Tag Archives: online

Announcements, News

Seattle, You’ve Got Nerve (Dating)

Remember the Aughts, when singletons (we called single people “singletons” and they spent time “quirkyalone”) used to flock to the various sites that featured Nerve personals? If you liked reading The Onion, for instance, you could visit their personals section and look for someone local to you, who would have written a little seeking-other ad usually modeled upon the snarky, urbane, interestingly-damaged-goods style of The Onion itself.

Less bruited about was the fact that Nerve white-labeled itself for a number of sites, and if you wanted to, you could play the detective game of deciding which hipster site fed which singleton into the interpersonal food court that was Nerve. At some point, it felt like all the underemployed writers in the world were logging into Nerve to freshen up their copy, polish a headline, optimize a keyword or two; they didn’t want to date you, necessarily, but they did, like all writers, appreciate the feedback from fans.

Now, with the the Teens in the offing, Nerve is going another direction, and that brings them to Seattle “just in time for Valentine’s Day,” they tell us. Nerve Dating dispenses with the whole chore of the encyclopedic dating profile. CEO Sean Mills, deriding the trend toward algorithmic love matches, puts it like this:

For most people, the challenge is less about figuring out whether you like someone, and more about starting that first conversation so you can meet more people. It can be really hard to walk across the room and start talking to someone you don’t know. We wanted to make that easier, and to do it in a way that felt natural and casual instead of gimmicky and contrived. (“I see you and I are 93% compatible!” — once again, no one ever.)

The site we came up with feels more like a lively party than an awkward blind date. On Nerve Dating, you actively share your thoughts and opinions about restaurants, bars, movies, music, and books, and anything else you’ve seen or done; then, you’re instantly introduced to other people who did the same.

“It can be really hard to walk across the room and start talking to someone you don’t know.” Mills doesn’t add, “Right, Seattle?” But we’re pretty sure he’s looking at us, meaningfully. Seattle is fourth in line for launch, after, of course, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. As of today, says Mills (or his PR bot):

[P]eople in Seattle will be able to meet based not on who is mathematically matched to them, but on conversations about culture, news, and their favorite activities. In a town with a lively music, culture, and food scene like Seattle, it just makes sense to have a dating site that celebrates the voice of an individual. It’s colorful conversations, not math, that create connections.

Prove it, Seattle!

Business, News

The Kindle Fire This Time & the Inevitable Crumbling of Bricks

After long refusing to release hard figures on Kindle sales, Amazon confirmed that they have sold at least four with their announcement today that “Kindle unit sales on Black Friday — including the new Kindle Fire tablet — were four times greater than whatever they were on Black Friday a year ago,” as GeekWire puts it.

More at this astonishingly sales-copy-laden press release.

Across the U.S., 226 million shoppers spent a record $52.4 billion on stuff over the weekend, an average of $398.62. The National Retail Federation’s report conflates online and bricks-and-mortar retail sales, an odd imprecision given that they can tell you that “nearly one-quarter (24.4%) of Black Friday shoppers were at the stores by midnight on Black Friday,” that the most popular category was clothing and clothing accessories (51 percent), and the runner-up was electronics (almost 40 percent).

2011 was the first time that the Federation deigned to ask shoppers what they intended to do with their electronic devices:

More than one-quarter (25.7%) of Americans with tablet devices said they did or will purchase items with their devices, and 37.4 percent will or have researched products and compared prices with their tablets. Overall, more than half (57.1%) said they have or will use their tablet devices to shop for gifts this weekend.

Now comes not just Cyber Monday, but Cyber Week, says the Wall Street Journal, noting that online sales are up 30 percent over last year so far this morning.

It’s not precisely news, but within these developments lies a good deal of tension: If the online shopping experience is as good as the in-store, or even exceeds the in-store in certain ways, then shareholders start to wonder what the point is in brick-and-mortar stores so expensive that they don’t edge into the black until the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Here’s an anecdote, with the usual caveats. In the market for a pair of sandals, I browsed styles online over the weekend. Nordstrom had the Cole Haan’s I settled on in black and brown, so I decided to swing by  to try them on, rather than buy-and-try. The store was the expected madhouse, but Nordstrom staff were as unflappable as always, directing me to the Cole Haan sandals on display, and hurrying off to check on sizes.

Regretfully, the sales clerk told me, they had nothing smaller than a 10. I explained I was hoping to try a pair on before I left for vacation to a spot where you can actually wear sandals (if you were wondering why a Seattleite was shopping for sandals with winter coming on). They could easily order me a pair, the clerk told me, but it would take four to six days. I thanked him, and went home and ordered my sandals from Zappos.com. (“Free Shipping Both Ways!“)

Now let’s return to the comforting realm of statistics:

“Despite some analysts’ predictions that the flurry of brick-and-mortar retailers opening their doors early for Black Friday would pull dollars from online retail, we still saw a banner day for e-commerce,” BBC News quotes Comscore’s chairman, Gian Fulgoni, as saying. On Black Friday, 50 million people visited online retail sites.

Ah.

Announcements, News

From the Publisher: The SunBreak’s Progress, Chapter 3

Hey, it's MvB!

On August 25, 2009, The SunBreak went live, in its bootstrappy way, with Bumbershoot coverage. (Now every year at Bumbershoot-time I am reminded of our mortality.) I have been trying to pull back the curtain on running an online magazine, as time permits, and it’s probably time for another update, on the occasion of our second birthday.

Editorial

What’s new-ish? We just anointed Tony Kay as our new music editor. Audrey Hendrickson is now our managing arts editor. Philippa Kiraly writes for us occasionally about classical music. I always feel like I need to get out there and interview more people just for being themselves, but you know Seattle–people are shy. I believe we’re in the double digits in actual paying subscribers now. It’s always thrilling to get that email from PayPal.

Besides our home page, the all-time top stories have been our most recent coverage of Vivace’s Brian Fairbrother’s death in a bicycle accident, a repost of a Kaiser cartoon explaining health care reform, Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl making a surprise appearance at a Mike Watt show, video of a rock avalanche on Mount Rainier, Jeremy’s investigation of a Kultur Shock imitator, a conversation with an economist about college tuition, and Cliff Mass getting canned by KUOW. You can’t say we don’t mix it up.

Our fifth most popular content page of the past two years is our A&E section! That, in conjunction with our home page coming in at #1, makes me feel good about our redesign offering readers helpful ways of navigating the site to find posts they are interested in.

Platform

In Chapter 2, as you recall, The SunBreak was negotiating a move to WordPress. This has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. There’s a learning curve, but over time the platform keeps impressing me with its sturdiness and functionality. The choice of Disqus for comments, on the other hand, we’ve had the chance to regret.

It was frequently slow and stalled out, and then finally quit on us, so we’re back to using WP’s built-in commenting system. Now styling our new comments is up top of the design to-do list, followed closely by finishing the design of our category pages.

Traffic

How about a blizzard of statistics? We are blessed with over 1,300 Twitter followers. On Facebook, we’re closing in on 400 fans. RSS remains around 300 spartan subscribers. As has been the case all along, Facebook fans are big news readers, leading all non-search referrers. (Filtering for the t.co Twitter URL, I see that with 1,300 followers, our most popular tweet generated all of 45 clicks.)

Demographics from our Facebook fans

Part of that is certainly because of Facebook’s ability to provide multiple impressions: For the past 30 days, it’s given us 48,000 headline impressions within FB, generating 3,000 referrals. (In contrast, our RSS subscribers looked at over 6,500 excerpted items, and clicked for the full story over 1,300 times.)

On the site itself, for the past 30 days we have 36,000 page views from 21,500 visitors, according to Google Analytics. Quantcast says that averages out to 14,700 visitors per month over our lifetime. 60 percent are Windows machines, 30 percent are Macs, and 7 percent are Linux. Top browsers? Firefox (33 percent), IE (28), Safari (14), and Chrome (13).

Business

Here is our weak spot. It’s unfortunate that running an online magazine leaves me little time for beating the bushes for advertisers. It took me forever to write up a little section about advertising on The SunBreak on our About Us page. (“As little as $150 per month!”) As a bootstrap operation, largely run through volunteer efforts and staff happy hours, we don’t actually require that much revenue to keep chugging along, but I have to admit to feeling stymied by the apparent need for a dedicated ad salesperson. That tends not to be a volunteer position.

In the progress column, we finally have a 728px leaderboard placement (we originally designed the site to include a 468px banner ad in the masthead area, just in time to see everyone switch en masse to 728px). Reverse-engineering lemons from lemonade, we’ve been using the 468px placement for sponsorships (first Strawberry Theatre Workshop, now City Arts Festival).

I still have a dream that someday something like the beLOCAL Ad Network will fully spin off from its media parents, and be free to develop as purely an advertising selling entity. In my mind, this is the best way to recoup ongoing investment in the technology, is to scale as broadly as possible, without concern for “competitors” getting a cut of ad revenue.

To date, there’s a frustrating absence when it comes to a local online ad aggregator who could harmonize total coverage of the Seattle-Tacoma DMA, and take responsibility for selling for network members. We are tiny fish in that equation, but the existence of such an enterprise would spark, I think, a re-emergence of independent, niche online media.

In the meantime, who wants to sell ads for us?

Business, News

Netflix Weekend Outages Raise Question of Hiring Weekend Help

After suffering through that Mariners vs. Rangers game yesterday–interspersed with news of the Women’s FIFA World Cup Finals–I got home and settled in for some Netflix escapism. Not so fast.

Around 4 p.m. (PDT), Netflix streaming began to fail for a substantial portion of customers–judging from the Twitter complaints, if you were watching through Xbox or Playstation or Roku, you were hit hardest.

Some customers were prompted to change their passwords, though that usually failed. (I could log in via Xbox, but couldn’t watch anything–even Search didn’t work. Curiously, I could still access and watch Netflix from my laptop.)

As it happens, Netflix seems not equipped to deal with a weekend outage. Their Netflixhelps Twitter account is only staffed Monday through Friday. On the weekend you’re advised to call a single phone number: “Phone support is available 24/7.” Depends on what you mean by support: during a widespread outage, all you got was a busy signal or, if lucky, a recorded message saying that call volumes were high and you should try later.

Downrightnow.com's assessment of the outage

The outage continued through the night. At about 9:30 p.m., Netflixhelps roused itself to announce that the problem had penetrated Netflix consciousness: “For those of you having difficulty streaming tonight, our apologies – we’re aware of the issue and working to fix it ASAP.”

A little after 11 p.m., the problem was declared fixed, though the internet believes it lasted through most of the night, and a recent Netflix tweet from this morning reads: “Some PS3 users are reporting Cannot Connect to Netflix errors – we’re looking into it.” So maybe fixed is not quite the right word.

Netflix went down on June 20, also on a weekend. That was blamed on a technical glitch. Wishful speculation again last night was that this could be a Denial of Service retribution for their recent price hike, but so far Netflix has offered no guidance on what the problem was.

Whatever else is true, you couldn’t have asked for a better way to exacerbate upset over their recent push toward online-streaming-only subscription. Down on Sunday night? Four to five hours of outage before telling customers it’s not their problem? Telling customers the problem is fixed when it isn’t? Netflix should be grateful Twitter wasn’t down last night, as they’d apparently have left customers in the dark the entire time.

Business, News

Cold Spring Blooms with New Sites: Eater, Curbed, Urbandipity, GeekWire

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Brrr! The cold spring hasn’t done much for plants–our asparagus is just coming in from the fields, finally–and it hasn’t improved moods either. UW Meteorologist Cliff Mass says he’s been hearing two questions over and over:

Are springs getting worse? Is this the worst spring on record? Looking at the data one might argue that the answer to both of these is yes.

But online, things are springing up all over. Eater Seattle, part of a national network, has launched and formerly-of-Seattlest editor Allecia Vermillion writes to say:

At Eater Seattle, we’ll dig deep for original reporting; offer user-generated tips, rants and raves; and curate a daily roundup of what the rest of the restaurant and food media around town—and on the national level—are talking about. No, you won’t find recipes, reviews, or food porn herein, but Eater Seattle promises a daily dose of restaurant news fresher than a basket of foraged fiddlehead ferns.

Which is weird because I just had to ask someone what a fiddlehead was last night. A companion online property–you can tell from the design–is the real-estate and lifestyle site, Curbed Seattle.

From the ins and outs of the real estate scene, to adventures in urban planning and architecture, to local oddities, for Curbed Seattle, it all comes back to real estate, rent, and the neighborhoods we inhabit.

Curbed Seattle joins the growing Curbed Network of sites including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and DC, not to mention our National Mothership.

That one’s helmed by Federal Way native Kelly Skahan.

I found out about Urbandipity by reading Queen Anne View’s post on the Queen Anne start-up. Urbandipity’s premise is that you post about something you’d like to do (heading to Discovery Park, a wine tasting, catching a Mariners–ha ha! No, I couldn’t get through that last one) and then Seattle’s famously stand-offish population looks over your e-shoulder and decides if they want to join you. Presumably they can monetize the site with offers to go do things that cost money.

Lastly, you’ve probably heard about GeekWire (the new indie offshoot of the PSBJ’s TechFlash, starring John Cook and Todd Bishop). If you’re interested in Seattle tech and its fleece-vest lifestyle, this is what you need to read. Coming soon will be an interview with Cook, as soon as I can find the time to pester him about it.

Announcements, News

From the Publisher’s Couch: The SunBreak’s Progress, Chapter 2

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MvB, at his most publisher-esque

 

I have to admit to having been inspired by The New New News to sit down and write this update on the site’s progress. The play’s argument that transparency is lacking as news is reinvented (at least as a business model) online hit home with me. We’re in one of those historical periods of exploration, financing tiny little caravels to travel uncharted paths, and it’s just plain discourteous not to leave a journal behind.

Let me start with the more reader-relevant details before moving on to a discussion what makes The SunBreak tick, and what our online magazine plans are.

First, we are very close to relaunching on the WordPress platform, following the “deprecation” of the Neighborlogs platform we initially launched with. Instivate is refocusing on their Seattle Indie Ads network, with which we will remain associated. Their service automates the ad process, so that the advertiser can control daily spends, upload new artwork as needed, or pause an ad’s delivery. More on that choice later.

A sneak preview of the design-in-progress. We hope to use Flickr pool photos in the masthead, with permission, of course. That’s Great Beyond’s shot.

 

The move to WordPress gives us the chance to try out an architecture that’s a little different from the current blog-style layout we’re using.

We’re working on a homepage layout that allows us to highlight our larger feature stories, while surfacing both the latest headlines, and the most popular, in a more skimmable format.

We’ll also be able to generate more extensive category pages (we don’t even have an archive currently), as well as create special features that unite a series, as when Jay goes on one of his foodie travel tours. (That will also give us the chance to offer sponsorships of those series to a Hertz or Horizon Air, to pick from just the H’s. This isn’t new thinking, I just really dislike irrelevant ads. More on that later, too.)

We’ll also be doing more to increase viewership of our Flickr pool–there are over 4,500 photos in there, and we want to do more to highlight all the photography that people share with us, not just the most recent shots. Also, there’s something called YouTube we’re looking into, mostly because I’m told local bands put “music videos” up there. (I hit upon a good elevator speech accidentally, talking to our intern Leah, when I said that in the future I hoped someone could look at an archive of The SunBreak and figure out why people enjoyed living in Seattle.)

Current reader logins and comment history are being maintained through an import process to both WordPress and Disqus, our new (disgustingly bloated and slow, according to our IT gnome) comment service. That choice is a trade-off, as Disqus is in part slow and erratic because of its popularity. Yet, because your Disqus profile “travels,” it removes a new username/password login hurdle.

Unless we somehow screw it up, the RSS feed should transfer seamlessly, and our Twitter followers and Facebook fans will one day soon click through to discover the makeover. Don’t ask me the specific day; we’re bootstrapping this whole operation. The SunBreak is powered by spare work cycles, and many thanks are owed to many people. And by thanks, I mean Bushmills.

Some of our readers will know that, editorial-staff-wise, we are a mutant spore of Seattlest.com, which is itself a member of the Gothamist network. (The SunBreak is not associated with Gothamist, except that we sometimes crash Seattlest happy hours.) If their mantra is to post more digestibly, more often, ours is to offer more context, at a relaxing, let’s-walk-around-Green-Lake pace. It was fun being editor over there, but man it was hectic.

Also, while The SunBreak is owned by an LLC (in case we libel Tim Eyman indefensibly, which is a risk for any publication), my preference these days is toward the co-op end of the spectrum, so that reader-members and contributors would all receive (very potentially) dividends.

I think this is a better way of reinventing subscribership online, rather than with pay walls. Obviously it’s a major business model shift, but I think it may make sense for low-profit publications that rely on a loyal community. (I say this somewhat idealistically–the practical reality of going co-op may well make me want to sell outdoor gear or organic groceries instead. Reader feedback welcome.)

The point is that the current model we’re using–our editors and contributors are essentially volunteers–leaves us in a strange limbo as the site’s readership and theoretical value grows. We are not planning to sell for $315 million any time soon, but I do feel an ethical responsibility to everyone who’s participating so that this line is never written about us: “there is no indication that its small army of unpaid bloggers will benefit from the deal.” Capitol Hill Seattle’s Justin Carder will confirm that I am a huge hippie communist in this regard.

So long as we rely strictly upon advertising, of course, the valuation question is, if not moot, on the wrong side of the decimal point. In the post “The Publisher’s Dilemma,” media consultant Frédéric Filloux charts the gut-check for the Washington Post: “Over the last seven years, for each dollar added to online revenue, the WaPo lost five dollars on print.” The lesson, apparently, is that we should buy our own Kaplan Education.

We don’t have legacy print operations to support, but I still find Filloux’ recommendations, paraphrased here, relevant:

  • Cut down on ad inventory by at least 50 percent to revive a sense of market scarcity
  • Invest much more in technology to match more sophisticated online players
  • Refuse to sell ad inventory to ad networks that “act as powerful deflationary engines”
  • Fight reach of inaccurate audience-measurement systems by setting up your own traffic analysis

Now, we are very small fish, and it’s easy to over-think things like ad rates, which you don’t have much leverage on. But I think if you’re a niche player on the internet, you need to leverage every inch of that niche. Do you want to sell ad space for pennies to a really awesome search company, or do you want to work the other angle, and make what are boutique ad sales (trading on prominence and exclusivity)? It’s hard to do both and not upset someone.

I am lazy (energy-optimizing) when it comes to this, so I am “strategically” developing a site with few ad placements, but in clear line-of-sight, not stuffed into a sidebar that no one has a reason to look at. I suspect that I’ll still have to work to educate advertisers on the difference between “owning” a page and being one of 50 ads on a page, which makes me grumpy.

But I really want these ads to pull because the readers see and use them, and that means being sure the advertiser is a good fit and that their ad stands out. Instivate’s Indie Ads allows us to serve advertisers who are local, who choose The SunBreak.

Traffic tracking and technology investments are trickier. Again, we are small fish, and I am not inventing a new analytics system in my spare time. But what I can do is use as many means of tracking as possible, to build a fuller picture of the audience: WordPress comes with a stats package, but I can also get feedback from Google Analytics, Quantcast, Feedburner, and Facebook (Insights).

At the very least, the discrepancies between these sources help define “unknown knowns.” And when they come close (Google reports 15,000 people visiting last month, Quantcast reports 11,000), you build a range. Sometimes you discover a power law: Our few hundred RSS readers view posts voraciously, almost doubling the amount of views we get on the site alone. Our Facebook fans also read like a house on fire, assuming houses on fire can get library cards. They now bring more page views than Google search.

In some ways this level of detail is bemusing, as I was initially inspired to start The SunBreak by the confluence of mostly non-business impulses. Too much Emerson on Goethe, maybe. Watching thoughtful cultural coverage decline in the face of a thriving Seattle cultural scene fired some contrarian streak in me: Why couldn’t a journal of Seattle arts and culture support itself, especially if it were built from the e-ground up? Monetization turns out to be a knottier, more time-consuming puzzle than I might have hoped–though this particular economic climate is a good test of sustainable practices.

But The SunBreak is for me already a success. It has also brought me into contact with really wonderful people, our SunBreak team, our readers, our interviewees–and it’s become a daily reminder of why we all love living here in Seattle: This is a very smart city, but it’s also got a lot of heart. Writing just some of that down turns out to be enormously fulfilling.