In case you don’t know what I do for a living, let me explain in a nutshell. I find ways to make more money on top of things we already do for MuchMusic. So we have a website, and we also sell ringtones and music on that website. We have TV shows, so we also have chat or SMS games over those tv shows which cost $.75/msg.
The premise under which I do all this stuff is that people want to be able to interact with TV, so it’s not such a one-sided medium. We take advantage of new technologies to give the user control, more information and more services. Now, that must be true, because we make money off these services.
But there have been a couple instances recently where I question how far this can go.
The first is the general discussion about radio. You’d think with TV on demand, the internet and all the other services people would have moved away from a linear, 1 sense media. But they didn’t, just like people didn’t stop reading books. My interpretation as to why this is so? Radio is the ultimate low-maintenance media. You can be doing 18 other things while listening to the radio and that’s ok. TV can be very passive if you don’t change the channel, but you still have to look at it to get it, which is a higher level of commitment.
The second thing is watching Maxie use the internet. Maxie is a very intelligent person who knows enough about the web to use Firefox and customize her blogger template, which is more than the vast majority of users can do. Yet when Maxie is on Facebook, she’s never rolled over and the names of the people tagged in an image to see where they are in that image. To me it seems totally obvious to interact with everything on the page to see what the functionality is. To Maxie, not a necessity at all. Maxie is happy when the functionality of the page meets her needs and doesn’t feel the need to go any further than that.
Taking both these things together, than kneading them together in my mind, you get a picture of a world where not everyone actually wants more control over the media they interact with. It might be only a small fragment of people that really want to go further with their media. While I think we absolutely should capitalize on this small subset, but I feel that we’ll hit the limit of diminishing returns quickly if we just hold to the value of simple interactivity.
Basically, I think we have to start marketing to the uninterested if we’re gonna keep growing this thing.
I totally agree. This is why personas come in handy when creating new features and functions. It’s easy to think that everyone is like us uber nerds but the reality is that most people are MUCH MUCH less sophisticated. If we focus on the simplicity of the basics we should be ok.