Marketing Interview: The Move Toward Fluid Content
Do you sell advertisements on the Doubleday Web site?
Yamaguchi: We have no illusions that this site is a major destination site. It’s not like a Gawker.com or a MediaBistro.com. It’s a source for information about Doubleday Publishing Group authors and things that are going on. There’s no advertising for sale. … When you take a survey of the land, most publisher Web sites have the feel of a catalog. In other words, they’re templated modules. They’re updated maybe monthly, which is crazy in the online world, but is very common [in book publishing]. … And right there, that’s a signal to your reader to not come back. … People on the Web are used to coming to a site every hour and seeing something different. When people come to the [Doubleday] site initially, they’ll think, “I recognize this, it sort of looks like a blog.” And that’s the point—it’s familiar territory. You have to adapt how you’re presenting your information. People don’t want to look at catalog copy. They want fluid content. They want to be able to organize a page based on subject or author. They want to leave a comment. They want to react to something, and they should be able to do that. … We’re really embracing that. Our goal is to put up original content three days a week. The hope is [that] it’s five days, that every day there’s something new.