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 By Ron Lewis Oct. 22, 2007 Have you ever visited an old hangout years later? Maybe the neighborhood of your youth, or a long-since closed nightclub? The memories swirl in your head and a smile comes to your lips, but it doesn’t matter – those days are gone and can’t come back. Guess what? They weren’t really as awesome as you remember them either. I poke by head into U-K about once a month. Mostly because it is still in my Favorites List which I scroll through when bored. The windows are boarded up here, folks. Weeds are growing high and a lot of the houses in the neighborhood are vacant. I read Tim Stelly and Ken Hughes’ wistful pleas for a return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, and I can’t help but wonder, “Why?” The answer is beautiful in its simplicity and I’ve always admired The Editor for coming up with it, even if it was just dumb luck. It borrows on the same marketing strategy of PublishAmerica, but doesn’t respect its writers as much as that vanity publisher – nor should it bother to respect them, just as PA doesn’t. Ken Hughes has included me on a few emails he’s sent out announcing an article posted on another site he frequents. He brags of the web hits it receives and praises that site’s high search engine presence. That site allows anyone to publish and does not limit storage space for articles to my knowledge. So why does Ken keep stalking U-K, like one of the undead vampires in this new movie, “30 Days of Night”? Why doesn’t he just post at the other site and move on from here. Although I don’t hear as often from Tim, I know that he, too, is aware of many avenues for posting his opinions. Why the interest in resurrecting U-K to its supposed former glory? I can only come up with one reason, that beautiful answer I alluded to above. I think the major reason writers have always liked U-K is that every article receives the exact same treatment (ignoring, for the moment, the despicable and cowardly treatment of opposing arguments by an imbecile recently posing as Editor). Submit an article to U-K and it was guaranteed to receive its 15 minutes of fame atop the Home Page. It was the great equalizer. It didn’t matter that the author couldn’t write legibly, or spelled worse than a sixth grader. It didn’t matter that their opinions were ludicrous, unsupportable, unfeasible, or just plain idiotic. Those articles were given the same opportunity for an audience as lucid, sane, and intelligent writing. The site Ken publishes on now does not provide that ego-satisfaction of seeing his article in bright lights. Its Home Page features mainstream media news feeds that attract most of the visitors, who then must search through hundreds of authors to find Ken and his articles. I expect that the hits Ken believes his articles are getting on that site are actually the site’s hits. But if I’m wrong about that, it only further substantiates my question, “Why hang around U-K?” PublishAmerica tapped into the same demographic – frustrated writers desperate to be heard. They dangle respect in the form of a Library of Congress number for your beloved manuscript and speak of its quality as if they had actually read your submission. PA exploits those “writers” by selling them high-priced copies of their “book,” knowing full well that the chance of anyone else ever buying the book was nil. Similarly, U-K uses these articles we submit to generate Pay-Per-Click revenue. The Editor’s only concern is that writers insert enough high-search keywords in their articles and the title – everything else about the article is irrelevant spittle. And that is fair. He is in business and the writers submit voluntarily. (Hi Editor! How’d you like the way I worked that current movie’s title into this article!! We’ll get some hits with that!) {Editor's Note: churlish lout} I just always have to laugh when the writers (I have been guilty as well) act as if there is a higher meaning to the site, as if there are standards that should be met and respect to be paid. At its zenith, U-K might have generated a couple of hundred views of your submitted article in a month. It would have had to have many high-value keywords to accomplish that much. Very few of those visits would have originated at the Home Page – the exact spot that those frustrated writers held in such high regard for its egalitarian exposure. The fact is that the 15 minutes of fame they sought was mostly in their minds – I expect that 90% of the Home Page traffic consists of U-K writers coming to see if their latest article is atop the leader board yet. On the other hand, probably 90+% of the site’s traffic arrives from a search engine request directly to a specific article’s page. The visitor has a very specific interest, and if the article actually matches that interest, if it doesn’t just casually cite that keyword in another context (the way I’ve done with that movie title), the visitor might actually read the article. I expect most don’t (including those who come to this article from a search engine). How many of those visitors would then proceed to other U-K articles, when most have absolutely nothing to do with their exact interest? Very few. Sure, The Editor would like the site to be “stickier,” but there is a very discernible break even point to investing more time and effort on the site – and it’s not very high. Instead, after several years of trying, it appears that The Editor has concluded that it is not worth the extra effort to make the site better. I believe he is exactly right. I expect, in fact, that the more he allows drivel to appear, the more drivellers the site attracts. I expect that drivellers tend to use more pop culture (i.e. low intelligence) keywords, and thus, produce more search engine hits. It is a sad statement on the decline of our society that stupidity rises to the top simply because it is embraced by more people than is intelligence. I think that if Tim and Ken could understand that, they’d realize that there is really nothing here to recreate. I’ve got a couple of domain names I’m not using that have some available storage space – they should just post their articles on a web page and take turns congratulating each other. Invite a few of their friends. It amounts to the same thing. From there, basic search engine marketing techniques will generate about as many hits as U-K does for their articles. Now, if a similar site were to start up that did not rely on Pay-Per-Click revenue, if its business model relied on intelligent, captivating content to attract visitors and sell them something, then I would understand Ken and Tim lobbying for that venue. Or maybe a sponsored site – that has been my concept, I’ve just not had the time to work on it. ------------ Email Ron Lewis: ron.lewis@hughes.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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