Based on these projections the paywall model would deliver revenues of $94 per week ($2 subs plus an advertising rate of $70 CPM) for the 40 subscribers per thousand that have been converted into paying customers. Not quite as healthy as the $175 per week in advertising revenues per thousand in traffic (based on a $70 CPM rate on 2.5 pages per visit for 5 days a week) that the old “free” model would have achieved but certainly not the shipwreck that Newsday encountered when it embraced the paywall.
On the DIY media front Mashable have just published a list of 10 beautiful social media infographics. There are some interesting ideas embedded in each of the diagrams on display. Plus each of the illustrations provide us with some degree of statistical insight into the impact of social media on the real world. The Conversation Prism and the Global Map of Social Web Involvement are particularly strong pieces of graphic design.
Having said that I’m not sure you really need pictures to describe just how big social media is today. You only have to go to Facebook’s official stats page to recognise the metrics are mind bogglingly large.
Based on a 10 Hour Working Day Facebook’s 500 Billion minutes per month of “face time” translates into about 2.3 Million Man Years of effort. That’s about the amount of effort historians estimate it took to build the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Picture in your head one Great Pyramid being built every month and you’ll get a some idea of just how much creative energy Facebook is consuming today.
The question is can all this ”virtual economic activity” translate into “real world economic activity”? Just how well do these ephemeral webs of increasingly complex and high touch online relationships translate into productive “real world” – dare I say consumer - networks?
The metrics required to answer this question have yet to be gathered -never mind analysed - and that’s I have been watching with some interest over the past couple of months the growth in Meetups . I’m interested to see if these Meetups can provide some insight into answering that question. After all, the journey that News Corp is taking with the paywall and the journey the Tech Blogs are taking with the Meetups are both experiments in how to translate online traffic into real world customers.
The idea that the most popular tech blogs (e.g. Mashable and Techcrunch) would hold global meet ups where regulars could catch up, have a beer or a coffee and celebrate their shared interest in their favorite technologies and platforms should provide us with some valuable insight into just how effective social media is in creating real world customer networks.
My initial assumption was the conversion rate similar to the direct marketing average of 2-3% would provide sufficient evidence to suggest that social media was a revolutionary new marketing platform that could significantly change the way we do business moving forward. After all direct marketing is basically cold calling. Theoretically Mashable and Techcrunch’s community of readers are already warm if not entirely hot prospects.
Google’s experience with the launch of the Nexus One delivered a “real world” response rate of around 0.05% – based on the search engines monthly traffic of around 150 Million uniques and sales of around 80,000 units in the first month. So I was interested to see if the tech blogs would have more success in turning online traffic into a “real world” network of brand champions. After all if they won’t take the opportunity to meet for a beer what chance have you got of selling them a mobile phone?
After crunching the traffic numbers - Monthly Uniques visiting the web site excluding the RSS, Facebook and Twitter numbers – here is what I have discovered
- Fred Wilson’s Meetup is currently attracting a 0.65% response rate
- Mashable Meetup attracted a 0.3% response rate
- Techcrunch Meetup attracted 0.05% response rate
Advertising and Direct Marketing Response rates
There are also some interesting insights to be found in the data about the relative value of the network nodes – For example there appears to be a significant proportion of Meetups that are just individuals or pairs (e.g. Techcrunch: 55%) while the high value Meetups (i.e. 100+) represent a very small proportion of the total gatherings (e.g. Techcrunch: 2%) but gathered 37% of the participants. As I have said before the real value in any network isn’t the total number of nodes but the value of the largest nodes embedded in the network.
These are early days in the journey to discover ways of translating online traffic into real world customers so these metrics are probably not too surprising. Either way it will be interesting to see if the response ratio improves in the next round of Meetups.
June 28th, 2011 → 6:16 pm
[...] a casual glance at the global effort being put into Facebook in particular and the web in general would suggest the answer to that question is no. Although the hive mind is [...]
July 20th, 2011 → 11:39 am
[...] we have encountered so far across a broad range of activities and networks (be it Meetups, Facebook fan page engagement , Zynga’s Game Addicts or Twitter advertising CTR’s ) [...]