Letters to the Editors

We don't get many "Letters to the Editors," even as email. Between article comments, sharing tools and social media, fewer magazines do these days—we get notes from PR agents, industry contacts and the occasional complaint, but letters actually discussing or responding to the articles are rare. In fact, I used to work for a magazine where we perhaps, may have ... ahem ... "made them up" for comedic purposes.

The following letters are not made up. Herschell Gordon Lewis and Rich Cress both had some things to say about some recent items in our magazine and e-newsletter. Do you agree with them? Let us know in the comments, or send me a letter!

Calling 'BS' on Video Views
At the bottom of your Editor's Notes pages in January [the DataBytes sidebar], is the statistic "11 billion online video ads were viewed in October 2012 …"

I say BS. I frequently am assaulted by "sniped" videos while I'm online. Videos that I have zero interest in, and delete as soon as possible. I'm sorry, but how about a statistic that tells us how much of the videos were watched? And, were we allowed to delete right away? Or did we have to watch all 20 seconds before being able to view what we really wanted to see?

In print, you can't claim that every ad in an issue was viewed—although perhaps we should, because if we used the same measurement, if a reader flips through an issue, he/she sees (views) every ad. Of course, they only read six to eight to 10 of them, but we can claim that they viewed 100 percent of them!

Rich Cress
Publisher
CSC Publishing, Inc

Nothing Beats Response
Thorin, my own experiences are at considerable variance with several concepts espoused in today’s email from your publication.

For example, I have to question video as an automatic response-increasing adjunct. This group of statements is far outside reality when evaluating comparative response:

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