Poor Richard 30
#30/09-July-99
POOR RICHARD'S WEB SITE NEWS
Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site
Editor: Peter Kent
Top Floor Publishing
http://PoorRichard.com/
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/ http://www.recommend-it.com/l.z.e?s=141385IN THIS ISSUE
- Beginner's Column: Music is Software -- And MP3 Proves It
- You Must Have .Com! -- Part II
- Online Transaction Failure Rate -- Part II
- Poor Richard's Web Site and Other Top Floor Books
- Book Reviewers Wanted -- MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution
- Reading Back Issues
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Beginner's Column: Music is Software -- And MP3 Proves It
This may not be obvious, but Music is software. It always has been, but changes in music technology over the past 18 months have made this quite clear.
In May of 1998 I was visiting a friend in Philadelphia, Joel Diamond of WUGNET ( http://www.wugnet.com/ ). He showed me WinAmp (the most popular MP3 player), and the things that you could do with MP3. I was pretty impressed -- I'd heard music playing from a computer before, of course, but this was different. It was very high quality, the sound files were very small -- around 1MB for every minute of music -- and there was already a large community of MP3 users, so there was a lot of music available.
At that point I had the idea of publishing a book about MP3. In fact Joel and I tried to get AOL to distribute a book with WinAmp bundled in it -- an AOL-branded version of WinAmp -- but at the time we couldn't get AOL's publishing arm interested, and the people at NullSoft, the publisher of WinAmp, didn't seem to understand the benefits. (You may have heard that just a few weeks ago AOL bought NullSoft for some ungodly amount of money. Unfortunately Joel and I were _not_ involved in this deal, being way too far ahead of both AOL and NullSoft!) I did go ahead and publish a book on the subject, though: "MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution: Turn Your PC into a CD-Quality Jukebox," by John Hedtke ( http://topfloor.com/mp3/ ). This book includes a CD that contains WinAmp, along with another popular MP3 program called MusicMatch, which contains a CD "ripper," a utility that copies tracks from CDs and saves them in the MP3 format.
But the CD contains more than just programs, it has over ten hours of music. (That's what we say on the book cover ... actually it's probably around eleven hours of music.) Now, a normal audio CD can only hold around 70 minutes of music. But at 1MB per minute, it's not hard to get many hours of music on a single disk.
So in what sense is music software? Well, in the same way that you have to store computer files on some kind of media -- floppy disks, hard disks, tapes, CDs, and so on -- you've always had to store music "files" on some kind of media. Music has been stored on vinyl (kinda floppy) disks, tapes, CDs, and more. But more importantly, music is now being treated like software in a number of ways. In fact there are parallels between the music and shareware businesses.
Many bands are now using MP3 tracks as a promotional tool. They record a track in MP3 format, then "set it free" on the Internet. They send it to the MP3 archives, in the same way that shareware developers send their software to the shareware archives. The bands encourage people to copy their music and pass it on to friends. And the smart ones make sure that the MP3 files contain contact information (though it surprises me how many _don't_ include this information). You see, an MP3 file contains more than just sound. (By the way, it's not just musicians who are using MP3 -- a lot of comedians are using the format, too.) An MP3 track can contain a picture -- generally album art. It can also contain lyrics, an artist or band bio, and contact information such as a Web URL. Good MP3 players can not only play the music, but they can display the text and art. (Microsoft Media Player can play MP3 tracks, but cannot display the text and art.)
Not everyone understands this concept of "music as shareware" yet. When we were putting together the CD to go with the book, we contacted hundreds of musicians who we knew had created MP3 tracks, asking if they wanted to include the tracks on the CD. The vast majority were very eager to be included. A number, however, wanted payment. We received a few complaints, too, accusing us of "exploiting" musicians. They just didn't understand the concept of shareware. (Actually the more correct term is demoware; you give away a track as a demo, in the hopes that people will buy an album.)
At one time the idea that a software developer would give away programs was quite radical. These days it's merely another distribution method, one that's made a number of people very wealthy, and that can even be used in some circumstances by companies that are generally work with more traditional methods of distribution.
The same is true of the music business. There are many in the business who do not like the idea of giving away music. At least, not in the MP3 format. CDnow, for instance, which doesn't want to alienate the music distributors, is experimenting with the .wma format, a sound file that plays through the latest beta version of Microsoft Windows Media Player 6.2 and that can be "timed" to expire after a certain number of days. (MP3 tracks have no technical limitations -- they can be freely copied and played, without restrictions.)
By the way, the popularity of MP3 is very much a product of the Internet. It's the Internet that allows music to flow from person to person in this way. In fact MP3 has grown in popularity in a very "viral" way (see the discussion of viral marketing in a recent issue of this newsletter: http://www.poorrichard.com/newsltr/028.htm#viral ). Search for the term MP3 at AltaVista, for instance, and you'll find well over 3 million pages (last summer, such a search would have found "just" half a million pages).
If you'd like to learn more about MP3, take a look at "MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution." See http://TopFloor.com/mp3/ for more information.
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You Must Have .Com! -- Part II
In the last edition of this newsletter I ranted a little bit about the lunacy of setting up a domain name for which you don't have the .com version. Setting up a .co.uk or .net domain, for instance, when somebody else owns same name under the .com top-level domain. See ...
http://www.poorrichard.com/newsltr/029.htm#com
I got a bit of mail about that. One reader pointed out that the focus on the .com domain is actually a bit of a nuisance. In particular, in the United States almost nobody uses the .us domain, while in other countries the use of the country top-level domain is common.
This reader pointed out that the use of the country domain can be very helpful in searching for services you need. "If I want a UK supplier I have an easy way to restrict my search, limit it to .co.uk. If I know it's a government department I can limit the search to .gov.uk. (How? in AltaVista restrict searches to one TLD by including in your search statement domain:uk, to restrict to gov.uk you have to use url:gov.uk)."
The reader went on to point out that geographical domains can be used to search for "a dentist or pizza delivery service," and that "If I want a manufactured item or a service, my first choice will be for a provider using the same currency, language, and taxation regime, and subject to the same legislation. If I don't find what I need in the UK domain then I might choose to widen the search."
These are all good points. And I'd never suggest that you _shouldn't_ use a domain other than the .com domain. What I'm saying is that you should make sure you get the .com domain _as well_ as a matching country domain, or .net or .org domain. Amazon.com, for instance, also has Amazon.co.uk.
Let's not overstate the value of a country domain, anyway. If you live in, say, England, you don't want a dentist or pizza delivery service "somewhere in the UK," you want one close to home. Still, I can certainly see the value of having a country domain. But that doesn't change the reality. And the reality is that the .com domain is very important, especially if you want to do business worldwide. "The [non-.com] TLDs (top-level domains) serve a useful purpose," said this reader. "To drive everyone to .com discards that valuable function." I agree. But the fact is the .com domain _is_ dominant. Perhaps that will change someday, but for now we have to fact that reality.
Dentist.xxx and Pizza.xxx
The same reader posed the rhetorical question, "who would be stupid enough to limit their internet research to a game of 'guess the domain name.' The last thing I would do to find a dentist or pizza is to try www.dentist.com or www.pizza.com."
In fact many people do search in this way -- far more than have the knowledge to enable them to restrict a search to a particular country domain. But in any case, I'm not suggesting that you should limit yourself to only "keyword" domains (though if you can get them, go for it! I discussed this issue long ago, early in 1998 ... see http://www.poorrichard.com/newsltr/004.htm#begin ). I'm saying that if you're trying to promote a domain name, it's often easier to get people to remember a .com name than any other.
But let's take a look at those dentist and pizza domains -- they're pretty good examples.
There is a dentist.com. There's also a dentist.net. Both sites are "under construction." But they're owned by different companies. The first is owned by a company called Dentist.com, in Danbury, CT. The second is owned by the Dentist Network, in Burlingame, CA. Now, does it really make sense for the Dentist Network to try to build an Internet presence around Dentist.net? (It appears that that is the only domain name they have right now.) I really don't think so -- how many people seeing or hearing their advertising will remember the word "dentist" but not the .net bit? How many will go to their computers and type "www.dentist.com" into their browsers?
As for Pizza.com and Pizza.net, there's a similar situation. Pizza.com is owned by Internet Information Services, of Bethesda, MD (and is currently not in use), while Pizza.net is owned by IMG Inc. of Las Vegas, NV. Although it's also not currently in use, there's a placeholder page saying that the service is "coming soon." Again, why would anyone put money into an ad campaign for Pizza.net, when it's going to push people over to the pizza.com domain?
Single-word Navigation
Here's something that's very important to consider. Millions of people are using browsers that default to the .com domain. Not so long ago both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were set up so that if you typed a single word into the Location/Address text box at the top of the browser and then pressed Enter, the browser would append .com to that word and look for the .com domain. Millions of people are still working with these older browsers, and are used to working with them in that way. If they remember hearing or seeing an ad for a pizza company, at "pizza dot somethingOrOther," there's a good chance they'll simply type the word "pizza" and press Enter.
Even newer browsers may default to the .com domain. I typed "pizza" into Internet Explorer 5, and guess what came up. Two panes -- in one was the placeholder page at Pizza.com, while in the other was a search results page ... and the pizza.net domain wasn't included!
I then typed the word "pizza" into Netscape Navigator 4.6. It went straight to pizza.com. Now, I have the Enable Internet Keywords option turned off in the preferences (in the Smart Browsing category -- see http://www.poorrichard.com/newsltr/012.htm#domain for a discussion of this feature). So I turned the feature back on, and tried again. This time I got a search-results page containing four links to pizza-related Web sites (none of which were pizza.com or pizza.net), followed by links to pizza.com, pizza.net, and pizza.org, with pizza.com at the top of the list. (Pizza.org is owned by yet another organization, but doesn't seem to have anything to do with pizza.)
In any case, most Internet users assume that a domain is .com. It's Amazon.com, not .net; CDnow.com, not .net; Yahoo.com, CNN.com, and so on. So if someone remembers an ad, but not the specifics, he'll probably assume the domain is .com.
It's true that in other countries people are used to working with country domains, but if the choice is between a .com domain and a .net domain, the .com domain is the important one. And if you want to attract people from North America -- where most Internet users live, and where most money is spent online -- you need a .com domain.
More Domain Mistakes
I've noticed another couple of domain mistakes recently. Perhaps you've heard the recent advertising campaign by Rent.net. I'll bet Rent.com are happy about that, as it's free advertising for them.
And perhaps you've heard that AOL bought eMachines, a computer manufacturer. When I went looking for this company online I was really surprised to discover that the eMachines URL is www.e4me.com, which seems to break two rules! First, it's best to have a domain name that matches your company name, but the www.EMachines.com domain is owned by a company that sells computer memory (Ready Access Memory, in Eugene, OR). Secondly, EForMe.com is owned by the Especially For Me Boutique (which is run by Mistress Ann -- visit the site to see photos of her dungeon!). So the e4Me.com domain won't work well on radio and TV (because it's hard to audibly differentiate between "E4Me" and "EForMe"). EMachines do own the EMachinesInc.com domain, but there's a good chance that at some point Ready Access Memory is going to get a nice offer to sell their domain!
Restrictions on .com Domains?
I heard more about this issue from several other readers. One reader told me that when he tried to register a .com domain, through a U.S. domain-registration company, he was told that he couldn't -- that the .com domain is for U.S. use only. THAT IS NOT CORRECT! The .com domain can be used by any commercial concern, regardless of country.
I also heard an interesting story about the Herman Miller domains. (Herman Miller is a U.S. office-furniture company). The UK subsidiary of this company was told by their headquarters that it couldn't use the hermanmiller.co.uk address, for some strange reason (they have registered it, though). So they decided to register millereurope.com. They were misinformed by the registration company, and told that they couldn't register a .com domain, so they registered millereurope.co.uk.
In the meantime, millereurope.com was registered by ... a competitor, a company in London called Miller Europe that sells some of the same sort of furniture that Herman Miller sells.
Legal Restrictions
Finally, I've been told that some countries may restrict companies from using domains other than their country domains. I heard that France has banned the use of all but the .fr domain. (Can anyone else confirm that?) That's pretty short sighted, typical of what happens when you let bureaucrats and politicians make too many decisions!
Online Transaction Failure Rate -- Part II
In the last issue, I discussed a statistic published by _Interactive Week_, that out of every three people who begin putting things into a Web site's shopping cart, only one completes the transaction and buys something -- two out of three abandon the transaction. See ...
http://www.poorrichard.com/newsltr/029.htm#fail
Part of my conclusion was a little off the mark. I said that "there's a huge group of people who want to buy online, who are a little wary of doing so." But I received a lot of mail from readers who abandon items in shopping carts. None said that they feared buying online. The single most important issue, if these responses can be used as a "survey," is that merchants are hiding information from buyers. Many buyers, it seems, are going through the buying process so that they can see how much it will cost to ship products to them. Merchants often hide this information away, so buyers feel that the only way to get that information is to load up the shopping cart and go to the checkout.
Another complaint was that the store software often fails to respond in a in a reasonable period of time while the buyer is trying to complete the transaction. Or that the procedure is poorly designed, requiring screen after screen of input, confirmations, and so on. Combine the two -- a slow server and poor design -- and many buyers simply leave in disgust.
These responses indicate a few areas in which you can increase sales.
1. Shipping Info
You can put shipping information somewhere up front, so visitors don't have to dig through your shopping-cart to find out how much they'll have to pay. Of course this won't make the people who are currently abandoning items in the shopping cart buy from you. They'll simply find out sooner that they don't want to buy from you! But there may be people who don't even bother entering your store if you don't post shipping costs. Many people don't have the patience to dig around looking for them, so they never enter your store. By posting these costs up front -- assuming they are reasonable -- you may encourage more people to purchase from you.
2. Shipping Costs
Perhaps your shipping costs are too high. You might compare your costs with those charged by other stores selling similar products.
3. Store Design
It's hard to find a really good shopping-cart system. Most are lacking in essential features, and many are hard to use. But if at all possible, make sure you have an easy-to-use system.
4. Server Speed
If the server your store is running on is slow ... it's probably time to change.
Shopping-Cart as Research Tool
There's another reason for abandoning transactions. One reader said this, for instance:
"I use the Amazon cart as a place to put books that I might want to buy in future. I don't want to write down all the details for each book (price, title etc.), so I just add it to the cart, and when I'm done "shopping", I print the page. Then I leave the site with a record of what I might buy in the future. To Amazon, it seems like I am continually aborting a transaction, when in fact all I am doing is research."
Another had this to say:
"With CD's, for example, I find that if I can't get four in my shopping cart then the postage costs make it more expensive than buying in my local store. So I print out a copy of my shopping cart and store it till I think of another CD I want to buy, and repeat the procedure till I have a nice stack of them. The same holds true for books.The services could be improved by having an optional registration scheme which would allow you to store your shopping cart with them between sessions."
In fact some stores _do_ allow you to save products for future purchase. CDnow, for instance, has a service called MyCDnow. It's free, and once you've signed up (all it takes is your e-mail address and a password) you can use a "Wish List" to store CDs that you may want to buy later. You can even use the Wish List as a Gift Registry; you send a URL pointing to your Gift Registry to friends and family, so that they can view the list and place an item into a shopping cart by simply clicking on it. But unfortunately this is the sort of feature that is currently out of reach of most small merchants -- it's a custom-programming job that only the big stores can afford.
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What can you do with MP3? Copy from your CDs to your computer ... create customized playlists (that run for hours or even days) ... play music from your computer through your stereo ... cut your own customized CDs and tapes (include just your favorite tracks) ... promote your music or band ... record MP3s from vinyl, tape, the radio ... and plenty more.
Find out all about MP3 in "MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution." The book includes a disk with WinAmp, MusicMatch, and over ten hours of great MP3 music! Visit http://TopFloor.com/mp3/ for more information!
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Poor Richard's Web Site and Other Top Floor Books
Top Floor Publishing now has four books in print:
Poor Richard's Web Site
http://PoorRichard.com/
Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions
http://PoorRichard.com/promo/
The CDnow Story: Rags to Riches on the Internet
http://TopFloor.com/cdnow/
MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution: Turn Your PC into a CD-Quality Jukebox
http://TopFloor.com/mp3/
Order direct from the publisher, and you'll get a 100%, 1-Year Guarantee. If you feel the book wasn't worth the money, send it back for a refund!
And remember, these books are discounted at the Web site, and you pay just one shipping cost regardless of how many books you buy!
Book Reviewers Wanted -- MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution
Do you review books for newspapers, magazines, newsletters (electronic or paper), Web sites, or other media spots? If so, perhaps you'd like to review Top Floor Publishing's latest book, "MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution: Turn Your PC into a CD-Quality Jukebox." Or perhaps you'd like to review one of the books I mentioned above?
Contact my Marketing Director, Missy Derkacz, at reviews@TopFloor.com. Include your full mailing address, the name of newspaper/magazine/whatever in which the review will appear and the probable date of publication, and the editor's contact information.
Reading Back Issues
If you need to refer to back issues of this newsletter -- and search the archives -- you can find them at the following location:
http://PoorRichard.com/newsltr/
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