The New York Post reported this week that NYC’s free public Wi-Fi kiosks aren’t making much money, fueling speculation among some observers that the LinkNYC program is facing financial shortfalls just two years into what is now expected to be a 15-year rollout.

This is probably not as big a deal as it might look, but whatever the case it should not be surprising. How is the LinkNYC program supposed to be profitable at this point when 100% of its revenue comes from advertising, and the kiosks are displaying so few ads? In replacing the old payphones CityBridge is taking three advertising panels and replacing them with just two, and for now they are essentially replacing ads that would have been on the old payphones with grade school poetry, NYC Facts, and precious few paid ads. As part of the rejiggered deal, and in light of the lack of advertising sufficient revenues, CityBridge will attempt to infuse cash into the LinkNYC program through the EB-5 program, where the federal government grants visas to foreigners who pump money into American companies. I don’t have a deeply informed opinion about EB-5 but this maneuver sounds very Bloombergian.

LinkNYC’s “now you see it now you don’t” approach to getting people to look at these screens, potentially increasing their value to future advertisers, has seen all manner of stranded content and disembodied headlines, much of which left this observer wondering what the hell I just saw. That seems to be the advertising æsthetic at play with LinkNYC: invoke confusion to make people look at these screens even when the content has no value.

CityBridge has not divulged details about its profitability, or lack thereof. My hunch is that the kiosks are not making money yet, but the old payphones still are, and the payphones’ display advertising revenues are what is carrying the company at this point. I continue to believe that long term the kiosks will actually make less money than the payphones did.

LinkNYC’s CONTENT OF NO VALUE

It would appear we can say goodbye, at least for now, to the LinkNYC bus arrival countdown widget, a bewildering and blessedly short-lived feature developed, in my opinion, by people who do not use the bus, for people who do not use the bus. The feature appears to have been removed just days after its deployment across all of the ~1400 LinkNYC kiosks.

For all the pomp and self-satisfaction that greeted the arrival of the MTA bus arrival feature its removal was not announced with so much as a tweet. Is it gone forever, or has it been sent back to the drawing board to be developed into something useful? We shall see. My guess is it’s gone for good but I’m happy to be wrong if someone can develop a bus arrival time widget that is useful to people who use the bus.

Also removed from the advertising screens’ rotation are those stupid Associated Press headlines. There is nothing stupid about the AP’s headlines, mind you. But by lobbing them up onto these screens with no means of accessing additional information about what the headlines reference these bits of content often meant absolutely nothing. It was like headlines from hell, or clickbait that you couldn’t even click on.

I and others have suggested that barcodes appear on some screens, allowing smartphone-ready pedestrians the chance to scan the barcode and access more information about what just appeared on the big screen. But at the rate these screens blink past such a demand on the citizens’ engagement would likely create more confusion. Say you see something interesting on one of the screens. You scramble to access and turn on your smartphone. You find and open the barcode scanning app. You point your phone at the advertising screen but you are out of luck. The screen blinked past and the barcode disappeared. The barcode might possibly reappear again, but only after an indeterminate length of time during which you would (what else?) stare at screen after screen of advertising and Fun Facts.

If barcodes were to be deployed on the screens in such a manner it might stand to reason that they would be allowed to stay on the screen, tucked in the corner, as another advertisement or “On This Day” screen takes over most of the space.

In watching this endless jumble of screens blink past I try to imagine efficiences, or interactive ways to engage pedestrians with advertisers or other content on the screens.

They could save themselves a screen or two by placing static information placards on the devices, explaining what these things are — because believe me, a lot of people don’t know what these kiosks are — and with instructions for connecting to the WiFi and using the phone. Informational placards are mandatory on the old payphones, but with LinkNYC it seems to have been assumed that the tablet would always work and citizens could learn about these kiosks by tapping through the “About” content.

But the tablets often do not work. In a somewhat perverse way this could justify the ludicrous quantity of kiosks expected to be installed, with as many as 10,000 units threatened to appear over the next several years. The more of them there are the more likely it is you will find one that actually works, right? I don’t know if that logic holds water but it reminds me, yet again, how I fail to understand what is so sacred about the 7,500 figure, and why must every single payphone be replaced when we had an outsized quantity of those to begin with?

Interactive ways of engaging pedestrians and getting them to use the tablet screens have thus far included the claim that you could register for health insurance with the New York State of Health using a special app. This app was available through the end of January.

Another attempt at getting people to use the tablets involved an app that let citizens vote in their community board’s discretionary spending campaign a few weeks ago.

I would be mightily impressed if anybody (besides news reporters) successfully performed either of these tasks on a LinkNYC tablet. In the case of registering for health insurance you would probably be stymied by being required to upload tax returns or other documentation as proof of income. You could do that with your own laptop using LinkNYC’s WiFi but there is no possible way to do this through the tablet. It also confounds me to see that anyone thought navigating the famously recalcitrant New York State of Health website through a tablet touchscreen, without a physical keyboard, in the cold of winter… how could any Smart City evangelist be so disconnected from reality to think this made real world sense?

The discretionary spending voting gateway probably worked as advertised but I would not expect that many people who would be motivated to vote in such a specialized election would choose to do so over a public kiosk. I also cannot see why the Smart City was encouraging its people to enter their name, address, phone number, and other personal information into a public kiosk into a website with a strange looking address. As a public relations gimmick the ability to vote this way might have been intended to be seen as a Smart City way to engage the kiosks’ primary customer. But who would that be, anyway? That would be the poor and disenfranchised with limited incentive to vote even in the traditional way.

Here, as so many times before, I see these things the Smart City puts forward and I ask “Who do they think they are talking to?”

I also noticed that Mayor de Blasio was scheduled to cast his discretionary spending vote using a LinkNYC kiosk, I guess to set some kind of example for others to follow. He did not, and as with most of LinkNYC’s failures (bus arrival time, AP headlines, etc.) no reason was given and CityBridge offered no admission that “this didn’t work”. It might have been something as simple as a scheduling conflict but whatever the reason the mayor’s failure to cast his vote via a kiosk cost LinkNYC at the very least a decent shot at positive publicity. My hunch is that something about the voting app simply did not work, or that the famously Luddite mayor would have had too much trouble using it.

No usage statistics were ever released showing how many people participated in the discretionary spending vote or how many people registered for health insurance through LinkNYC kiosks. Casual observers probably either forget those projects existed or else assumed they were successful, since the Smart City can do no wrong. Right?

I suspect usage stats were never released because usage was negligible to nil.

I know, I think about this stuff more than I should. That’s my LinkNYC rant for the day.