We were at the south end of SFO’s long runways (28L & R) and this UAL 777 made the turn to get into takeoff position.

And then all of a sudden, this AF A340 appears out of nowhere (you can see how foggy it was in the previous picture). It hits the gas and goes around for another chance at landing. I have no idea if the pilots just got spooked or if I nearly saw Tenerife 2.0.

It was foggy.

There’s the AF A340 from before, finally landing.

I love seeing 747s take off.

And then – this time with empty runways – this BA 747 appears out of the fog and has to go around. This was the first time I’ve seen one plane abort a landing, let alone two.

Meanwhile, I thought this was cute.

And the BA came around for a successful landing.

It’s still a worthwhile question, especially when companies can answer, “Zero, actually” and be taken seriously. And oddly enough, two companies that are in the magazine publishing industry are able to answer the question with confidence. They’re not startups, but like many in the digital world, they aim to monetize content.

“The Economist” is a trite answer to a separate question – “Who’s killing it with content?” – but it’s worth noting that their $130 annual subscription ends up in the hands of only around 1.5 million people. In spite of that relatively small number, the magazine makes money. £60MM every year. And that figure is growing.

Cook’s Illustrated is a less-cited example, but they continue to impress. They’re private, so they’re not quite as easy to assess as a business, but they seem to be growing, making money off a model that doesn’t include advertising, and experimenting effectively in the digital space. They publish 6 issues each year, do not discount their subscription rates, and charge for the digital version even if you get the magazine in the mail. And remarkably, somewhere near 80% of their one million subscribers re-up annually. Gangster.

Note to the reader: I am a paid subscriber to the digital edition of Cook’s Illustrated. My parents are longtime subs to the print edition.

But beyond their business success (the most important metric in my book), my case for them being awesome, effective publishers of content worth emulating by brands and other folks in the content game revolves around three key things:

1. They’re committed to a unique, obsessive perspective, and everything they make flows from there
2. They’re using digital channels in effective ways to drive people toward their moneymaker
3. As far as I can tell, they’re organized around efficient content creation

Obsessive perspective
Cook’s is famously obsessive. Its founder Christopher Kimball believes there’s a single right way to do things, and the magazine feels like it grows from that perspective, rather than one that’s about a love of food. Which to me is a good thing. There are probably thousands of places you can go to express or indulge your love for food, and I’d argue fewer than a handful that really scratch the perfection/process itch. Being obsessive and having an uncommonly held position allows you to be different, to compete with fewer people, and unlocks the ability to thrive off scarcity. I’ll pay for Cook’s because there are no good, free substitutes. And because I want Cook’s to continue to to exist.

Importantly, the perfection “thing” extends to how they make their core, stock content:

“Kimball’s idea is simple. So simple that he’s amazed it’s not how every publisher does it. The reason the others don’t is because it’s crazy expensive. Every recipe that appears in his publications and on his TV shows must represent the single best way to make a dish — and they are forged in the fires of the Mother of All Test Kitchens.

“The Cook’s Illustrated recipes follow the most rigorous journey. First, each recipe idea is pre-surveyed to see if readers are even interested in it. Then, based on research in the company’s cookbook library, a test-kitchen cook comes up with several versions of the dish and submits them to a staff taste test. She is then pummeled with questions about why she didn’t try this ingredient or that sauteing method or a different type of sugar. She goes back to the kitchen for more experimentation, and more critiques follow. Only when all hands believe the recipe is the best it can be is it sent to a handful of readers, who make it and report whether they’d make it again. If a recipe – even after all that time and testing, and even after more revisions – doesn’t score well with the readers, it ends up on the kitchen floor. Surviving recipes are published with the story of their journey in the test kitchen. There’s even a science guy on call to conduct more technically challenging experiments and add explanation to the articles so readers can learn why, say, on a molecular level, cream of tartar does what it does (and I have no idea what that is, but it is apparently very important).”
– Perfection, Inc. Boston Globe, 2009

Content as advertising
The success of Cook’s and its parent America’s Test Kitchen as money-making products/services subsidizes the creation of content and the support of channels, which effectively operate as marketing for the paid channels. And because they’re organized around making content and have been for some time, they’re much more likely to be successful at making content for the internet than other similar organizations.

For example…

A diagnostic infographic found its way to Lifehacker…

I clicked and found out that it was from America’s Test Kitchen, and Lifehacker linked to their visual.ly page…

Where they’ve posted this and a couple more infographics, including this one about cakes throughout history. The profile links back to what looks like a new digital property, “Feed”…

And it’s a site that offers Cook’s-like instructions and recipes, though certainly not in the same, incredibly analytical, detailed and sometimes obnoxiously complicated style as the magazine. It also provides a view behind the curtain at the Test Kitchen, and provides individual authors not only a byline, but fully developed pages that they might use to grow their personal brands.

This is a significant strategic move, but it’s one that feels sustainable. It doesn’t appear that there are new staff members that are expressly dedicated to the new site: instead, it seems that the site is populated by content generated by more junior/digitally savvy staffers of ATK. And if they’re going to blog about food anyway – because they’re people who love food and love the internet – why not give them a brand-positive place to put it? Your content costs are effectively zero (nobody new to hire, small negative changes in productivity, perhaps), and your brand spreads through the efforts of many. Makes sense to me. Get your flow for cheap.

This only works if you’re organized for creation
So this is fascinating. I did a little poking around on LinkedIn to see how a few different organizations are structured. I had a hunch that companies that do better at the internet have more people making shit for it.

I’ve listed GILT, Net-A-Porter, Coach, Gap, Ralph Lauren, Bon Appetít, and Cook’s Illustrated, and I used the “insightful statistics” section of LinkedIn to pull the top ten most common skills of employees at each of the companies. Highlighted in the image above are skills that in my estimation relate to content creation. Compare GILT and Net-A-Porter to their suppliers/rivals/supplier-rivals. Do the same for Cook’s versus Bon Appetit. Granted, these are self-reported skills. And they’re not comprehensive. And each of these companies makes money in a different way.

But on the internet, competing for attention, they’re all being judged the same way. And the companies with more content-creation skills are winning.

So if you want to compete on the internet, up your skills. Hire people that can make content, not just people that know how to pay for content. Easy, right?

So, content makers, get to it.

Last night I did some browsing of Bottega Veneta’s men’s stuff. It’s been notably present in my Instagram feeds, thanks to Ryan Plett (with a cool intrecciato bracelet) and Guido Wongolini (with a cool, vintage intrecciato lanyard) and part of various menswear promos. Plus, I’m missing my lost passport cover and figured Veneta had a nice replacement.

The stuff is gorgeous, a little weird, and fantastically expensive. For example, the multicolor Cervo duffel above retails for $4,250.

And even at the low end – the entry market for most luxury brands, the small leather goods category – the most plausible replacement for my passport cover, below, runs a cool $750.

So you can imagine my surprise to see this ad on Slate today. On an article about income inequality, no less.

Shop women’s wallets.

Okay, sure. Granted, I’d pay a lot for a conversion, but is a random Slate article the right place? And can a fellow get some targeting up in here?

Last week, my lovely and talented colleague Vlad wrote about three steps to eliminate/mitigate risks in strategy – understand, assess, neutralize – and offered a chart that caught my eye. Vlad adapted a piece of HBR chartery that was fundamentally similar to a Boris Cube, something used by aerospace engineers to assess, quantify, and make decisions about process and design.

This is a slide from a deck by Boeing – surfaced by Flightblogger – that was used in the development of a second production facility in South Carolina. Interesting that the axes are transposed from Vlad’s chart.

And here’s a slide from a Northrop Grumman tutorial on risk cubes, why they should be used, and how/when to implement them. Note that Northrop’s generic risk cube represents a higher tolerance for risk than does Boeing’s, which considers Likely + Minor Consequence a Moderate Risk.

(Aside: I love finding shit like this.)

Same deck. Same level of fascination on my part. Good strategists, as far as I’m concerned, are thinking like engineers and cost analysts when they’re developing their recommendations.

Not just the 300×600 (or whatever that unit is), but the takeover, and the snipe on the modal window. CPM bonus!

Monocle’s got the same thing going, albeit in a classier way. Every single podcast is brought to you by some advertiser. Nice work. F*ck “church and state,” am I right?

You have to pay for content somehow, I guess.

Looking at connectedness is interesting.

For a post on Undercurrent’s Theory blog, I’m looking at the emailing habits of colleagues as a proxy for the connectedness between people. Every pixel in line width represents 100 emails sent/received between two people. Darker nodes represent individuals that have been completely mapped.

More to come.

Ain’t that a trip?

Quora. A Q&A site. Has a blog on Slate.com. I don’t know about you, but something that is ostensibly a startup having a blog outside of its own media ecosystem more than caught my eye.

But get this: it’s not authored by some expert at Quora. The three posts (this is a new effort, it seems) are written by Quora users. As in, unpaid people who contribute content to the site. And Quora’s ToS allows them to make money off their content, no matter where they put it. Say, on a major digital media property. From the ToS:

You agree that this license includes the right for other users of the Service to modify your Content, and for Quora to make your Content available to others for the publication, distribution, syndication, or broadcast of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Quora or others may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Service.

Know what that’s called? Zero content costs. Which is boss if you’re a magazine, and shit if you’re an author. If you’re an author on Slate’s “Explainer” column (one of my favorites), you might be bummed to find out that a human-powered free content machine is taking your place.

Here’s an example. Some guy called Garrick answered a question on Quora, and now it’s been posted on Slate.

It’s been edited (I checked with QuickDiff and found that Slate prefers double spaces after full stops) minimally. Just a bit of punctuation. No major edits.

Anyway. Fascinating. And more proof of two things that I believe:

1. If you’re a magazine, being in the editorial business on the internet is a bad idea; you don’t want to compete for ad dollars with companies that get their content for free. (Be Instructables, don’t be Popular Mechanics.)
2. If you’re an author of content, you need to know your rights, know why you’re posting what where, and realize that getting famous under your own name is probably your best bet to make a buck. (Be Grantland, don’t be Bill Simmons, columnist, ESPN.)

I’ve long been a fan of San Francisco’s public transportation system – it’s expansive, it’s unique, it’s multi-modal, it’s well-utilized – but had never used the light rail portion of the program.

It’s great. It’s fast, regular, and clean. The trains run on the streets, changing the feel of certain parts of the city, not unlike Chicago’s El but without all the noise.

But the cool part, for me, is pictured above.

1. They’ve pictured the entire system on one map, allowing for easy macro route planning
2. Each of the color- and letter-designated dots on the routes are moving along one side of the tracks, indicating the location of all the trains in the system

Granted, it’s a small system, but it’s cool to see its status in total.

It would be exceptionally lame to say, “No, comments are great!” after that bait-y headline.

So, folks, my position – and it’s a position that I intend to be provocative – is that comments are over.

We’ve been thinking a bunch lately at UC about whether or not to have comments on our site. People that we know and respect have asked us to open comments up, and at this point, we’re just not sure. There’s a healthy cabal of folks that are in the pro-comment camp, and for a variety of reasons, I’m not one of them.

Before I get into my reasons, I have a couple of examples of comment sections that do what comment sections say they’ll do on the tin: host incredibly vibrant, productive conversations that, aside from a few trolls, improve the quality of the site and its connectedness to its readers.

First: Aviation Herald

This is a daily visit for me as an aviation geek, and it is one of the most comprehensive single-purpose sites I’ve ever encountered. From what I understand, one guy – Simon Hradecky, located in Austria – reports on and manages the site, which contains and displays over 10,000 commercial aviation “events.” They’re reported in near real time and the audience seems to play an important supporting role: they do some original research (either fact-checking or digging up/submitting images) and speculate about/discuss causes for some of the more notable events.

Case in point: Air France 447′s event page, which contains 1,790 comments at the time of writing. The comments were kicked-off when the plane went off-radar, and continue through to January 2012. I suspect they’ll never stop. It’s really fascinating to read from the bottom up.

Second: Dr. Jeff Masters’ Wunderblog

The comment section in the Wunderblog is the ne plus ultra of a productive blend of insane obsession and effective contribution.

To wit, in August 2011, it hosted 98,375 comments. 98,375. Over 44 posts. On the day Irene became a real thing, there were 7,311 comments on one post. The amazing thing about the threads was that all the users were bringing new data to the party, new animated GIFs of sea surface temperatures, new analyses of La Niña and its impact on Irene’s progression. Being a weather nerd, it was a thrill to continually refresh and get rapidly changing diagnoses of Irene’s future path. The stream of content was just plain unavailable elsewhere; no other forum approached the depth of Wunderblog, and somehow it felt more like a chat-room of geeks than a parade of self-promoting assholes. All this in spite of the scale of the discussion.

The effective combination for both Wunderblog and Aviation Herald seems to be nerds + available (but slightly inaccessible based on design and/or popularity) source material, in a setting where the future is uncertain.

I believe that comments are most helpful when participants have a shared mission that revolves around solving a problem.

When they’re outside of this range, you get ESPN.com.

5,000+ comments, all of it drivel. As an aside, this is a great example of scale not being “it” when it comes to engagement.

So what’s the point?

This blog has comments, mostly because it has since I started it. I’m not sure I would have them today (on my blog or on any other) for the following reasons:

1. On most business blogs/sites, the authors and readers aren’t really solving anything. And it’s not clear that they have a shared mission. In most cases, the individual money-making mission trumps the shared make-the-world-better-with-the-internet mission.
2. In the marketing/business space, especially on more popular blogs, comments sections turn into the Q+A session after a talk: “Two part question: Firstly, have you read my book/blog/essay? Secondly, you, popular/respected speaker/author, have made many bad assumptions. I’ll tell you about them now.” Put more succinctly by John Gruber, “Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.”
3. We’re now at a point where more mature discussion experiences exist at a scale that makes them useful. Comment threads, even when awesome-ified by Disqus, don’t hold a candle to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. The discussion has moved to those places and I don’t think it’s coming back.

So that’s my take. Comments welcome, here, for now.

Further reading on the same topic: Marco Arment, Shawn Blanc, and Bijan Sabet.

So much truth, so much inspiration.

I don’t put much stock in the “sleep is for the unsuccessful” thing, but the idea that the best in every field work hard to perfect everything, every little detail, everything to the work…man, that’s powerful stuff.

I remember in college we used to really think about this kind of thing: managing our sleep, managing our food, the timing of our workouts, the people that we ran with, the order of operations for optimal race and workout days…everything was considered and pretty much mandated by a coach.

Since entering the adult work world, I’ve never once thought that way. Let alone lived by life with that kind of focused method.

Which is pretty weak, if you ask me.

I suppose most people, including myself, think “that kind of intensity is for professional athletes.”

Again, weak. Some folks in the creative and strategic world get paid like professional athletes, and their careers are significantly longer.

So my question, I guess, for myself and anyone who feels like being inspired today: where’s the focus?

Found via Mr. Plett.