October Traffic – The month that was at Sound Alliance and beyond…
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. (more…)
How Deep Is Australia’s Digital Media Talent Pool?
A guest post from Nick Crocker.
Nick popped up on my radar just a year ago and since then he’s achieved an awful lot, particularly with the launch of the music aggregator We Are Hunted and Native Digital, neither of which existed when we met.
Nick, like many other entrepreneurs is deeply passionate about ideas. But as any successful entrepreneur knows, there are many obstacles in the way of taking a brilliant idea to execution. The toughest obstacle of all is raising capital.
Australia is a notoriously difficult market to raise capital for digital ventures. I know. Our business is one of a limited few who have successfully been through the process.
Nick’s post looks at who in Australia is pushing boundaries and innovating in the digital media space.
Myspace gets page-raped. Skinning gone mad!
Skinning (or page rape as we like to call it) seems to be all the rage right now. Everyone’s getting in on the act. Occasionally you see it done well with seamless integration, a relevant brand and a genuine contextual reason for being there. But more often than not, the ad placements are just plain wrong and butt ugly. (more…)
Why does ticket scalping continue to occur? And who is to blame?
Big Day Out’s Sydney show sold out in 15 minutes today. Almost simultaneously, scalped tickets appeared on ebay for $300 – double their face value.
It seems every year the ticket scalping issue rears its ugly head again. A few months ago, AC-DC’s sold out stadium tour brought a similar outpouring of consumer anger and frustration. The biggest loser in all this, as always, is the loyal ticket buying public. But for all the Facebook hate groups, forum rants and media articles, what’s been done to fix the issue? (more…)
September Traffic – The month that was at Sound Alliance & beyond…
Time to geek out on some more web stats!
September is a traditionally a big month across the board for Sound Alliance. The pent up energy of hundreds of thousands of passionate festival goers reaches fever pitch as the season is just weeks away from lift off.
September 2009 was even bigger than anticipated with records being broken across the board for the second consecutive month. Average Daily Unique Browsers to SA sites was up 9% to 30,984 and Total Unique Browsers of 569,882. Engagement was up, with a jump in page impressions to 8.8M. (more…)
Spotify ‘back of napkin’ revenue forecast
I recently wrote a post about the Spotify music revolution. Everyone I talk to loves the product for its pure simplicity, me included. But everyone I talk to questions the business model, again, me included.
Spotify are obviously cagey on quoting specifics around revenue, forecasts and profitability. So I decided to have a bash at a ‘back of a napkin’ dissection of Spotify’s business model. (more…)
Do Video pop-ups with auto sound deliver brand benefits? I think not!
Today I was shown a presentation given by a publisher (who shall remain nameless) to a brand (who shall also remain nameless). It was a very impressive pitch, but one line in the presentation leapt out at me.
There’s a slide that sells the virtues of running TVC’s online. The presentation describes pop up TVC’s with ‘Automatic sound on’ as a ‘Brand Benefit’.
Just think about that term ‘brand benefit’ for a moment. I would interpret it to mean something that would positively shift a viewers perception of the brand. I fail to see how auto-play sound does anything but cause a negative shift in brand perception. (more…)
If you take away ‘Breaking News’ what do you have left?
Two news events occurred in the last 12 hours in Australia that became common knowledge on Twitter long before they made it into the newspapers online. The first was the Earthquake in Melbourne. The second was the Sydney dust storm.
Photo borrowed from this rather excellent gallery on Flickr by Marching Ants
67% of The Vine are over 35 years old says Netview
I recently ran a post challenging Fairfax’s youth site The Vine to substantiate their claim of being number 1 in youth. I got a big response after it was run on Ben Shepherd’s blog, Talking Digital. I never received a reply directly from Fairfax. Today Ben Shepherd posted some interesting figures from Netview that drive home my point.
In Ben’s words:
“How come 67% of The Vine – ie, the 18-29 targeting youth website – are over 35 years of age. (more…)
Cheap Traffic Grabs #2: Auto-Refresh
How is it possible that we are still seeing some massive media organisations like Fairfax, ACP and Real Estate using auto-refresh? I mean seriously, how low down and dirty can you go for more page impressions? (more…)
The Sound Alliance, Suite 5, 113 Reservoir Street, Surry Hills NSW, 2010
Telephone: +61 2 9282 4000
www.thesoundalliance.net
Photograph by Calum Paton