the barbarian group - Too Many Words

The Barbarian Group has a new world wide web site. And its wordy.
The group responsible for famous flash sites like BK’s subservient chicken, Comcastic, VW features, and Snowball FIGHT have an excellent reputation for delivering top-notch experiential destinations.

The latest destination for themselves falls short on experience and long on words. Even their response to wordiness is wordy. Its true that search is still all the rave and content is king. But, I think Barbarian has crossed the line. Not only is it counter to the way they’ve experienced success. Their site is so text heavy it breaks fundamental rules of legibility (no more than 10 words per line). And as internet experts they should understand that people don’t want to read that much online. They are, however, getting a lot of attention because of their polar-opposite execution style. But, surely they could have struck up a better balance of flash and textual content.

Barbaripedia (a different way of saying “about us”) is a great concept executed fairly generically. Wouldn’t it be cool if they actually owned some online definitions? Or would allow people to help collaborate to define terms with them - true wiki-style. Barbarian could even be experts on several topics within the true wikipedia. Back in the day we saw email forwards as the beginnings of viral content. But, for most, Barbarian and CP+Ps subservient chicken is the definition of “viral” for digital marketing. They could own that.

So do what you do well and be true to who you are. For Barbarian it should be about flash experiences and digital marketing expertise. Not about publishing online novels.