You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
- If you are not an Insider, why not? Do we need to do a better job of showing you what Insider offers? Or, is there not enough that has compelled you to buy? What content or tools would be worth it to become an Insider?It's nice to see companies embracing the internet and blogs to reach consumers in a real way. Kareem is trying to gain insight from some serious ESPN.com fans and I expect he'll get it.- If you are an Insider, what do you like about it? What would you like to see more of?
As for me, I've been an Insider at three different points in the last few years. For me, the most enticing aspect of Insider is the draft coverage and specifically Kiper's commentary. I'm a big football fan and I really like to keep up on what's going on during the offseason (especially because much of the time the offseason provides much more hope for Bears fans than the regular season). At the times when I've ended my Insider subscription it's just been because I decided it wasn't really something I needed. I weighed the expense versus the return and decided it just wasn't worth it. I'm not quite sure what else I would want to become an Insider. I admit that I often am interested in Insider only articles, but I haven't seen anything I absolutely could not live without. I also have chosen not to subscribe again because one time when I tried to end my subscription I had a great deal of trouble ending it. I couldn't get through to anyone at ESPN.com and when I finally did, they never issued me my credit until I called back a second time (not an easy task).
I still see Insider as an impulse buy. If one day I see something on ESPN.com Insider that I absolutely can not live without I could see myself subscribing again, but until then I think the regular, old ESPN.com will be good enough for me. Another thing that might encourage me (or at least the dork in me), is if there were some RSS options to insider. Maybe if I could get the Insider Local articles delivered as a feed I'd be more interested. I must admite that since I started using an RSS aggregator my ESPN.com visits have gone down quite a bit. I have feeds for Bill Simmons and Chris Mortensen and other than that it's just an occaisional visit (down from my 15+ visits a day just a year ago). Hope some of these comments are helpful.
Also, as a side note, ESPN.com should really make its RSS feeds more accessible. I never knew about them until I stumbled upon the RSS page randomly one day, there was no easy to find link on the site.