I was interested in this discussion at Prawfs between bigwigs at SSRN and bePress about the relative merits of these two important services for viewing legal scholarship online, and was particularly intrigued by Bernie Black’s explanation of why you can’t download a paper from SSRN without first visiting the paper’s abstract page. I’ve always found this element to SSRN kind of annoying: I want people to read my papers, and I don’t want them to get lost or give up at the abstract page.
So why does SSRN require the abstract page? If I understand Bernie correctly, the goal is to ensure that each counted download is a reliable signal of a reader’s genuine desire to read that particular paper:
SSRN takes great care to ensure that paper downloads are an accurate measure of reader interest in an author’s work. First, we ensure that only informed decisions to view a full text of a particular paper, rather than uninformed explorations triggered by a catchy or vague title, count as a download. Every download starts with a reader visiting the paper’s “abstract page”. Only readers who still want the paper, after seeing the abstract, can download the paper. In general, only one out of three abstract views result in a download.
Interesting. I wonder, though, is a decision to download a paper from an abstract page really an “informed decision”? Isn’t it just based on the title, the author, and a catchy abstract? And if the one-out-of-three ratio is pretty widely shared across different papers, which in my experience it is, is the abstract page really informing readers versus just making it harder to see the paper itself?
To be clear, I think having an abstract page has some advantages for some readers. For example, it makes it easier to surf around without using lots of bandwith. If you’re on a slow connection, it makes it easier to look around without waiting for .pdfs to load. But it’s not obvious to me that the abstract page means that the downloads are more meaningful. (I should add the caveat that I don’t know if download numbers are ever meaningful, but that’s a debate for another day.)
On a more cynical note, I wonder how much of SSRN’s business model hinges on abstract visits. SSRN is a for-profit business, and in addition to bringing law to the people they presumably also want to maximize their revenue. As best I can tell, the abstract page is where SSRN posts its advertisements: Every SSRN abstract page has one of those annoying “Ads by Goooooogle” strips down the right hand side of the page that posts a series of topic-specific advertisements.
I don’t know how much SSRN makes from its Google AdWords advertising, but the amount might be significant. People who view SSRN abstracts are a very specific marketing target group, and SSRN probably gets on the order of 100,000 abstract page reloads a day. (Or more, perhaps much more.) As a result, getting rid of the abstract page presumably might lead to smaller profits for the owners of SSRN, a group that I believe includes Bernie Black. Of course, whether that is an important part of SSRN’s business model or just a bonus resulting from SSRN’s focus on meaningful downloads is something that only the SSRN folks can answer.
If this is an issue of SSRN profits (opening more pages), it seems forgivable considering the utility of SSRN’s free services.
I can only speak of my own habits, but I have followed many links from bloggers to papers on SSRN, only to read the abstract and thank my stars I hadn’t downloaded the paper. (Sometimes my Adobe Reader program crashes, do downloading a .pdf isn’t without its risks.)
Also, many papers with catchy titles, links from prominent bloggers, and boring-sounding abstracts have a 10:1 view-to-download ratio. So it seems I’m not the only one who first seems intrigued before deciding to pass on a download.
After all, if the abstract isn’t well-written, what are the odds the rest of the paper will be?
Well two reasons leap to my mind.
First is to prevent people from unsuspectingly linking people to big pdf files. Frequently I have found myself annoyed when a link I thought went to an html page loaded up a big pdf file. This policy prevents this sort of accidental download because if you download from an abstract page the reader clearly has a genuine desire to at least download the pdf.
Secondly, and what I had always thought before you mentioned the issue, is to let you pick the right mirror. Isn’t the abstract page the way SSRN lets you pick the mirror for you to download the paper?
It is worth noting that the “annoying Ads by Goooogle” strip provides the money that lubricates huge amounts of the web as we know it. No ads, no money, no web site is often how that would work pre-google.
If it really bugs you, get Firefox, GreaseMonkey, and stifle the Google Ads before you ever see them.
Cheers.
[OK Comments: True, Ran, but SSRN also charges high fees to law schools to host papers.]
Following up on the comment about Firefox, this discussion is actually the first I’ve heard that there was advertising on SSRN – my AdBlock must work pretty well.
As to the more substantive issues, to the extent that SSRN download counts serves as a reputational signal, it stands to reason that you want your downloads to have at least some relationship to quality of article (even if it is just a “catchy” abstract) rather than a relationship to quality of marketing.
I don’t always download the papers of “big names” if the abstract doesn’t match what I’m looking for, and I suspect the same is true for others.
I rather agree with Mike and logicnazi; I think the abstract page is actively helpful when one is trying to find a particular on a particular topic. If I’m trying to get hold of the latest hot-off-the-presses page from Randy Barnett or Orin Kerr, or if I’m trying to access a paper I know by name but don’t have a copy to hand, perhaps the abstract page might be annoying, but that’s not really my usual use of SSRN. I usually have a general topic I want to know about, so for example, I might search for “federal preemption” and get a bazillion hits; the abstract page helps by letting me see if the paper is relevant to the particular aspects of my inquiry.
I should add that the adverts are evidently monumentally pointless; I hadn’t even noticed that there WERE adverts on SSRN, on the abstract page or anywhere else. When I read Althouse these days, my eyes just skip over the ads entirely; it never enters my conscious mind. It seems to me that if many more people are anything like me – a terrifying thought – then there are a lot of dollars being wasted on entirely ineffective advertising. As with most advertising, I suspect a lot of it is just the vanity that companies use the marketing budget as a metric for success; I just don’t understand how else companies like coke or pepsi can justify a department which would be just as effective if, instead of making and buying ads, it set fire to a big pile of cash each year on tax day. Perhaps advert blindness is more acute in those of us who share Bill Hicks belief that essentially, the world would be much better off if everyone in marketing found alternative employment. Hicks put it in stronger terms than that.
What ads? There are ads?
I have to wonder, pace Ran Barton’s comment, about the wisdom of building business models on a revenue-generating mechanism that can be so easily circumvented. It’s not like you have to invest hundreds of dollars in a TiVo to skip the ads — Firefox is free and multi-platform; the adblock extension couldn’t be easier to install.
Are there ads on OrinKerr.com? The only downside to adblock is that I never know, without making a special effort to find out, who is and who isn’t running ads.