Like everyone, we share a certain anxiety over what is happening with our economy and how it will impact our businesses, familes and friends. And while some speculate on the end of print publishing and the failure of online advertising, we still find ourselves very enthusiastic over building a publishing business. Having launched three entertainment focused brands last year (Giant Bomb, Comic Vine and Anime Vice), we see a promising future for our brands and other publishers who can grow and flourish under these economic conditions.
A little under two years ago, we launched Whiskey Media to build brands that are high on audience engagement and editorial authority. Early on in the formation of the company in 2007, we made a conscience effort to keep our costs low so that we could afford a reasonable amount of creative and editorial freedom to find our voice and establish our process. So far, we’re happy to say that we are really pleased with the results while looking at the past 30 days of Google Analytics data:
Across the Whiskey Media Network:
- Absolute Uniques/mo: 2.36M
- Pageviews/mo: 19M
- Over 825k moderated wiki submissions
- 1.4M images submitted
- Avg 7 page views per user session
Our primary focus has been a basic rethink of the content model, at least as we knew it. Our goal was to develop a publishing platform that is both high on engagement and authoritative content- while at the same time keeping expenses in check. In particular, we wanted the ability to have both editorial and creative freedom and not be in the position where we ever had to do anything un-natural based on a desire for revenue. We found out a couple of things a long the way we would like to share.
There is a big difference between being a blog and a structured wiki.
The graph above is from Giant Bomb’s Google Analytics. We launched Giant Bomb as a blog on March 6th and it was moderately successful doing around 15k visitors a day 20k pages a day. Now we are doing 75k visits and 250k pageviews, and you can see the big difference in terms of both user growth and pageviews after we relaunched it on the Whiskey Media structured wiki platform. We spent the time between March and July doing two significant things for the company. First, we moved to the
Django framework from the homegrown PHP framework we were using with Comicvine at the time. Second, we spent a significant amount of time thinking through the data model so that the database could grow naturally through user contribution, but in a way that made enjoyable and useful to browse.
You never get it right the first time
Again, having a background building multiple content brands over and over again, we were sensitive to launching sites that could be easily maintained . We also realized immediately after launching a new site, that we had learned new ways to improve the functionality and streamline maintenance if we went back in and refined the code. So we waited a few weeks, watched what was happening with usage. Then we realized we needed better tools than Analytics to monitor usage specific to our platform and business needs. Specifically we were concerned about”ease of contribution”. We built a set of tools to monitor engagement for each site in our network we call “Metrimatics”. Metrics such as “friending”, video completion, wiki moderation and trivia contribution are examples of engagement we monitor daily and use as a way to measure how well our publishing platform and content is resonating with each brand’s audience. Here’s a screenshot of what this tool looks like:
Some features we thought were going to be killer, turned out to be filler. So we axed them, and did boring things like move the images to
Cloudfront and improve the image uploader as we saw users struggle with upload. Immediately we saw better results across all the sites with each incremental tweak, and we’ve been more cautious about adding new features and focusing on the core user experience of sharing knowledge with their community. In short, giving the people what they want.
You got to give what you get
As we showed above, there has been a tremendous amount of data contributed to all of our sites over the year. The data is so deep and rich, we struggle with not building more and more ways to view and consume the data. So we quit fighting it and we recently opened up the data to the public through our
Whiskey API. We are already seeing some amazing Facebook and iPhone apps, as well as new websites that look promising. We’re looking forward to seeing even more cool products derived from our communities work going forward.
Looking forward
While we have the ability to rollout sites the scale of Giantbomb every couple of weeks (like we did with Animevice), we have decided against launching rapidly. Instead, we’re focusing on areas where we have the most interest and think we can offer something unique. Expect to see some new products this year in other entertainment verticals, specifically areas where our communities already have shown interest. And then there is the next big challenge….making money. We have a plan to make money in the context of the value we create, and it will not come solely from advertising support. We believe ads still work- as long as they are in context and add to the content value. More on that soon.
In all, it’s been a great year. Thanks to all of you for the support.
