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It’s been 3 weeks since my last blog post.  I have a valid excuse.  I was in Europe on a business research trip, specifically London, Amsterdam (for the music conference ADE) and Paris.  The trip was enlightening and inspiring.  Most of my meetings were with media companies in the same space as Sound Alliance. I must admit, I went into the meetings expecting the knowledge gap between us and them to be significantly in their favour.  The reality is that we are at least on par and in some cases far ahead of the overseas companies I met, particularly with the maturity and diversification of our commercial model and the size of our audience relative to our population size.  It’s easy to imagine Australia as a backwater but that’s not always the case.  I returned to Australia proud of our position as a company (and of our industry more broadly) compared to our global peers.

I should go away more often if it means we have more months like October. The momentum we have built over the winter months continues unabated and October, traditionally a big month, delivered across the board. SA reached a new domestic record of 32k Daily UB’s, 619k monthly UB’s, 9% up on last months record. Pages also broke records with 9.7M in total.

inthemix maintained its #1 spot in the Netratings Music & Radio category, posting its biggest month ever – 18,625 daily and 351k monthly UB’s and a whopping 5.68M pages.  Festival and NYE line up announcements flew in thick and fast and events like Parklife drove a flurry of activity and buzz across the site.  Page traffic has returned to the pre-social networking levels we saw in 2006.  Ad revenue spiked dramatically with 34% year on year growth for the month.  ITM has proven to be a resilient old dog.  As it’s tenth year of operation approaches the brand is arguably stronger than ever.

FasterLouder’s strong run continues with the big story on FL being page growth. Pages fell just shy of the 2M barrier (1.848M) up 10% on last month and up 96% on Oct 08!  UB’s stayed strong at 8,726 daily 185k monthly UB’s placing us 8th in the Music & Radio category.  FasterLouder now hosts the Big Day Out, Splendour in the Grass & Laneway Festival forums clearly establishing its position as the go-to destination for live music events.  The challenge now is communicating this phenomenal growth to advertisers who may still perceive the site to be a lot smaller than it now is.

SameSame had a fantastic traffic month jumping 19% to 2,683 daily and 60k monthly UB’s and 1M pages.  The growth is consistent month on month which is fantastic given it’s all coming from word of mouth.

Consistent month from Mess+Noise, 42k UB’s and 1M pages.

Elsewhere, The Vine continued its descent, down -14% to 13k daily and 331k total UB’s.  At this rate FasterLouder will catch them pretty soon.  Channel V’s new site dropped slightly after a few good months of growth since launch but that’s to be expected.  TripleM Sydney & Melbourne both suffered significant falls, down -19% & -32% respectively.  Radio sites tend to spike and drop a lot which I assume is driven by on-air promos.

Moshtix had a great month, up 19% with all their big festival on-sales to 9k daily and 218k monthly UB’s.  Timeout also spiked by 34% to 5k daily and 131k total UB’s but their engagement is pretty low with just 475k pages.  Still, one to watch.

That’s my round up for the month.  If you’re interested in me covering any other sites feel free to drop me a comment.  Hard to know if this is useful without feedback so all comments welcomed.

*All stats sourced from Nielsen Netratings Market Intelligence, Domestic Traffic, October 2009

One Response to “October Traffic – The month that was at Sound Alliance and beyond…”

1. Tweets that mention October Traffic – The month that was at Sound Alliance and beyond… « Sound Alliance Blog -- Topsy.com says:

   November 3, 2009 at 10:51 am

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