I had an incredibly frustrating experience this morning and felt the need to share. I wanted to know where I could watch the Notre Dame vs. Navy game. I figured it was either on NBC or on Peacock but wasn’t sure. So I Googled, “where to watch Notre Dame vs. Navy game” and received a link from the NBC affiliate in Chicago with the headline “How to watch Notre Dame vs. Navy game”. Great!
So I land on this page, get the headline, a photo, caption, etc. Ok fine, I’ll scroll.
Here we are with 3.5 paragraphs and a block quote…still no response on where to watch the damn game which is what I came here for and the headline would imply, I would get.
Here we are, on the 3rd scroll. I get where the game is, when the game is, and then finally…how to watch the damn game. Notre Dame vs. Navy is on NBC and/or Peacock.
Stuff like this is why recipe sites are such garbage. The usefulness of the headline gets picked up by search engines and then the actual information you need is buried at the bottom of the page, if it’s on the page at all.
This is to optimize time on site, a metric that can be sold to advertisers. “Our average page view is a minute long” as if that means someone will spend a minute staring at an ad.
In a previous role, a goal I set was to see how quickly I could get a user off of a page while still accomplishing their goal. It was actually fairly simple. Get the page to load quickly, put the key action they wanted above the fold, and conversion rate actually increased! That is serving the user. Not this nonsense.