Aggressive growth projects often lead to UX cruft, slowly degrading long-term user engagement and retention. Yes, you can move short-term metrics by throwing a blocking modal that up-sells a subscription (yes newspaper websites, I’m talking about you!) but how long before that alienates long-term users?
tension and trade-off. short vs. long-term thinking.
When a creativity medium is democratized, the volume of available content swells, necessitating a curational layer. We’ve reached this third stage for podcasts.
The fact that Amazon just drastically reduced its affiliate fees is perfect evidence of how little negotiating power these individual sites have in this value chain, despite their collective importance.
Here is what I believe the App Store has fundamentally wrong: its current organizing principle is digital versus analog; anything that is digital has to have in-app purchase, while anything that is analog — i.e. connected to the real world — can monetize however it pleases. That is why Amazon or Uber can ask for your credit card, and Airbnb can do... See more