The incredible power of a 16 year old video blogger
22michaels.com
22michaels.com
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.
(also there are a few services kicking around that try to solve these problems)
Kids tend to get allowances and spending money as gifts for birthdays, Christmas, Easter, etc. in the UK at least.
And the higher the ranking, the higher the potential revenue in the future.
Remember: you can never have too much traffic. If you do, cope with it, it's only going to help you (unless you have 0 business sense).
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.
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?
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.
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.
http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/28/the-incredible-power-of-a-16...
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.
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 :-)
Does anyone have a link to that post? Im intrigued on reading it again in light of this.