Once the eyeballs stopped clicking came new ideas, like pop-under ads, fake “close” boxes, or ads that moved around the screen and would not let your mouse close them…

Then came Google

Opera, a small niche browser from Norway, started adding tools to block pop-up ads. But Microsoft’s then dominant Internet Explorer browser would have none of it.

Google had just launched Adwords, their textual ads placed above search engine results. Pop-up ads were in the same market: ugly, no doubt, but they delivered clicks.

In a brilliant move, Google created Google Toolbar, an add-on to IE that blocked pop-up ads. This allowed them to kill off the competition coming from pop-up ads, play nice guy towards users who were sick of the constant interruptions, place their logo in front of millions of users and softly push them to use their search engine more often.

How is this relevant today?

Today, reputable news outlets are seeing marketing budgets move towards small websites that produce questionable content — most of it bullshit — because a set of ad-tech technologies known as programmatic advertising are allowing marketers to target users that read serious newspapers on those websites, at much cheaper prices.

It’s almost 2020, and it’s high time for newspapers to pull a trick like Google did.

[ to be continued… ]