Show me the Clicks...

Shel Israel writes here about my analysis that Robert Scoble was more important to launching Ojos than Walt Mossberg. I came to this conclustion from experience. Over the last few years at Andale, a company I co-founded, we got numerous articles in various newspapers. Everytime we did I would eagerly await the next day's registration numbers on the website. I was like a kid waiting for the ice cream truck to come by. I would get calls from my mom (you can always count on her) saying, "beta (means son in Hindi) I am so proud of you. I saw you in the Washington Post." While a mother's love can sustain many things, a business is not one of them..;-). The registration numbers would always disappoint. The impact of the article was maybe 5 or 10 registrations extra on a base of 300-500 a day (so about 3%) and it would go away in one or two days. This happened everytime.


Recently the firefox community pitched in and purchased a full page ad in the New York Times. John Battelle wrote about it here . You can learn more abou the effort on the Spread Firefox . I heard that it added 5000 new registrations on a base of hundreds of millions (I was unable to verify this so if you can let me know). Assuming it is true, not much impact.


My thesis is: it is just too hard to translate ads you see in print to registrations online. A reader has to read the article, remember the name, find the URL, and next time they are in front of a computer - remember to go there. In an online article, you click and you are there. Offline might get awareness, but as a small struggling startup, you can't feed yourself on awareness and the hope of maybe a future registration. I think the popularity of adwords and the direct ROI for the small business dollar further underscores this trend toward "show me the clicks".


So Walt - I think you do a great job reviewing new products and technology. I just wish your medium was more online than print.

Comments

[Tejas Patel]

Hello Munjal,
I agree. Links on good blogs/sites tend to end up bringing more exposure/registrations on one's service rather than print media on the long run. Normally we won't open one week old newspapers as to see what was the techo news on there. But I might still search for something, go to a site/blog and read an article that might be old and click on the links mentioned there.

BLOGS ARE POWERFUL :).

Based on what I could rather from this blog and other links, the product that you guys are working on sounds like cool. I will keep an eye on it and try when it's available. Good luck to you and your team.

[Munjal Shah]

Blogs are very powerful. I just met Tejas when he skyped me and he is going to think about more applications for our technology. I couldn't have gotten connected with someone like him from a print article.

[Vinod G]

Hi Munjal,
My being here is testament to what you have written here.
Is there any place where we can see ojos at work??

[Munjal Shah]

Vinod, soon there will be a place. Shall I add you to the beta? I will also be posting some screen shots here shortly.

[Asa Dotzler]

Actually, the NYT advertisement was almost a year ago and it direclty accounted for probably hundreds of thousands of new users but that wasn't the main impact. The campaign to raise the money and the novelty of the effort for an open source project to place an ad in a major paper led to dozens of stories in mainstream press as well as thousands of blog posts. The results of the press surrounding the campaign to make that add happen probably accounted for millions of new Firefox users.

- A
(Spread Firefox co-creator)

[Munjal Shah]

Asa - thanks for the clarification, but alas you will never know the exact impact which is the 2nd issue - even when print is effective you can't correlate. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy - well actually more - and I am very excited about Firefox, but I still think print is not as effective for driving downloads.

[Christopher Coulter]

If you measure success by clicks, eyeballs, registrations or downloads, you haven't learnt a darn thing from the first Bubble. The Wall Street Journal goes places and reaches people Scoble can't even ever dream about, and the WSJ has an archive. You can't mesaure things on just an one-day impact.

And that Firefox ad, was buying name reco, which granted tons of new users, which will continue to have a payoff as the media will pit it in the classic David vs. Goliath mode.

Getting people to download start-uppy buggish-testing-alphaish code, well yes, bloggers are more of that sort. But your reasoning is wholly circular, and Blog vs. Print is a false and needless argument, you need a diversified marketing strategy, as the mainstream demographics are not bunched up in Scoble's blog thicket, even if some does spread to major press organs. Same mistake the Dean internet focus had, all the juice and excitement coming back from a small group that looked and felt way bigger than it was, all the screaming echo chamber loudness, but it will ring hollow.

[Gideon Marken]

Munjal,

I just wanted to add that you are so very correct on the impact of print media on the Web. I think most papers and magazines would get quite upset if they realized that they are loosing the influence and impact that they once had.

Case in point... I run a music site for independent artists at http://www.ArtistServer.com - and in this week's issue of Time magazine (Nov 21, 2005), my site is featured as one of the "Top 20 Music Sites" in the Online Music Guide. This is the first time my site has made it into the press, so I was very excited... then the fear set in... "oh no... my site will go down from all the signups and traffic!!!" Well, the traffic has picked up, signups per day have gone up, but nothing like what I expected.

I'm not disappointed though, I'm greatly moved that the site was selected - plus,the recognition is still there. This is what Mr. Coulter has brought up in his reply - the establishing of name recognition - the planting of seeds.

I wouldn't abandon traditional marketing and PR - you want to attract a wide range of people to your service - and many of those people are either new to the Web, or aren't there yet. Those people won't read blogs, but they'll buy a digital camera - and that's a doorway for your business.

Have fun with the business and enjoy the times,

Gideon Marken

[coffee queen]

Bloggers are so powerful. That is why ihype.com is going to be such a great website! It is suppose to launch in June 2008!