Surfbird Shrugged

The head of Surfingbird, Sergey Shalaev, explains why the service is ceasing to be a traffic generator

Author: Sergey Shalaev

On December 17, Look At Media executives announced that they were removing the Surfingbird recommendation service buttons from their sites due to changes in its operating policies. LAM was supported by several other sites, including Sports.ru and Habrahabr. The head of Surfingbird, Sergey Shalaev, explains why the service is ceasing to be a traffic generator.

Why does Surfingbird cut out someone else's layout?

It’s worth starting with a little background on why we started cleaning up the layout of sites displayed on Surfingbird. Colleagues from LAM see in this solely our desire to “become self-sufficient,” and simply our cunning and treachery. I don’t know how this will help us become self-sufficient, but probably specialists know better.

Post by Alex Amyotov .

Initially, Surfingbird showed pages as is, that is, with all the native site layout. This made it possible to receive traffic, unscrew banners, etc., etc. Then we began to encounter the fact that in place of the searched content, for example, a publication’s request to subscribe to its page on Facebook or VKontakte could be displayed. Further more: publications could hang advertising or some kind of rich media on top of the content, covering the entire site. Sometimes all of the above happened at once.

The site could run a channel on Surfingbird, put our button on the site and suddenly prohibit displaying itself inside the frame, which generally turned the content on our site into a pumpkin. Another problem for us was the display on smartphones. While on the web you can still tolerate unadapted layout, on a smartphone everything was torn to shreds in 80% of cases. The era of the mobile web has not yet arrived for our media.

Users gave us their last words, and one could understand them: it doesn’t matter to them who has what rich media: they came to watch the content. They want a holiday, not endless suffering and attempts to get to the point.

The most unpleasant problem for us was the reluctance of sites to find a common language, but at the same time receive as much traffic as possible. I won’t describe all their tricks and tricks, but neither warnings nor blocking stopped them. Every day we faced the same problems related to the desire to get as many advertising impressions as possible. We cannot blame the sites for this: unfortunately, their business is now built only on this. We don’t want to write multi-page carts about the stagnation in which the media is now. Everyone already understands this - deep down.

In fact, the media are not created for the sake of advertising.

The main mission of the site is to convey your content to users. This is primary, and here our goals - the goals of Surfingbird as a service and the goals of the platforms that produce content - coincide. When the main complaint of large publications is that “traffic has dropped,” this is simply a tragedy. The worst scenario for the development of online media. They are paralyzed by the fear that they may lose an advertiser, or under-rotate the banner that they have turned into their idol.

You know, recently on Surfingbird I watched the same pre-roll about winter sports (I think everyone remembers it) about 20 times. This was the last straw. In the six years of my work in IT, nothing has changed, and the media are only driving themselves deeper and deeper into the dead-end path of monetization by spinning banners, not understanding that the advertiser is interested in a platform with an audience - not numbers in metrics, but an audience.

You can't pray endlessly on CPM. This is brain cancer, a serious illness when vital organs are already beginning to fail.

Of course, we did not expect such a negative reaction and such hysteria from people who position themselves as the vanguard of a new generation of media. This shocked us.

We also did not expect such a mess when we indicate in five different places on the page whose content it is, where it comes from, who it belongs to, and provide the opportunity to switch to the normal layout of the site in one click. But they still say: “You are stealing content.” You steal and that's it.

This happens, for a second, in the era of the existence of Instapaper, Readability, AdBlock, all sorts of readers, countless similar browser plugins, and, after all, VKontakte previews. Reluctance to shift thinking to new lines, reluctance to understand that a new generation of media is emerging (such as Surfingbird) - all this provokes conflicts out of nowhere. Well, we sent the team “Fas!” from LAM to Hopes&Fears. Well, yes, “Hoops” bit, explaining it as something from the series “We write what we want.” Great, what next? Not to mention the fact that this approach suits NTV more, and not the supposedly liberal media, which are thirsty for some kind of reforms in the country.

What do we do

We planned to make a big announcement on Thursday, and we will make it. We definitely don’t plan to deviate from our concept: someone must change the current situation, someone must think about the user. VKontakte began to do this with its preview of materials - excellent, a positive moment. Some people still think in terms of magazine circulation, this is bad and we will change this. You can’t constantly chatter on this topic. We need to evolve somehow.

We tested the adapted layout quite a long time ago, from the beginning of September. First they rolled it out to 10% of pages, then increased it to 50%. In recent days, we have begun to gradually increase to 100%, and this coming Thursday we will completely exclude pages that are not adapted for mobile versions from the search results. Of course, there was no pressure from the investor here.

We have communicated and continue to communicate with publications. In general, we don’t see any drama: after all, showing users the site’s content for free is better than not showing it at all, loudly slamming the door and banning it by IP. In the long term, publications will only benefit from this, especially since we plan to create an affiliate program.

I don’t understand how you can get your head around the idea that we will insidiously steal all the content, the entire Internet and perhaps even the sun. I don’t understand how people get along with the idea that someone can save their content, for example, in Pocket and then, somewhere in a place unknown to the investigation, meanly read it without clicking on the banner. I don't understand.

What kind of new media, what kind of protest is there if all the media are at the level of thinking of the 2000s with an exorbitant ambition that our content is the best and exclusive in the world. I'll say more: don't threaten South Central while drinking juice on your block. After the situation with RIAN, all news and near-news products will become twice as boring and neutral, and in general it is not very clear who will then need them and who will read them.

Think about the user

The user wants content. That's it, it's that simple. He wants to watch all sorts of things according to his interests. We cannot control the greed of sites, but we can take the object of desire - traffic - out of brackets and create a uniform format for displaying sites for all, because for the user everyone should be equal. It is impossible for some site to be unable to deliver its content due to the fact that the sales department bent the editorial team and filled the entire site with banners. I saw this when I worked at WMJ.ru. It shouldn't be this way, it's wrong, it's a dead end.

The media is not a banner-rolling factory; that is not what they were created for.

We are not interested in all these showdowns, squabbles and conflicts of publishing houses in the light of recent events, these clarifications until we are hoarse about who has more. God, how boring this is, how so 2010 it is.

We write algorithms and recommend content - these are the two things that interest us more than anything else and which find positive feedback from our users, for whom we work.

We recognize that not all sites behave the same, but we cannot divide them into good and bad. All pages will be adapted to the new format. We will try to satisfy the interests of the sites as much as possible, but our ideology is that crystal clear content is primary, everything else is secondary.

The future is inevitable, whether anyone wants it or not. The user deserves to be able to easily read the article from any device. Everyone needs to accept this.

Keep calm and surf,
Sergey Shalaev,
Especially for TJournal

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