I honestly don’t know who the slideshows are for. They don’t even display more ads as far as I can see.
God damn that is such a brutally hostile response that I don’t for a second believe you
I know that the writers are basically being forced to use them at this point for the sake of SEO and clicks, but yeesh these indie game list article headlines are cringey. I’m honestly kinda surprised the sub-headline isn’t more along the lines of “The #7 game on this list will blow you away!” or something like on…
It’s been made pretty clear (I believe the source was various twitter posts by writers who left the site) that the slideshows and other changes that users complain about which have come into place since Deadspin melted down, are mandated because the current GMG executives (or at least the Herb).
So I decided to actually check it out and loaded up a slideshow article...in another browser free of any extensions and userscripts since, you know, it’s not 1995 and I’ve been using adblockers for nearly 20 years now lol.
Brief chats with outgoing writers and just poking my nose about. The commenting areas also reflect it too. I don’t have beef with any of the new staff at all, but the site is clearly on a downturn, which is why everyone ran for the hills after they fucked up Deadspin.
It’s probably about the ads. Every new slide on a slideshow loads new ads, so a full click-through is way more ad views than a straight article.
Same here. At first, it seemed like Kotaku would remain Kotaku for the most part. The at length articles, new stuff like Morning Music and so on were very Kotaku, but they went away. The fact that the place is dead as hell after 6-7pm EST Fridays with almost no weekend posts or reasons to visit makes me sad.
I’m not surprised. I barely engage with the comments now, and the quality of the articles has dropped dramatically since the Old Guard all jumped ship.
Yeah I had that thought about reader engagement a few days ago (in the shower, as all good ponderings come from). A few years ago an article with high engagement could expect a thousand comments or so, now the upper end is a couple hundred. Most don’t even seem to break 50.
I wouldn’t be surprised if total readers are…
You have no idea how happy it makes me that this wasn’t a slideshow
oh for sure that’s 100%, more clicks, more revenue, but the community hates it and it needs to be repeated
Ironically this looks exactly the same as their slideshow articles look once you fix them lol.
It’s not just Kotaku. Scuttlebutt is that slideshows are likely being pushed from on high due to higher clicks. Most of the writers don’t care for them, but when told effectively “You really should use more slideshows” by the higher ups, well...
the fuck, kotaku is able to display articles like this that aren’t slideshows?! who knew! I wonder if the authors could try it more often....
Except for the part where a portion of each video is covered by the “previous slide” and “next slide” buttons.
Exactly. He’s responded to me several times with increasingly worse slurs (and I think the spelling gets worse as he gets more hysterical) and I keep dismissing them.
They’ve invaded everywhere. It’s terrible at Jez and The Root. It’s going to drive off long time commenters and I hope it fucking does. I hope this whole family of websites implodes bc of their lax policy on trolls.
Yeah I had me fun responding, now I’m just flagging his harassing posts and dismissing his responses