High-res peterfeld: jaketbrooks: Take a look at the NYTimes.com’s beautiful video ghetto. After watching an excellent animation produced by Zach Wise and Danielle Belopotosky about securities lending, I was looking for context: any and all related content. There was none to be found. Sure, if I wanted to watch another video, perhaps starring Andy Rooney or about the future of television, it was right there, but there was no content related to New Orleans, banking, the economy, nada. NYTimes.com effectively walls off their video content from the rest of their content. This strategy definitely results in a very tidy, pretty page, but how functional is it? The problematic assumption here is this: I watched a video, therefore I will be interested in watching other videos. This assumption is sometimes valid, but it wasn’t in my case and I doubt its valid the majority of the time. I watched this video because I was interested in learning about how the city of New Orleans was being gamed by the banking system. Once I was done, I was interested in reading more NYTimes.com content related to that. Why is it nowhere to be found?  I wonder how high the bounce rate is on these video permalinks. I think this is a vestige. You are right, segregating content by format is lame, a naive print-media web mistake that was more common five years ago (see: navbars that point to “stories,” “blogs,” “slideshows,” etc.) but nowadays I think the Times generally provides good context for their multimedia. The existence of a landing page for videos doesn’t mean they don’t also group those videos with related news stories. Agreed that the Times does a good job of grouping content by context rather than type. But you can go too far with this; the Newsweek redesign is an example of the dangers of being agnostic to media type. Video is a different experience than text, and should be presented in a different fashion. 

peterfeld:

jaketbrooks:

Take a look at the NYTimes.com’s beautiful video ghetto.

After watching an excellent animation produced by Zach Wise and Danielle Belopotosky about securities lending, I was looking for context: any and all related content. There was none to be found. Sure, if I wanted to watch another video, perhaps starring Andy Rooney or about the future of television, it was right there, but there was no content related to New Orleans, banking, the economy, nada. NYTimes.com effectively walls off their video content from the rest of their content.

This strategy definitely results in a very tidy, pretty page, but how functional is it?

The problematic assumption here is this: I watched a video, therefore I will be interested in watching other videos. This assumption is sometimes valid, but it wasn’t in my case and I doubt its valid the majority of the time. I watched this video because I was interested in learning about how the city of New Orleans was being gamed by the banking system. Once I was done, I was interested in reading more NYTimes.com content related to that. Why is it nowhere to be found? 

I wonder how high the bounce rate is on these video permalinks.

I think this is a vestige. You are right, segregating content by format is lame, a naive print-media web mistake that was more common five years ago (see: navbars that point to “stories,” “blogs,” “slideshows,” etc.) but nowadays I think the Times generally provides good context for their multimedia. The existence of a landing page for videos doesn’t mean they don’t also group those videos with related news stories.

Agreed that the Times does a good job of grouping content by context rather than type. But you can go too far with this; the Newsweek redesign is an example of the dangers of being agnostic to media type. Video is a different experience than text, and should be presented in a different fashion. 

Notes

  1. jericsinger reblogged this from soupsoup and added:
    Great point. Online video has traditionally been walled-off from other content, with the idea that people watch online...
  2. markcoatney reblogged this from peterfeld and added:
    Agreed that the Times does a good job of grouping content by context rather than type. But you can go too far with this;...
  3. peterfeld reblogged this from soupsoup and added:
    I think this is a vestige. You are right, segregating content by format is lame, a naive print-media web mistake that...
  4. soupsoup reblogged this from jaketbrooks
  5. jaketbrooks posted this