The incredible power of a 16 year old video blogger

http://www.22michaels.com/2010/03/juicystar07-and-world-of-new-media.html

by ALee • 16 years ago

54 19 16 years ago

teej• 16 years ago

"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.

greendestiny• 16 years ago

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.

derefr2• 16 years ago

How does one do that? I can't imagine 13-17-year-olds having the means to order shoes online.

archon810• 16 years ago

Not entirely true - traffic and publicity is surely going to have impact on their SEO rankings - Alexa, Google PR, etc.

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).

gizmo• 16 years ago

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.

smokinn• 16 years ago

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?

icefox• 16 years ago

So the real question is what do 13-17 year old girls buy.

hnsummary2• 16 years ago

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.

http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/28/the-incredible-power-of-a-16...

Confusion• 16 years ago

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.

hnsummary2• 16 years ago

If I get down voted consistently then I'll stop. Most of the value of HN is in the comments so I'll link back to the original HN post in each summary.

chamza• 16 years ago

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.

petercooper2• 16 years ago

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 :-)

davi• 16 years ago

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.

petercooper2• 16 years ago

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 :-)

ryanjmo• 16 years ago

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.

drtse4• 16 years ago

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.

The incredible power of a 16 year old video blogger

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