Morrus said:
As you and numerous other people have mentioned earlier - sales, for the publishers, are the only purpose for their presence here. I don't think that's true. If I'm proved wrong, Steve, I'll gladly admit to it.
I've not said it's the ONLY reason--I have said it's a big part of their incentive to hang around here. Without that incentive, what does EnWorld offer them that any number of other sites with comparable memberships don't offer? Making the site only desigend towards sales is an absolute. Only making the site about news is an absolute. What I'm commenting on is the middle ground between those two absolutes that suits customers and publishers alike in both respects. Remove one or the other and the site's usefulness IS diminished and its appeal lessened.
Because I don't think that's true, I don't think that an extra click before the sale is a big deal. And let's be clear - despite the massive hyperbole in this thread, we are only talking about an extra click. It's only a big deal if publishers are here only to make sales.
"Massive hyperbole"? I'm afraid not. Among other things, I'm a market research who deals primarily in online studies and other aspects of technical research. Yes, just ONE additional click means hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue to some of our clients. That's why they're willing to spend $35K a pop to research the matter and find out ways to compensate when such additional clicks are absolutely necessary (usually as a matter of a new security process added to online ordering software.) Reducing their purchasing process to a single click has indeed alone earned Amazon tens of millions of dollars and they've also spent millions protecting their patent on it from the competition because it does indeed have that great an effect. This isn't me spouting hyperbole, this is me being able to look at web sites of some of the largest companies in the world and being able to say "hey, I remember the study that helped design that!" and passing what they spent lots of money learning on to you and anyone else reading this thread at no cost, to be taken or forgotten as you will.
The online world is all about instant gratification, or as close as you can get. Granted, the effect is worse for larger companies, but even if you're only losing one in 50
potential sales or even one in a thousand because of that extra click, do the math on how much that can add up to in a year when you consider how many people visit EnWorld every day.
What publishers can still do is tell people about their products, and they can send people to their own websites which should have info, news, previews and so forth about their stuff. Again, assuming that they're not only posting here for the sole purpose of making direct sales - if they are, then, well... yes, it's bad news for them.
You lose sight of the fact that most publishers were
already doing this to begin with--what you're proposing in the above is little different than the links I already have in my signature. It's not like the above is anything new that the publishers don't already have working for them. What IS happening is that the convenience to the customer, not the publisher, is being removed and that will end up hurting the publisher through the round-about. If that is so, I again state that you're reducing the reasons why publishers vest time and energy in EnWorld when they'd be better off leaving token information here and investing themselves in sites that aren't enforcing such policies.
Out of self-interest, sure I'd rather Misfit Studios not lose those sales, but in the bigger picture I'd rather not inconvenience my customers, which means putting more energy into promoting in places where that is less likely to happen and less energy into EnWorld. I'd be shocked if I'm the only publisher who feels this way, and with good reason.