"Unfortunately conversions is a different story as Juicystar07's audience is primarily 13-17 year old girls."
There's a hidden lesson in this story. 22 Michaels learned this lesson the hard way. The lesson is simple: not all traffic is created equal. It turns out that Youtube views, Youtube comments, Youtube ranking, Facebook shares, and pageviews don't mean much. They're vanity metrics - nice to look at but lacking content.
The only thing that matters is sales. Find traffic sources that generate sales and pour money into the channels the most sales dollars per advertising dollar.
Well the lesson could be that they should aim their product more at 13-17 year olds. If they are disproportionately interested in your site it would make sense to optimise for them as customers. My unscientific guess is that custom shoes aren't ever going to fit quite into the premium shoe price range - because at that end you want some extra validation like a famous brand/designer.
In Scotland 17 year olds start University. I had a debit card account when I was 16 (quite a few years ago) and it's quite common for teens (14+) to have part-time jobs even if they're still in full-time education.
Kids tend to get allowances and spending money as gifts for birthdays, Christmas, Easter, etc. in the UK at least.
By "means," I didn't mean "money", but rather specifically "a credit card." Parents don't like to let their children have them here—they forsee bad spending habits and debt; that's why "reloadable" service-specific gift cards are so popular.
I don't think you appreciate the sheer volume of traffic.
Half a million 15-year-olds watch the clip, and none of them immediately buy the product. But it's fair to assume at least 10% of the girls remember the brand name, and the remaining 90% will remember that for custom designed shoes they should go with "whatever the brand was that got recommended by shinyrainbowprincess". That's a lot of brand recognition.
But let's look at it from a cost perspective for a moment. I'm almost entirely sure that she got paid less than $10.000 for the advertisement. Probably way less, but what do I know? Suppose they did pay $10.000, then they only need to sell an extra 100 shoes or so to break even (assuming they have a healthy profit margin). That's peanuts, really.
So even if there are no direct conversions, and the only benefit is word of mouth or brand recognition the shoe shop still got a deal of a lifetime. Half a million people, that's half the circulation of the New York Times! And most people spend only 10 or so minutes on the paper, which is the same as the length of the advertisement.
Exactly. Conversion is always immediate, especially in high end products.
I think they timed this competition very well because isn't prom coming up very soon? How many of these girls that didn't buy their design are going to be pestering their parents to get their custom shoe in time for prom? What about next year?
Our start-up creates Facebook Applications for these popular YouTubers. Blair is one of our top clients (http://apprats.com/partners/) and her app is here: http://apps.facebook.com/juicystar/ She has been a really awesome person to work with; I have been continually impressed by her.
We have been able to get around 250,000 Facebook monthly users in just over 2 months because of all the traffic these YouTubers can push. I think people are still underestimating how influential and valuable these YouTubers are.
The power of social media isn’t lost on any of the visitors of HN but it’s still worth taking a moment to read about how Shoes Of Prey worked with 16 year old video blogger Blair Fowler to make a make a YouTube video and post it to her account. She has nearly 300,000 youtube subscribers and the promotional video sent nearly 200,000 visitors to the Shoes Of Prey website. To give some perspective, Techcrunch was only able to deliver a tiny fraction of that number of visitors.
Visitors don’t always mean sales though. The Shoes Of Prey blog says they didn’t get many sales out of the deal and speculate that Blairs follower demographic of 13-17 year old girls can’t afford the expensive shoes. I don’t know how much they paid Blair to do the video but I’m sure enough of those kids were able to convince their moms to buy some shoes.
Well, this'll be interesting. I think this comment is valuable (good summaries of articles usually are), but the site you link to isn't (because other comments are also valuable). However, as I suspect you're the guys from mixergynotes, I don't think this account has a chance in hell.
Gotta say this is impressive, though.. a world where a 16 year old both looks and talks like a 25+ year old is a pretty alien one to me. I'm only glad I'm out of the dating pool! When I was 16, the girls were spotty, wore no or bad make up, and were into screaming over boy bands. It's a different world :-)
I don't think the lesson here is, "Boy, girls today!"
This 16 year old is an outlier, despite her mainstream looks. She has built up her audience to the point that she can attract 450,000 views to a youtube post on shoes, and she has monetized this audience. I don't like a lot about what she represents (teenagers should aspire to $305 custom-made snake skin high heels? ugh) but she is very good at what she does.
When we were kids, there was essentially no way for an ambitious, entrepreneurial, but non-technical 16 year old to do this sort of thing. Viva la internet.
This 16 year old is an outlier, despite her mainstream looks.
Good point, but unless you're trawling social networking sites,the ones plastered over the TV (MTV, 90210, et al) are the only ones we see a ton of :-)
The comparison with TechCrunch in not relevant, i guess that only a small percentage of the average techie tc user visited the site, let alone buy anything. A girl oriented site/whatever was a better way to promote something like this.
Btw, i'm impressed with the results too, trying this with a more tech related vlogger (if there are any) for a more tech/web2.0 related startup could be a nice experiment.
You'd think if they were aware of the problem [with the shoe design software on Linux] they would pay someone to fix it.
One of the wonderful joys of doing a small business is that you have a million things you can do for your next task, and one of the pains is you have to make the tough decisions on which one wins.
This is not a tough decision. The intersection of women who pay $300 for shoes and Linux users is likely microscopic and the cost of fully supporting marginal platforms is often huge. You're almost certainly better off spending the engineering resources on something marketing-oriented which you can immediately roll out to the 99.92% of your clients who are not rocking Ubuntu.
Funny thing that you mention about Linux. I used to have a Linux blog where I only used to write about Linux. It was very easy to get traffic, my best months were ~600k and I was making fairly decent money (around ~1500/month), but I was very easy on ads and had to turn down many ad offers even though they had amazing CPM (from Microsoft, Apple and antivirus softwares).
I ended up selling the site for 20k in 2008, cause I needed some money for a new project and I was getting bored with the blog.
I guess the lesson I learned from my experience is that almost ALL traffic can be monetized. Who knew you could make $1500/month from a linux blog? I could have made more if I took all the offer and pushed it farther. Now that I think about it I think it was a mistake to sell it, the new owner totally trashed the site. :(
> Now that I think about it I think it was a mistake to sell it, the new owner totally trashed the site. :(
That's the main thing that'd keep me from selling any sites of mine, unless I got really ridiculously impossible-to-refuse offers. I have a personal finance site I could probably sell, but the thought of something I started, that could at least vaguely be associated with me, turning into a cesspool of popup ads and paid blog posts, is enough to not do so.
This is reminding me of a post I read on HN about some guy who was trying to start an advertising business focused around getting popular video bloggers from youtube to advertise products.
Does anyone have a link to that post? Im intrigued on reading it again in light of this.
There's a hidden lesson in this story. 22 Michaels learned this lesson the hard way. The lesson is simple: not all traffic is created equal. It turns out that Youtube views, Youtube comments, Youtube ranking, Facebook shares, and pageviews don't mean much. They're vanity metrics - nice to look at but lacking content.
The only thing that matters is sales. Find traffic sources that generate sales and pour money into the channels the most sales dollars per advertising dollar.