The Daily Mirror (don’t click that) is the english newspaper of record in Sri Lanka. They have the most successful news website in the country which is also, simultaneously, quite possibly the worst website on earth. For reference I include something calling itself the worst website ever:
I would venture that this intentionally bad website is actually more readable than the Daily Mirror. The page today (August 27th) has 25 ads, 26 if you include the splash screen that takes over the page. While that seems to make money for them, it makes the site completely unreadable. I used to read the DM now and I just don’t. Simply opening the page fills me with dread and the news stories are usually not much better than tweets. I get the gist from their SMS service (which is relatively good) and read more somewhere else, that is, on some site where it is possible to read without getting your retinas strobed.
Why is it like this? For one thing, it’s because Sri Lankan web advertisers pay for space, not impressions. If you pay for space the same ad has to show up on every page served. If you pay for impressions (like Google or FB or modern sites do) you pay for say 10,000 pages viewed by some amount of people. After that someone else can have the ad slot. In this way big sites are able to earn, advertisers can get actual attention, and nobody gets ebola of the eyeball. You could say that it’s thus the advertisers fault, but if anyone could, the Daily Mirror could educate them and change the system.
In this case they give advertisers exactly what they think they want and it ends up being a horrible experience for readers and advertisers alike.
Not that we don’t struggle with this issue at YAMU. Right now there’s a big bloating and acid reflux ad on the top of our site (ENO, try it out if you’re feeling gassy), but we at least try to limit the advertising on our site rather than saying yes to everyone that asks. This isn’t philanthropic, it’s just that we value our readers and want to deliver value to advertisers as well, which sometimes means restraint.
I guess the Daily Mirror is too big to care and nobody’s going to take a risk and go for less revenue, but it does make them a bit of a dinosaur as far as online goes. I like them, but their website sucks and a more discerning competitor could possibly take them out. At the least, it would be great if someone would compete. As it is I just get my news from social media, or maybe Republic Square.
You are correct Indi. I too used to read DM but not anymore. They should change the web format and rethink about the ads. Their sister paper, The Sunday Times is also badly designed. Nobody can read the stuff in it as the font is too small.
They could probably earn more by using a CPM or CPC revenue model and have advertisers compete for limited ad space, just like how all major publishers do online. They have instead placed ads all over their homepage and devalued their ad inventory and compromised user experience as a result.
Most of the ads are irrelevant to their readership outside Sri Lanka too, which means that they are not utilizing geo-targeting via an ad server. You can serve different ads to different regions through the same ad slots using an ad server, and further monetize your inventory by selling the same ad slots to advertisers in other regions.
But losing traffic because of a terrible user experience may not make a difference to them at all because advertisers in Sri Lanka could care less about a site’s traffic — they tend to care about how much branding they can get on a site.
This is the website of a popular newspaper that has been around for nearly two decades. They have a dedicated marketing department that sells ad space for their paper, so selling their ad inventory would be a breeze too. They don’t have to dance to any advertiser’s tune, or educate anyone, no?
Yes, it’s bloody horrible. I’m glad you mentioned YAMU though, as I’ve felt the same way about it as DM – becoming unreadable with the current use of advertising.
That’s weird. Maybe you have a different add-on that is manikg the page hide content. Did you try a different browser? I’m using Firefox and it’s rendering fine.
I didn’t know there were browsers other than Firefox. (snicker) After you ptosed, I used IE and did see what you’re talking about. So, thank you for the confirmation.Still, with no other add-ons running, I still don’t see the 5 paragraphs. I remember Firefox disabled *some* add-on made by Microsoft last week — maybe that (whatever it was) is why I’m not seeing it. It’s an unsolved mystery. Thanks for your help, effie. :) Take care.
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