Posts tagged ‘Web Traffic’

Traffic Alone is Not a Business: Reddit-Conde Nast Edition

By

It’s easy to hate on deals of the Conde Nast-Reddit variety. When a big traditional publisher snaps up a website with no clear strategy in mind — or at least no strategy made public — it begs more questions than it answers. What does an old-line company who excels at matching blue-chip advertisers with its gorgeous, glossy tomes want with a Digg-like site where readers suggest headlines and then are voted up or down by peers in the community? (Sample: “Do periods attract bears? Can they really smell the menstruation?”)

How Reddit fits into Conde’s future wasn’t obvious when the deal was done in 2006 and it’s less so now, what with Reddit asking for money from its community. It’s sad to see a site with such a strong community reduced to groveling for more funds to hire enough engineers to basically keep the site up and add some features. There are lessons here for those who still look at big traffic figures — and with 280 million views a month, Reddit pulls a ton — and assume that audience alone will prop up a business.

Here are a few things a ton of traffic won’t fix:

1. No revenue. Ok, This is a bit chicken-and eggy. In most cases, audience is the first step towards making a content outfit some money, but without any scratch a mature site like Reddit isn’t going to be a favorite of corporate overlords. That’s essentially Reddit’s explanation of what’s going on and it seems straightforward. As the Ning saga recently demonstrated, the days of tossing around big numbers of uniqiue visitors or page views as though they themselves indicated the health of a business have come and gone. Less simple is who to blame or where to go from here.

2. No clear path to real revenue. I’m not a regular Reddit user and I may be missing something, but it seems that the main way the site makes money is a little ad unit tucked into the right rail. This morning, it featured a house ad soliciting advertising. That’s unacceptable for an operation with the consumer traction Reddit has — even just from the advertising perspective. As a heavily-trafficked platform whose main laborers are its readers, Reddit should scale. Helping it do so, you would think, should have been job number-one for Conde.

Read more »

  • 19 May 2010 at 1:59 PM
  • /
  • Our Sites

Elena Kagan and The Albino: Giving You the Journalism You Deserve

By

On Monday, May 10, President Barack Obama announced his nomination Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, to fill the seat soon to be vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens. Kagan — the current Solicitor General and former dean of Harvard Law School, and the first woman in each of these offices — is a distinguished lawyer and a worthy nominee. Expect her to be easily confirmed.

Elena Kagan Princess BriderOn Above the Law, we’ve covered the Kagan nomination with our traditional high-low mix. The highbrow fare has included a personal essay by my colleague, Elie Mystal, on the experience of studying under Kagan at Harvard Law School; a thoughtful, historically informed analysis on the required credentials for nominees (fun fact: you don’t need a law degree); and an exegesis of a 1995 law review article Kagan wrote, in which she described Supreme Court confirmation hearings as a “vapid and hollow charade.”

Read more »

5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Online Porn Business

By

Ever dream of building a porn website? Then you should have become an academic. Maybe you would have been one of the five “security researchers” from the Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and University of California- Santa Barbara who set out to answer one of the most pressing questions of our time: How do adult websites make money?

To get us an answer, they built their own smutty destination, which yielded plenty of insight into an oft-ignored and steamy little corner of the content business. Their findings were reported on MIT’s Technology Review today. Although it disappointed by not linking to the site, the post is otherwise chock full of factoids. Here are five you need to know:

1. Turns out being a successful porn mogul isn’t as simple as aggregating a bunch of bukkake videos. Once you’ve got the content, then you need the eyeballs and that means anteing up in a surprisingly complicated game of web traffic arbitrage. Or as the article rather kinkily describes it: “a seething ecosystem of traffic affiliates constantly skimming clicks and pennies off of one another.” If you’re interesting in getting into the porn-traffic brokering racket, know that $160 will fetch 47,000 sticky little clicks in the rather robust-sounding market.

Read more »

How to Increase Your Twitter Following Using Neither Science Nor Snake Oil: A Case Study

By

One of the most commonly available brands of social-media snake oil now available is the kind that will help you grow your Twitter following to Greg Odom-like proportions. It’s a rare day that my inbox isn’t violated by some multi-step program that will have thousands of folks hanging on your every 140-character burst overnight. Usually the bulk of the advice is either platitudinous–Be authentic, Engage your community, Provide value–or so highly technical in nature as to miss the point of Twitter, which is simplicity. If you want a platform to game, try Google. At least, the search engine’s algorithm is complex enough to warrant some thinking about how to beat it.

Not so for Twitter. Sure, you might be best off posting at certain times of day and there might be convincing, data-driven grammatical guidance on how to earn those precious re-tweets that will give your Tweets a better chance to go viral. But that’s not what really matters.

I can say that with dead certainty because we have a site whose following has exploded over the past four months–and not from two to eight or 100 to 400 or even 5,000 to 20,000. Since January, Fashionista.com— whose Twitter handle is @fashionista_com— has gone from about 23,000 followers in January to more than 124,000 today. And it did so without relying on any gimmicks, research, or profound social-media advice unless of course you count mine. Which you probably shouldn’t.

Fashionista.com Twitter ChartThe site’s editors, Lauren Sherman and Britt Aboutaleb (who is unfortunately leaving us), have built (unofficially) the third-largest Twitter feed of any fashion news brand, trailing only Women’s Wear Daily and Elle.com, both of which have staffs that dwarf our  operation. They’ve done it by taking the sensibility that informs their blog and applying it to their Twitter feed. A radical approach, huh? Though it’s best you check out the site for yourself, I’ll try to capture their approach here: Fashionista is smart and high-curated, enthusiastic without being frothy, critical without being catty. And, importantly, I can say it’s personal without being totally subjective because it pulls in hundreds of thousands of readers every month, some of them fashion’s leading lights. And some of those, Elle Creative Director Joe Zee, fashion PR maven Kelly Cutrone and Glamour Editor Cindy Leive, have even thrown us a few retweets.

Read more »