Rajiv G. Aricat
Commercial websites constitute a major share of virtual web space, though it is absurd to use the word ¿share¿ in this digital era of near infinite chip memory. It is perhaps debatable whether the Internet is just another medium which outperforms its predecessors (this has been the history of media inventions: radio outperformed telephone, television outperformed radio and so on) or whether it is another world order that is capable of simulating every communication activity of the real world. Let us examine the activities in this medium at close quarters and try to make some sense of them.
Theoretically, many of the much-hyped features of internet are mere conceptual extensions of conventional media: E-mail, chat and discussion forums can be explained with models of interpersonal and group communication; websites developed for a particular business firm or service/governmental organization or individual are more or less the exact replica of the promotional brochures and leaflets they produce in print; and internet newspapers follow the same working principle, that of print journalism and journalistic writing. The objective of this article, then, is to analyze the activities involved in the creation and sustenance of commercial websites. I want to substantiate that these activities portend a major change in the realm of persuasive business writing.
One could start with the strategies used by commercial sites in their day to day exercise of content generation for the internet. What are the changes we see in the domain of language, writing and media techniques with the advent of internet? This question can be better answered if we take the cues from commercial websites rather than from internet features like e-mail or chat. It¿s true that as chat and mobile phone SMS began to intrude into our lives, language for interpersonal communication got squeezed and the frequency of their occurrence increased. But since our focus is on persuasive business communication, we may overlook the changes in language for interpersonal communication.
In the employment market, content writing for commercial websites have long since become a boom in major IT hubs of the country and is likely to remain so for the next few years, though the job profile of content writers are expected to go under revision from time to time.
¿As content writers you are not expected to become creative writers according to the strict sense of the term in which both the thought and expression need to be original. Creativity for you primarily means creativity of expression. You should collect your information from various sources, develop a proper perspective on the issue, and then write about it in your own words. That is where your creativity comes into the picture. Every sentence in your write-up must be an original sentence; it must not be a sentence lifted from anywhere.¿
reads the ¿instructions to content writers¿ distributed by a commercial web development company in a quality improvement workshop for its content writers. While rewriting the already present content has become the rule of the game with commercial sites, this method nevertheless generates good revenue for them. To understand this situation, readers have to be well aware of the main revenue generation sources of internet. One of the main sources is the Google ads. Google shares the revenue it generates from ads with the sites that carry the ads. The ads are thematically classified and displayed; thus, if a site is about Indian handicrafts, Google ads displayed within and without the text are related to this field. If an internet user clicks on to the ad, it is recorded by Google and it pays the site which displayed the ad. a portion of the amount it collects from the advertiser who gains from the click by the internet user. On the face of it, this pattern of advertising is the forerunner of all major business strategies on the internet and hence, a harbinger of all changes in business writing that the medium witnesses at present. In other words, the present method of revenue generation on internet is drastically different from the revenue generation techniques used by the print medium and has considerably influenced the concept of business writing.
When McLuhan said ?The medium is the message? he was highlighting the power of a medium to change lives. For him, the power of the message conveyed through the medium is apparently negligible when compared to the changes that a medium ushers in along with its theory and practice. Consider the process of placing an advertisement in print medium. In the case of newspapers or magazines, there are ad holes and news holes. The limited amount of space available with a single newspaper/magazine edition is shared between news or information on one hand and advertisements on the other. Diligently displayed and arranged ads and news make optimal usage of newsprint/printable paper?say 16 newspaper pages in the case of a single print edition of a morning newspaper. And the optimum use of ad holes and news holes has been the task before all those who manage print medium throughout its history. But chip technology has made all the difference. Now the question is not about making optimal use of scarce resources but it¿s a question of effectively garnering the plentitude. It is not that since the cost of publishing is negligible in internet, you can write about anything and everything. On the other hand, one ought to write about anything and everything to meet the technical requirements adhered to the medium. In short, the concept of precision in writing which has been a major prerequisite for writing for print medium has given way to tautology and redundancy. Let¿s elaborate more on this point.
According to the basic working principle of search engines, a site is detected, promoted and ranked by the engine based more on the quantity of the content than on quality. For example, no matter how mundane a topic is, if it is discussed over 1000 pages, a search engine is likely to rank it high above other sites which have churned out good quality content in significantly less number of pages. Of course, this is only a preliminary ranking and later on if the traffic to the sites with less number of pages is substantially more than the former, their rankings will definitely go high. But as a general principle, for a site to be ranked and promoted well, the quantity of its content has to be at an optimum level, if not more than its competitors. And websites have to deliberately take efforts to increase quantity of content, often ending up with nothing more than blabby elaborations. As mentioned above, the more you write and the more number of pages you create for the site, the more the ads displayed on the site.
This business model has been followed, although in a different fashion, by many regional newspapers for quite a long time: on special occasions like religious or cultural festivals, these newspapers deliver two sets of newspapers for a single edition. This allows the dailies an abundance of front page ad space allowed by the two copies. The second set of newspaper is not like a pull out of the daily, but an exact replica of it. The hype is about the front page with higher ad revenue which can only be possible on certain special occasions owing partly to the high cost of material resources. On the internet, one need not wait for special occasions to go for a replica of ad. space with higher revenue. One can be tautological about page titles and get as many ads on them as possible without taxing too much on material resources. The hype about front page isn¿t there anymore. All pages are of equal importance in the eyes of Google which doesn¿t differentiate between clicks on ads from pages of varying importance in terms of its content. It¿s time to formulate a hypothesis with this preliminary observation: the whole activity of commercial web development and promotion, which accounts for a major portion of work in this area, is run by tautology, repetition and forced writing.
Further, one can allow mistakes to pass through the copy; in fact, internet pages deliberately include mistakes in them for one important technological reason. As anyone in the field of web promotion is aware, major search engines take a monthly or weekly survey in which they shuffle the existing rankings on the basis of updations of web pages. The idea is to avoid outdated information coming at the top of the search list. But commercial sites use this technical bottleneck to their own advantage by just correcting the mistakes of the web pages and giving a false impression to a search engine that the site is being updated regularly. Perhaps the anti-climax of all persuasive efforts of business writing is when a frustrated reader exits a web page by clicking on an ad. generating revenue for the website with his/her unintentional act. Have you noticed another reversal of logic here: to exit a web page means generation of revenue for the site. Only insiders know that making a user exit a web page is also used nowadays as a business strategy for getting more clicks on ads. Language and writing will have to adapt to this new marketing technique.