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Podshow Up 92%?

Adam Curry couldn’t help but leave a comment here linking to a Podshow press release from June 18th. Here is quick excerpt:

According to comScore Media Metrix reporting, PodShow had 1,372,000 unique visitors for the month of May, up 92% from April’s number of 690,000, which was up 16% from the March number of 592,000. Prior to March, PodShow’s traffic was not reported by comScore. This traffic is in addition to the millions of audio and video downloads through the site and via other distribution outlets such as Apple’s iTunes.

As usual, I don’t buy that for a second. If you look at the Alexa chart (yes, I know – Alexa is not perfect, but I trust the trends they show if not the exact numbers) – May was clearly a better month than April for Podshow.com – which makes sense, because looking at the stats on Alexa – April was one of the worst performing months for Podshow in a long time. Hence, it is no wonder that May was a better month. The overall trend is still not up.
See Alexa stats here.

Nice try Adam. Here are some more excerpts from the press release for those who like to have a giggle or two.

“PodShow’s entertainment properties have built huge audiences across the net. We are now beginning to see similar traction occurring with PodShow.com,” commented PodShow CEO and Co founder Ron Bloom. “People are using the power of PodShow.com to help them to discover great entertainment, personalize their entertainment choices, play or download entire channels, and share their collections with everyone.”

“As the internet gets increasingly crowded with average content, audiences are looking for ways to find great entertainment, manage their media, and to join in the show,” adds PodShow President and Co founder, Adam Curry. “PodShow is becoming the place for audiences who are hungry for quality entertainment whenever and wherever they want it.”

Technorati tags: podshow, adam curry, curry, fuzzy stats

what comscore does for a living…check out their clients and the about-page too.

http://www.weforum.org/en/about/Technology%20Pioneers/SelectedTechPioneers/2007TechPioneers/comScore/index.htm

“4) How does your company directly contribute to improving the state of the world?
We help companies understand what consumers want on the Internet. Also, by providing credible third party information on online audiences, we help accelerate the growth of online marketing which ultimately pays the bills for the growth of the Internet, which is arguably the most significant revolution in knowledge creation and dissemination in history.”

oopsie…if that link is too long for your blog template, you can also just go to comscore.com.

darnit…delete that last one…let me do it right this time…sorry.

http://www.comscore.com
http://www.comscore.com/about/mission.asp
http://www.comscore.com/about/clients.asp

Just to be clear, I am not dissing ComScore here – I am sure they are doing a fine job. But Podshow is comparing a real down month with a good month.

Saying that they are up 92% month to month means very little in this context. Year by year – the data would be more interesting, but conveniently, ComScore only started rating Podshow in March… Alexa reports podshow as being up around 10% over the last three months.

Conveniently???

As someone (i.e. you) who anonymously reports/blogs on information and would like to be a reliable source to a large audience, it might benefit your readers/audience more (as well as your google-ad-revenue model) if you thought about this question…

Is your media property (i.e. this site) more of a) strong editorial opinion based on some facts from some sources or b) a truly factual, objective perspective backed with deep research and dilligent fact-finding as an expert in the field.

for example http://www.emarketer.com…their main tagline (on the header of their site) positions themselves as very objective:

- Market Research on E-Business and Online Marketing
- Objective Analysis of Internet Market Trends
- Data from Over 2,800 Worldwide Sources

ooops…my linking skills are terrible today: http://www.emarketer.com

sorry again…

oh, btw…i don’t work for anonymous.com…just happened to pick that for my posts so that, as you, I could stay anonymous.

best of luck to you!

Well, Anonymous, I will leave that up to my readers.

Also, I am not sure what your problem really is and why you are so upset about this.

All I am saying is that Podshow is disingenuous when it comes to how it represents the data (I have no quarrels with the data at all). The press release look great, but I am arguing that the month to month data says little because it seems that April was a really bad month for Podshow. With the hire of Dvorak stirring up some dust, I am not surprised their numbers for May are far better. Once we get year by year number, we will see how this plays out in the long run.

By the way – I have a)good reasons not to put my full name on the site directly at this point and b)it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out all the details you would need to know about me if you read the blog and did a bit of research.

Not upset at all…enjoyed the conversation and sorry to come off upset…it was just very intellectually stimulating…namaste.

just been thinking alot lately about how there is value in really good fact-finding for the media business. traffic may shift from bloggers back to bigger media properties over the next year or so…

take care…

yep…understood…best of luck with that.

I actually belong to the school of thought that thinks that there would be little to blog about if it wasn’t for the bigger media businesses doing the groundwork.

The power of blogging is that it provides various, uncensored opinions and interpretations.

btw…your google ad-words/analytics stuff can be used to measure the traffic on your site and optimize the results of your site/ads interactions with your audience on a much faster basis than a year…check it out.

peace…sorry if i come across as picking on you…sincerely…best of luck.

Anon – no offense taken.

I am sure I could spend a lot of time working out better adsense placements, but it would just ruin my layout and annoy my readers even more. I just want it to pay for my hosting bills (which it does).

I have been playing with clicktale.com by the way – no better way to see how individual users are using the site.

Frederic,
Thanks for the link to the interesting app.

Want to apologize for picking on you…honestly feel bad about it. It is not my intent to ridicule or be critical of you, your post, or your site.
You are obviously passionate about this and doing some cool stuff, so please don’t take this the wrong way.

The reason I am taking the time to write this is that I feel that blog comments can be more productively managed…I know some companies are trying to figure this out…bottom line, is that I am a big fan of well-researched, thoughtful, fair, and objective posts from trusted sources. It is also a practice of mine (as yours) to “triangulate” information from multiple sources to be more educated on the multiple perspectives out there…news reporters and research firms make this a habit. Honestly, I tend to weigh my education and belief more towards trusted sources than ones I am unfamiliar with (as yourself). Your post may be defeating your goals, but I don’t really know your goals…so, take these thoughts or leave them. Again, I am definitely not trying to be rude.

Above, you said “I will leave that up to my readers”. Currently, I am one reader of your blog…and I am actually a writer/contributor too (just for this post). If you will humor me, I’d like to describe what I, as a reader, am taking from this post (and your site)…

1. You said, “PodShow is disingenous when it comes to how it represents the data.”
• So, you use Google on your site for adwords and get paid for it…in fact, you are a media property for Google and Google is already optimizing the banners you serve to better reach your audience. I am not sure how long you have had these ads up, but it is conceivable that Google analyzed your traffic and content, and was serving the “right ads” to your audience within 1-3 months…probably faster . You can do some research to find out how long it took them to optimize your ads…but they actually are constantly measuring your traffic to optimze the ads you serve.
• Google Analytics and Adwords is built on a (conceptually) very similar type of datawarehouse as what Comscore has. A lot of big media companies use Comscore data (not Google Data) to really do a better job managing their site traffic and content. Think about it, you don’t usually see bigger media companies with Google Ads…unless they are just testing it. Many blogs use Google Analytics data to do similar things.
• Now on this post, you are using a couple of data points from companies that have a presence in the market, and it is a super practice to triangulate data points….however, Comscore is a pretty key player compared to your sources (nothing against the sources…they are good tools). Looking at the Comscore client list, there are some really big media companies and advertisers (and the executives that run them) that rely on Comscore to make very big, very expensive decisions. So, for me…when I read your post, I ask, “do you have any evidence that the CEO or any VP at Disney.com (for example) uses Alexa data to make multi-million dollar decisions?”
• So as an reader of your blog (who is fairly educated on the industry you are writing about), I feel that you are being a bit disingenous (defined as not straightforward or candid; giving a false appearance of frankness) because you are giving a false appearance of being an expert on a few web tools when you really didn’t realize that the very ad-server you are running on your own website is measuring and optimizing traffic for you at a pace much faster than 3 months (the timeline you are skeptical of). In addition, you actually have the experience of working with Google to see this happen faster than 3 months on your own media property. As well, you didn’t find out more about Comscore and what they do before you posted. For all we know, it is a regular practice of Comscore to tell media properties to wait three months so that the data is trustworthy for their advertising customers.

2. You said, “…thinks that there would be little to blog about if it wasn’t for the bigger media businesses doing the groundwork”. Now, it sounds to me like you are suggesting something…and I don’t want to misinterpret this statement. To me, a reader of your blog who found your article after visiting another site (that is a bigger media business)…and knowing you make money on Google Ads, it sounds to me like you are saying that you have posted to these “bigger media sites” in order for you to get traffic so that you can sell google ads and make money to pay for your site. It sounds like “a little bit of skepticism and sensationalism” is the method by which you market yourself. So, I may be mistaken…I honestly have NOT read much of your site…but this is how it comes across in this post.

3. You said, “The power of blogging is that it provides various, uncensored opinions and interpretations.” So, you have provided a various uncensored opinion and interpretation with this post. It is powerful…you are right. In this case, the companies who are probably going to read the PodShow PR (btw…PR is almost always carefully reviewed to say very specific things on purpose), are probably made up of very educated, very bright people that “get” this industry. They might come across your post and decide that you are not a trustworthy source, and never come back to your site. It depends what they are looking for…if they want information from a source who is characterized by #1 and #2 above, you may keep them as a reader…if they don’t like that, they probably will never come back. It is possible that wordpress even has a widget to auto-respond to comments from domains such as yours and mark the comment as un-trustworthy. An example of this idea (i.e. the “wordpress trust application”) is Amazon.com (the owner of Alexa, the tool you used)…who uses a separate system to rate people that comment on products at the Amazon.com site. Perhaps the comment system is based on the same technology as Alexa…one thing is clear…many people regularly rely on the “trusted commenters” (e.g. Top 100 Reviewers) on products and books to become more educated before they buy something. Just as someone might read your post to become more educated on Podcasting before they “buy”. If I was being purely skeptical, and, I’ll admit that I am only semi-infomred about what Amazon is doing with Alexa and the other comments/rating system, I might say that you used a tool (Alexa) owned by a company (Amazon) who doesn’t even use their own tool for the purpose you are using it…and a great, world-class web-company too. So that I am not confusing two things, I am merely suggesting that you are using Alexa to “rate a domain” and Amazon provides a different tool for many people to “rate an area of their website” (a product page’s comments). Now, these are not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison, and I have have not done the research to know about Alexa vs. Amazon/comments/ratings…but it seems that this might be the case…certainly, I could make a sensationalist statement about it such as you have.

So you know, I will probably never come back to your blog unless your approach to writing changes…I do honestly and sincerely wish you the very best with your endeavor.
It will be interesting to see if your usability-app will show you if your site visitors like content that you spend more time doing research on or ones that you are semi-informed and sensationalizing.
For me, I am going to go find a blog of someone who is more focused on a topic like “effective-blog-posts.com”…not sure if it even exists.

Again, please do not take this the wrong way…I don’t mean to come across like a jerk…again, I am just very passionate about managing productive blog posts…and decided, for whatever reason, to make a point here.

Sincerely…best of luck to you,
anonymous

Anonymous – I sincerely appreciate your comments and I fully understand your reasoning.

I know that my in-depth post attract more readers. However, this specific post was part of a longer discussion I had with Adam Curry a while back – a discussion Curry felt the need to bring back up again by posting a link to the Podshow PR release in the comments. So this post was indeed meant more to provoke discussion than anything else (and it sure did).

I think there might be a slight disconnect here, though, as all I was trying to point out with the Alexa data was that it seems Podshow had a few bad months and now makes it seem as if the next good month is an example of the exponential growth it is going through, for which I find no evidence so far except for Podshow’s own PR of which I have always been very skeptical. So I think I actually provide some evidence for what I am saying here.

Also, I am using this blog to write about things that I either really enjoy or that bother me. I have no marketing plan and don’t try to present any persona. It is really more of an outlet for some extra steam and I like the fact that some people enjoy reading some of my posts now and then.

Anyway – I will read over your posts again tomorrow – got to get some sleep now.

Thanks again.

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