Meanwhile, your customers-the majority of whom are using 56kbps or slower modems-are spending their time waiting: waiting for the page to download, waiting for the animation to appear, waiting for the jerky video and gap-filled audio files to play.

Thanks to such obvious design gaffes, smart companies have learned to restrain their use of bandwidth-hogging multimedia technologies. The most successful business sites all sport simple, rapidly downloading Web pages. On the Yahoo, REI, Lands’ End and Amazon.com sites, most pages have plenty of information-rich text, image files are small in size, and multimedia or broadband features-if any-are kept well off the home page. That way, customers who want to look at a large graphic or watch a video can seek those features out, while the majority can easily avoid them.

But now that broadband Internet access is becoming more widespread among home users, a lot of people are talking about broadband-enhanced content. The golden age of streaming video is about to dawn-right? Not so fast. It’s true that broadband connections are becoming more widespread, but that doesn’t exactly give Web designers carte blanche.

According to a recent study by Internet research firm Jupiter Research/Media Metrix, broadband Internet access is indeed growing. One-third of U.S. online households will have a high-speed Internet connection by 2005, Jupiter predicts-that’s over 28 million households. Stiff competition among service providers will drive the cost of broadband access down to about $20 to $25 per month-about what a dialup connection costs today. However, Jupiter predicts that broadband growth won’t really pick up steam until 2002. What’s more, most of the people surveyed by Jupiter (53%) have no interest in broadband right now.

In fact, according to an international survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, home Internet users are primarily interested in going online to research information and use e-mail, and for that, a dialup connection is just fine, thank you very much. Streaming multimedia entertainment, according to this study, is the least popular reason for going online, garnering interest from a mere 6% of U.S. consumers and 4% of those in Europe.

The Internet’s infrastructure just doesn’t support video and other bandwidth-intensive multimedia very well yet. Keynote Systems, which monitors the performance of Web sites, recently started tracking streaming media features on popular Web sites. The initial results show that most multimedia delivery is shockingly poor. On Keynote’s scale, which goes from zero to 10, the average site rated a mere 1.87 in streaming media performance. The problems Keynote identified will be familiar to anyone who has tried to view a video on the Web: media files that are slow to start (or unavailable), poor quality video and audio, and an overall poor quality of experience for the user.

Broadband Internet access only fixes part of the problem-the “last mile” data connection. If you produce broadband content you have a host of additional expenses. You need to worry about requisitioning plenty of extra bandwidth for your network operations centers, beefing up your servers, and perhaps contracting with content delivery companies such as Akamai, which can help deliver broadband to end users more quickly. After you’ve done all of that, traffic on the Web continues to make broadband quality unpredictable.

Even when your customer is another business, you can’t count on it having a fast connection. Maybe your customer’s T-1 line is filled to capacity at the moment he tries to access your site, or maybe the CEO is checking out your site from a dialup line in his hotel room. Either way, if your site relies on multimedia and you can’t deliver it, you’re hosed.

Finally, even if the predictions are correct and one-third of all home users do have broadband connections by 2005, that still leaves another two-thirds of consumers on slow dialup lines. What sensible business would exclude 66% of its potential market?

If you must add broadband content to your site, do so with care. It may add cachet, and it might help prove to your more naive shareholders that your company really “gets” the Internet. But the bottom line is that most of your site-including, most importantly, the home page-should be easily usable by consumers on slow dialup connections. And that rule is not going to change for several years.

Dylan Tweney is an award-winning technology journalist in San Mateo, California. His Web site is at www.tweney.com.

Link: Caution: Broadband content

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Among the recent spate of dotcom layoffs and company failures, big content-focused sites have taken some of the worst beatings. Webcaster Pseudo Networks shut down in September, laying off its entire staff of 180. Crime news site APBNews laid off most of its staff last summer, putting 140 people out of work. Around the same time, CBS, Salon.com and Oxygen Media all laid off online content staff. The previous May, broadband content company Digital Entertainment Network handed out pink slips to all 150 employees and closed its doors.

After a year like this, you might start to wonder whether offering quality content on your site is really such a good business idea after all. If these high-profile startups, loaded with talent and backed by tens of millions of dollars in investment capital, can’t make a go of their well-crafted ideas and words, then who can?

Don’t be fooled. What’s really going on here is that Web companies are realizing online content alone can’t support a massive editorial payroll. Instead, content production teams need to start small, growing gradually as online revenues grow.

In fact, the size of your content staff may need to be more tightly tied to revenues than that of any other online team. The reason is that content, with a few exceptions, tends to have a short shelf life and quickly goes stale. A big investment in content today will produce returns immediately-or not at all. It’s more important to keep a steady stream of fresh content appearing on your site than it is to have a large archive or many separately staffed channels. Fresh information will keep users coming back; a large archive appeals only to the occasional visitor.

It’s a lesson that’s as applicable to e-commerce sites and clicks-and-mortar ventures as it is to pure content publishers. For example, look at the success of REI.com (www.rei.com), the online arm of outdoor and sporting goods retailer Recreational Equipment Inc. REI.com comprises three separate sites (including a Japanese site at REI.co.jp and a discount site at REIoutlet.com), which have a combined 45,000 pages of editorial and catalog content. All of that content has been produced since the first site’s launch in 1996 by a comparatively tiny staff of writers, editors and designers, now numbering about twenty people. That’s a small slice of REI.com’s entire staff of 140. But it hasn’t hurt REI.com’s standings; the site consistently draws millions of visitors per month and boasts a conversion rate around 10%, according to Matt Hyde, vice president of online sales. Hyde attributes much of that success to the site’s content, which combines seasonal features about outdoor activities with relevant product descriptions. E-tailers, take note.

In fact, some of the most successful and long-standing Web content sites have been produced on shoestring budgets with skeleton staffs. For example, a tiny staff of two or three editors and a small army of occasional freelance contributors have produced the popular satire site Suck.com (www.suck.com) since its inception in 1995. Likewise, Feed Magazine (www.feedmag .com), which was also started in 1995, has taken a similar approach, keeping fewer than 10 editors on staff for most of its life. Much of the site’s content comes from a large body of distinguished freelancers.

Both Suck.com and Feed Magazine, despite their small staffs, have been able to produce high-quality, award-winning content, and as a result have attracted loyal audiences. The payoff came this year, when the two (along with pop-culture database Alt.Culture) merged. The combined entity, Automatic Media, won a tidy $4 million in venture capital-enough to keep the online magazines going for quite awhile, thanks to their low burn rates. At the same time, the merger lets the sites reap additional efficiencies by sharing infrastructure, administration and ad sales staff.

Even AOL’s editorial director, Jesse Kornbluth, is a firm believer in keeping content staff as small and scalable as possible. Ever since last spring’s stock market shakedown, Kornbluth says, content producers have been under pressure to produce results. “Losing money to IPO is no longer fashionable-now you have to have a real business,” says Kornbluth. “New Economy companies are being judged by old economy standards. That means that bloat is out.” The answer is to start with very low overhead, keeping permanent staff to a minimum. Add to your staff only when your revenues can support a larger payroll.

The bottom line: Concentrate on keeping your site’s content fresh, and do so with the smallest practicable staff. Otherwise, when your CEO starts to demand bottom-line results from the online team, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of having to trim a bloated content staff.

Dylan Tweney is an award-winning technology writer in San Mateo, California. His Web site is www.tweney.com.

Link: Beware of content staff bloat

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