Cocktail Marketing's Blog

Esté es un artículo escrito por Sruthijith KK @ paidcontent.org

During the last two weeks, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, has almost become a household name in urban India, a dream scenario for a new generation Internet phenomenon and one that could not have perhaps been achieved even with a massive ad budget.

All thanks to India’s junior minister for external affairs, Shashi Tharoor, who is also India’s top Twitter user by the number of followers. Even as an innocuous quip the minister made in a tweet spiralled into one of the more absurd political controversies of recent times, the winner was Twitter, which featured in countless frontpage stories and primetime television debates across the country. (If you are an overseas reader or is unfamiliar with the Tharoor controversy for some unfathomable reason, you can read all about it here.)

Much hilarity ensued as party spokespersons worked overtime to argue knowledgably about the role of Web 2.0 in the world’s largest democracy (”tweet is a very lonely man, and he needs counselling”, said Congress party spokesperson Tom Vadakkan, claiming he read research reports before coming to that conclusion). It was also a difficult time for non-English language media as they tried to translate and explain Twitter, Tweets and other related nouns for their audience.

The awareness about the Twitter brand and the microblogging service it provides skyrocketed during this episode. The last time Twitter got widespread mainstream media mentions was during the tragic terror attacks on Mumbai but the coverage this time surpassed a marketer’s wildest dreams.

While the debate is unsettled on whether the minister was politically naive or if his countrymen lack a sense of humour, we asked three professionals from the brand and advertising domains about what they thought the controversy was worth for the brand Twitter in media buying terms. In other words, how much would it cost Twitter to buy the amount of media impressions and the resultant awareness that arose from this controversy. All three were queried independently, and was not told what the other participants thought it was worth.

“I’d say, about Rs8 crore,” said brand specialist Harish Bijoor, CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., which advises more than 100 brands in several countries. “If we look at the eight metros and about 101 cities with one million plus population. The interest in the story was largely in the urban areas. So about Rs8 crore is what I think an equivalent campaign would cost,” Bijoor said.

Will this result in some lasting stickiness for the brand? “I think so. The brand is easy on the lips, and it should stay on people’s minds,” he added.

Shashi Sinha, chairman of media agency Lodestar Universal, said he’d put the figure at about Rs6-7 crore. He added the disclaimer that it was a ballpark figure not based on any scientific calculation.

Shubha George, CEO of media agency Mediaedge:CIA, said one shouldn’t even try to put a figure on it. “It was priceless,” she said. “The power of the medium came through from the coverage. It was really invaluable coverage for the brand,” she added.

Rise of Twitter in India:

India is already the third among countries that account for traffic to Twitter.com, closely following Germany and vastly trailing the United States, according to web metrics firm Alexa.

India’s interest in Twitter has grown steadily in 2009, according to Google Insights for Search (note the sharp spike in September).

Since the Tharoor controversy, there has been a noticable spurt in conversations on Twitter. If in India, Twitter had mostly remained a haunt for early adopters prior to 2009, it has steadily won over big league journalists, writers, artists and politicians this year, adding a lot of interesting content to the platform.

Another sign of Twitter going mainstream: Twitter ids replacing emails and blog urls for some print columnists in the sign off line.

(We shall compile an informal list of ‘famous’ Twitter users in India soon. If you follow otherwise well known people on Twitter and enjoy the interaction, please tip us off.)

Aside: Do you think a verified Twitter account might soon become the ultimate status symbol among our celebs? Shashi Tharoor has one.

Éste es un artículo publicado por Claire Cain Miller @ nytimes.com

Lisa Sugar began blogging about celebrity gossip in her spare time four years ago. Now she and her husband, Brian, have a little media empire called, sensibly enough, Sugar Inc., with 12 blogs, 11 million readers a month and advertisers like Chanel and Sony.

The dream of quitting the day job and making a living from blog revenue has proved to be far-fetched for most bloggers. But a few entrepreneurs, like the Sugars, have found success in blog networks.

Such networks put blogs on various topics under some form of central control, like a digital-era Condé Nast. Though they do not command nearly the same ad rates that glossy magazines do, they are attracting ad dollars while magazines are losing them.

Sugar’s ad revenue increased 20 percent in the first half of the year, and the company is on track to double its revenue and turn a profit this year, said Mr. Sugar, the company’s chief executive. Gawker Media, one of the earliest and biggest blog networks, reported that ad revenue was up 45 percent in the first half of this year.

Both companies are private, and neither would disclose more specific figures, but by some estimates the larger networks have annual revenue in the low tens of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, advertising revenue for magazines dropped 21 percent in the first half, and the number of ad pages sold dropped 28 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

The blog networks that have survived the downturn in advertising and the explosion of competing content on the Web credit their obsessive coverage of narrow topics, along with business models that reach beyond advertising.

“It’s actually really hard creating compelling content that brings an audience,” Mr. Sugar said.

Hobbyist bloggers first got the idea that their online entries could be profitable in 2002 when Nick Denton, a former reporter for The Financial Times, started what would become Gawker Media. The catty network quickly grew into a powerhouse, and it now has eight blogs, 20 million monthly readers and more than 150 full- and part-time employees. When Jason Calacanis sold his blog network, Weblogs Inc., to AOL for a reported $25 million in 2005, the notion that blogging could be a business was cemented.

Today, blog networks range from big, like Gawker and Sugar, to smaller and more focused, like The Business Insider, VentureBeat and the GigaOm Network, which cover business and technology. There are also large networks of blogs that share ads but not editorial control, like BlogHer and Glam Media.

Sugar’s blogs — with names like PopSugar (celebrity gossip), BellaSugar (beauty) and LilSugar (mothering) — are all edited and designed with 28-year-old women in mind. The writers and sales staff are fanatical about going after that ideal visitor, Mr. Sugar said. The posts are short, light and sarcasm-free, with big photos and headlines like “The Jolie-Pitts Bring the Twins to the Golden Arches” and “10 Sexy Bedhead Hairstyles to Try Today.”

Other blog networks take a similarly narrow focus. Gawker Media’s business cards used to read “Unhealthily obsessed,” said Lockhart Steele, the company’s former managing editor. He follows the same motto at Curbed, a company he founded that publishes blogs on real estate, dining, shopping and travel in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“We are completely obsessed with every square inch of the areas we cover,” Mr. Steele said. “It’s the classic blogger model: give people everything they could possibly want on a topic.” For the Curbed sites, that sometimes means two dozen posts a day just about New York real estate.

That all-encompassing coverage is meant to keep readers coming back many times a day, in turn attracting advertisers.

Blogs, with their unpredictable and sometimes edgy content, can be frightening to advertisers, but blog networks are less risky, said Shenan Reed, a founder of Morpheus Media, a digital marketing agency that represents brands like Louis Vuitton and L’Oréal.

“When you’re dealing with a company where the editorial control is living under one roof, you feel like there’s a consistency in the message, which is what makes Sugar, Gawker and Curbed fantastically interesting to us,” Ms. Reed said.

Blog networks also make it easier for advertisers, who do not have time to sift through the millions of blogs on the Web, to reach a big blog audience. For example, Morpheus ran an ad campaign for Neiman Marcus on the Sugar network in which it dressed each of the Sugar blogs’ cartoon mascots in outfits from the store, and readers could click on the clothes to buy them.

Yet for Sugar, the dream of growing a large and profitable media business on advertising alone did not come true.

“Outside of a few examples, I think people way overestimated the amount of ad revenue that was there for the taking for blogging as a business,” said Scott Rosenberg, author of the recent book “Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.”

In 2007, Sugar, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and has 105 employees, acquired ShopStyle, an e-commerce site. Today it brings in half of Sugar’s revenue. At ShopStyle, shoppers can browse online retailers’ selections, and Sugar gets paid when they click through to a retailer or make a purchase.

Sugar would not have been able to grow as it has without both sources of revenue, said Mr. Sugar, who was formerly vice president for e-commerce at J. Crew. The company plans to eventually make money selling virtual goods, too, like stilettos in a fashion game.

Blog networks have also had to change the type of content they publish. Though many started by publishing links to and commentary on other Web sites’ material, there is now so much material online that they need to offer original reporting to stand out, Mr. Steele said.

Each of Curbed’s sites has a full-time editor and a few freelancers, and they have started competing with local papers for scoops. Curbed often depends on readers’ tips and might publish 10 updates to an article in response to them.

When Gawker blogs get exclusive content, like leaked videos, they can get more than a hundred times their typical traffic. “Scoops pay,” Mr. Denton said.

Sugar gets press passes to the Oscars and recently started producing videos about shopping and celebrities. It also developed blogging software called OnSugar. When bloggers use the software to showcase clothes and readers click to buy them, the bloggers and Sugar get a cut. Sugar plans to eventually sell ads on these blogs.

“Perpetual movement is the essence of survival and prosperity online,” said Michael Moritz, the Sequoia investor who backed Google, Yahoo and Sugar. “If online media and entertainment companies don’t improve every day, they will just wind up as the newfangled version of Reader’s Digest — bankrupt.”