Back in May, TheNextWeb made some changes. Their mobile experience at the time had two bars, one at the top and one at the bottom. Even on a large phone display, viewing the content between the two was very distracting. Also, they both had icons for twitter and Facebook. I gave them some feedback regarding the design and said that I felt it was a UX mistake. The VP of design got back to me and said, very politely, that he disagreed with my assessment. He went on to say basically that an increase in shares means an increase in page views which means an increase in ad impressions, and thus income. With TNW being an ad-supported company, this directly relates to the quantity and quality of our content. This lead me to feel that the single driving motivation was not that their users had a good experience, but that they maximized revenue. From a user point of view, I feel that's wrong. From a business point of view, it does make sense.
Regarding who is responsible for the final content, I would assume that if you have a VP of Design, that's the person. Maybe I'm wrong.
I notice now that they only have the one bar at the top. Interesting.
They're possibly optimizing for the wrong metric, or at least a metric you don't care about. I'd think they'd want repeat viewers. A bad UX will mean fewer repeat viewers, and possibly an unsustainable business. Classic short-term vs long-term view. Problem with this is it's generally harder to measure long term, so short term becomes easier to justify.
Maybe yes, maybe no. A classic example is tourist trap restaurants in heavy tourism areas. They literally don't care about repeat customers because all of their business is transient one-time customers. Sure they might get bad reviews ultimately, and that could hurt them, but that hasn't really seemed to slow them down, and that is easy to game.
The content sites themselves largely don't care about repeat visitors. Social networks and other aggregators are the primary drives of traffic to news/content/lifestyle sites. In other words, most people do go look at the home page of Buzz Feed or Wired or Huff Po and read multiple stories. They go to Facebook and click into different articles on different sites
Regarding who is responsible for the final content, I would assume that if you have a VP of Design, that's the person. Maybe I'm wrong.
I notice now that they only have the one bar at the top. Interesting.