Pants. Mustard.

Is Project Goldfish pants? Or mustard?

I'm sorry, what was that you said? Those two sentences don't make any sense? OK, let me start at the beginning. One of the many things I loved about Los Angeles was Indie 103.1 FM. The independent radio station (now R.I.P.) was an oasis in the sea of obnoxious DJs and bad music. My morning drive down Sunset Boulevard was usually accompanied by Joe Escalante, Vandals bassist turned attorney. He hosted The Last of the Famous International Morning Show, where director David Lynch was the weatherman and actor Timothy Olyphant did sports. It was all very charming.

That charm continued into the afternoon with Jonesy’s Jukebox. Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols hosted a funky, meandering and highly-entertaining program where he’d mumble about whatever, play music, interview guests and sometimes go ahead and answer his cell phone. Jonesy liked to play new singles for his guests in the studio, and then he would ask them if the song was pants or mustard.

Mustard meant good.

Pants meant bad.

As I’m working on this project, I constantly ask myself if this will be any good. What does "good" mean? What is the definition of success?

Yesterday, I sorted through survey results. The findings were interesting, but not groundbreaking. One of the questions on the survey asked:

Would you be willing to pay for articles on Los Angeles politics if they had information or exclusive interviews you could not find in another publication?

The result: 60 percent of respondents said NO.

Hmm. Philosophically, I think consumers should pay for news. It is not that good journalism is costly, but the idea that it's free has never sat well with me. After reading through survey results, however, it looks like counting subscriptions would not be a good benchmark of success. Nowadays, “free” is (always was?) a business model. Chris Anderson explores the concept in Free, a book that I highly recommend. Anderson explains the psychology of free in this way:

“Why do people think ‘free’ means diminished quality in one instance, and not in another? It turns out that our feelings about ‘free’ are relative, not absolute. If something used to cost money and now doesn’t, we tend to correlate that with a decline in quality. But if something never cost money, we don’t feel the same way. A free bagel is probably stale, but free ketchup in a restaurant is fine. Nobody thinks that Google is an inferior search engine because it doesn’t charge.”

I am one who has long considered price and quality to be intertwined. A news product with a subscription was probably mustard; free news was pants.

But let’s assume that Project Goldfish is quality journalism and it is free. From there I think there are two measures of success: 1) How many unique visitors stop by the website every month? 2) Do Project Goldfish stories motivate anyone to take action?

Unique visitors are the number of people who visit a site during a given period of time. This is in contrast to visits. The same user may return to your site every day – one unique visitor, many visits. Through the survey, participants told me they regularly visit LAist and CityWatchLA. I know most people in that sphere also visit Kevin Roderick's LAObserved, and Ron Kaye is working to build traffic on his website, which is typically commentary about ongoing political issues. To get a sense of their traffic, I plugged the sites into Compete. (Disclaimer: I am sure each site would say/does say these are low estimates. Compete estimates traffic but internal metrics almost always show greater numbers of visitors. Also, I used Compete here instead of Quantcast because some of the traffic was too low for Quantcast to even estimate.)

There’s obviously a range of traffic.

Traffic is one measure of influence. I think what happens after a story is published is also a good measure. If Project Goldfish has the traffic of CityWatchLA but produces stories that help capture a serial killer, expose dangers at hospitals or become Monday morning must-reads, I would absolutely consider the site to be a success. Mustard.