Over at the Comic Reporter, Tom Spurgeon talks to former Wizard Online editor Rick Marshall, who was let go in October:
SPURGEON: Were there any significant conflicts with what you were trying and accomplish and those on the news magazine, convention or even retail side of the company? How were those conflicts resolved?
MARSHALL: I feel like the site provided a rude awakening for the Wizard Magazine crew. Web site tracking systems provide a very easy, clear-cut way to determine which articles people are reading, and which articles people don’t bother skipping over. I don’t think Wizard Magazine was ready for the cold, hard facts that this type of tracking provided. Until the site came along, Wizard Magazine was always the biggest fish in a very small fishbowl — in this case, the world of comics news in print format. To take the analogy a step further, creating the website dumped that little bowl and its alpha-male fish into the ocean of online news. Suddenly it had to compete against other fish, and I don’t think it was ready for that. For example, the Wizard Magazine crew always seemed insulted by the fact that content from the magazine rarely received as many readers on the site as the original online content we produced. From a pure traffic standpoint, stories from ToyFare Magazine clobbered Wizard Magazine stories on a regular basis, and the reaction from the Wizard Magazine side always seemed to be that the fault wasn’t with the content itself, but the way in which we provided it online. It was very frustrating to present all of this data indicating that changes were necessary, and to have it ignored time and time again.
However, the most prominent conflict was always the traffic-vs-political content issue. From the start, my marching orders were always “More Traffic” and “More Readers.” But it became painfully obvious that many people at the company assumed that the most popular stories would always be the stories about the companies who buy the most space at conventions or advertise the most on the site — that we could MAKE a topic popular simply by posting it. It was an ideology framed around the notion that “it’s interesting because we tell you it’s interesting.”
That wasn’t the case, though. I obsessively tracked the traffic for the site, and there was rarely any overlap between the people who were considered “Friends of Wizard” (yes, that was an actual term thrown around) and the types of content and subject matter that generated the most traffic. So, most of the time, we operated under a cycle of unavoidable bridge-burning and tail-chasing, with the people at the higher levels of the company alternating between complaints of “Why didn’t you give my friend/client a front-page story?” and “Why weren’t the numbers as high today as they were yesterday?” It was a Catch-22 situation.
The thing is, no matter how much I tried to explain these very fundamental problems, I don’t think they ever really penetrated. I wish I could say they were resolved, but in the end, I think the resolution they arrived at was to kill the messenger.
You can read Rick’s blog for further info on what he’s doing post-Wizard.
November 16th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
If you don’t have a reason not to read Wizard, then this is a good one.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Publications that don’t understand that web-specific content will drive more traffic than dumping their print stories there are in for a bumpy road ahead.
November 16th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
I used to read Wizard frequently, but looking at my monthly comic budget, and the news I can find online, like Newsarama. It was a no-brainer to drop the mag from my pull file.
November 17th, 2007 at 3:41 am
Assuming Wizard mag readers go to the site mainly, odds are they arent going to read an article online when they’ve already read it in the magazine. If you take that into play, everything makes sense.
November 17th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Wizard may not understand what stories readers want to see, but I’m betting THEY don’t let their site go off line each night. Seems like each of the news sites have a thing or two to learn.
November 17th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Marty Graw (cute.)
I think the point isn’t about whether or not someone backs up their website and goes off line to do so–but these sites provide timely ORIGINAL content that isn’t a re-hash of something they’ve provided somewhere else.
It’s kind of like inviting someone over for dinner and them serving them leftovers.
I feel sorry Rick Marshall–I would’ve quit a job like his had I been constantly received like he was.
November 17th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Modern websites don’t have to go down to back up. What, did they buy the server with the hand crank starter?
November 17th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Each of the news sites?
November 17th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Nope. Just this site, each night. I take no issue with the content which remains top notch. I just find the fact that it has to be taken off line each night a little sad and antiquated.
November 20th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Yet another example of “If the audience doesn’t want what we’re selling, then it’s the audience’s fault!” This is becoming an all-too-pervasive meme in all media.