So if some of you were following, I was in Dusseldorf at The World After Advertising Conference a few weeks ago give a short talk on a topic pertaining to online media and its ability to maintain stricter control over its personal agenda and content. Meaning it doesn’t need to focus on necessarily popular content or the pressure of others to grow and develop itself.
As my first opportunity to speak in front of a crowd I wasn’t exactly nervous but it didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped haha. Of course any new experience rarely goes to plan and that’s fine, how one progresses afterwards is a more important measure. I would generally say that if I had aggregated and combined my presentation on three occasions, I probably would have hit all 100% of my ideas and content. That’s fine to a certain extent, going forward I have a better grasp of the creation and execution of a presentation.
However, one thing that’s a bit more difficult to overcome is a perceived nervousness that accompanied the presentation. I personally felt relatively fine and comfortable, but a friend said I sounded nervous. I wouldn’t lie to myself cause it would really serve no purpose, so that’s something I should definitely take into account. As a by-product of this experience, I am definitely more aware of how I sound or come off as after listing to recordings and watching videos of myself.
So on to the discussion… prior to settling in a topic, the organizers assigned me a topic talking about advertising and the financial aspect of Hypebeast which I really couldn’t speak about. Not that I didn’t want to but I really have little involvement in the ad sales and the business numbers of Hypebeast. So from there, they proposed that I speak about Long Tail distribution and what effect it has on us being a media outlet.
The subsequent presentation I put together was mainly a series of photographs and wasn’t created to really explain the concept. I must admit I wasn’t familiar with the concept of the Long Tail in its purest form but after going hard on the research, it was essentially a fancy name for something I sort of already had a firm grasp on, it’s just that it tied together everything nicely.
In layman’s turns, the Long Tail (as seen in the image above) is essentially a reference to a type of distribution curve that probably wouldn’t have been accounted for had it not been for the Internet. Its more well-established distribution concept of the the 80-20 Rule or Pareto Curve has been pushed by many people from all walks of life. It could be something along the lines of “20% of your customers give you 80% of your business… 20% of your stories drive 80% of your traffic…” While traditionally this may have been true, this came mostly based on the notion that you were working in a relatively small market.
If I had to relate this to the print magazine world, back in the day there was a reliance on working on mostly big stories since anything obscure would perhaps be lost on the audience and put into question the interest in your magazine. Also this in general would mean that niche content would have a more difficult to survive pre-Internet days since the market for magazines in regards to total distribution was much smaller.
However, enter the Internet and in a time where there is virtually limitless amounts of publishing real estate. Yes this is a double edge sword and it really puts curation on a back burner at times. It’s not about fitting the top news into 50 printed pages anymore when you could post 500 things electronically n a blog if you wanted to. But simultaneously, you’re obviously able to grow much much quicker cause obscurity becomes less of a factor. If I want to talk about neon hiking boot laces on Hypebeast, all of a sudden there is a potential market for it cause you’ve just now pooled all neon hiking boot lace fans across the whole world (or anybody connected to the Internet). And by law of the Long Tail (in our case traffic vs. stories), it states that the tail-end of the distribution when aggregated is in excess of the head/front-end. So all the smaller unassuming stories when added up are in excess of the more heavily trafficked stories. One of the better examples of this are businesses such as Netflix and Amazon. Yes they stock a lot of mainstream and blockbuster items, however if you look at the numbers, much of their sales in total come from items that generally aren’t deemed as being super popular or well-known. Sure people are going to Netflix to get that copy of Star Wars but there are many more sourcing out niche and lesser known titles.
It sounds good, but is there any conclusive evidence on the part of Hypebeast? Here is a quick run down of some easy to digest numbers.
December 1st, 2010 – December 31st, 2010: 12,646,353 Pageviews
Top Content – Hits
40,742 Phillip Annand: Me, Creativity and the Internet
25,187 TRON x Playboy Photoshoot
24,319 Shinsuke Takizawa: The Inspirations of a NEIGHBORHOOD
20,411 Kanye West featuring Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj & Bon Iver – Monster (Preview)
16,682 Air Jordan III Black/Cement 2011 Retro Confirmed
Top Content – Percentage of Total Hits
0.34% Phillip Annand: Me, Creativity and the Internet
0.20% TRON x Playboy Photoshoot
0.20% Shinsuke Takizawa: The Inspirations of a NEIGHBORHOOD
0.17% Kanye West featuring Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj & Bon Iver – Monster (Preview)
0.01% Air Jordan III Black/Cement 2011 Retro Confirmed
So as you can see, even the most highly trafficked piece of content on Hypebeast for the month of December was essentially a drop in the bucket. If I drop that number as an outlier because it was a multi-page feature and look at TRON x Playboy as the top blog post, you can see how inconsequential each post is in the grand scheme of things. During my presentation, I used the analogy of an iceberg. Many people are under the assumption that big news drives websites (as it represents what you can superficially see on the surface), but the true foundation is seen below the water in the base. I don’t doubt the importance of mainstream content as it provides a starting point. People may stumble onto Hypebeast cause of something relatively mainstream but their interest, I hope anyways, can be held with other content from relatively unknown sources or focuses. With these numbers in mind you can see where much of the traffic is derived, and its not from top stories.
Having said that, media sites should be less worried about reposting news everybody else has covered and hopefully find their own editorial voice. It seems stating the obvious but by catering to a different angle, there’s much more room for growth. As I mentioned in the introduction, to drive Hypebeast’s traffic, there’s no need to really succumb to going a route that emphasizes what the advertiser wants because you’re able to grow just fine by picking out news you find interesting… assuming you have something put together in a noteworthy fashion. If you do start a niche site, your ability isn’t that you cover a topic few people around your area care about, it’s about a good quality platform and how are you going to ensure the market you’re speaking to can find out about your platform. And to cap it off, the ability for other traffic to aggregate into something so substantial ensures you don’t have to necessarily worry that your site will not flourish if you aren’t posting any particular bit of news.
If anybody has any questions, I’ll try to explain them.
-Eugene