Its not the traffic that they send, its the quality. TV, printed, and radio traffic are still very good. I once had a magazine mention and only had about 50-ish extra visitors. But, that turned into doubling my sales for the next 2 months. Its not the traffic, but the conversions and sales.
In 2008, a Consumer Reports Money Advisor TV segment that featured http://www.PriceAdvance.com was syndicated to news programs in 15 states right around the holidays. That led to 125k+ installs of our toolbar.
In October 2007, the Wall Street Journal mentioned Startup Schwag on the front page, below the fold. That yielded ~15 signups for the ~$20/mo service, though admittedly its appeal was a bit niche.
One of my side projects[1] was shown for about 20 seconds on BBC News. Overall it drove maybe 10k visitors.
The traffic comes in huge waves. It jumps 500x in seconds and dies down almost as quickly. In my case there were aftershocks as the news piece was aired around the world.
The closest my company has come to mainstream fame was in the Wall Street Journal. It was a half page article on page 2 - not about us but more the data from our system (a specialist kind of weather data for energy-data analysis).
I don't think it drove more than about 100 extra visitors - truly a drop in the ocean. As a kind of direct marketing I think it was pretty much useless as the readership is so broad whilst our business is so specialist (no use in exposure unless it's to the right audience).
But we can now mention the WSJ piece as a kind of credibility signal. And for that it is great.
Great point about the value of the social validation from high-profile media coverage! That's usually more important than the minimal traffic it drives.
This was definitely our biggest surprise: we expected an early spike and quick tapering, just like we were accustomed to from web traffic.
It's hard for us to know how much residual traffic we still get from Better Homes & Gardens, since there's no referrer to track people coming from magazines.
From the experience I've had, I tend to think that all things being equal, a mention on a popular blog in your market will drive higher quality traffic than a television mention.
My company has been mentioned multiple times on major TV and Radio, the most recent being a couple of appearances on two different BBC shows, with millions of people watching. The clicks through to our site were only a handful - in the hundreds, or less.
press for us (and we've gotten quite a bit) has mostly been useful in getting over the 'never heard of you' hurdle which i think is absolutely huge for just about any business conversation. the power of name recognition is astounding. we're a small app - we count our users in thousands units not millions - but our userbase is highly engaged, using our app every time they go to work and our most valuable user segment (bar staff) generally doesn't care about the press and certainly not tech press. mainstream press is mostly a fleeting adrenaline rush and ego stroke for us, it's primary value is street cred.
For top cable shows (top 5 in weekly cable ratings), a rule of thumb we've found works for planning is 100 thousand uniques per second of time the domain or URL is shown or spoken, during and following the ad. If the brand is the domain, that counts too.
So 15 seconds of clear call to action exposure can drive 1.5 million uniques. Numbers are lower without a call to action.
Relatively little. Yes, there are visible spikes if a site is mentioned on TV, but it's nothing compared to what a decent size mailing can do, or getting attention from a major website.
Even when I used to work for a major TV station and we did very strong promotion in and around well viewed prime time shows the spikes in traffic were nothing shocking.
Of course this says nothing about the long term effects.
This is really interesting, but you have to remember to THINK ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE
In this case it worked relatively well, because (probably) there is a segment of the public of the site that is more on TV than on internet, so they saw the mention on TV and then went to the PC
I doubt you can get this kind of result from a TV mention (or ad) of HN ;)
I bet the easy-to-remember and apt name helped combat the product's "lack of SEO friendly links". Conversion from someone hearing of a product once in offline media, even if they're a perfect demographic fit, seems impressive.
[+] [-] dylanvee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangethirty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrevorJ|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrival|13 years ago|reply
In October 2007, the Wall Street Journal mentioned Startup Schwag on the front page, below the fold. That yielded ~15 signups for the ~$20/mo service, though admittedly its appeal was a bit niche.
[+] [-] typpo|13 years ago|reply
The traffic comes in huge waves. It jumps 500x in seconds and dies down almost as quickly. In my case there were aftershocks as the news piece was aired around the world.
[1] http://asterank.com
[+] [-] ibudiallo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bromley|13 years ago|reply
I don't think it drove more than about 100 extra visitors - truly a drop in the ocean. As a kind of direct marketing I think it was pretty much useless as the readership is so broad whilst our business is so specialist (no use in exposure unless it's to the right audience).
But we can now mention the WSJ piece as a kind of credibility signal. And for that it is great.
[+] [-] garbowza|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ry0ohki|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garbowza|13 years ago|reply
It's hard for us to know how much residual traffic we still get from Better Homes & Gardens, since there's no referrer to track people coming from magazines.
[+] [-] miniatureape|13 years ago|reply
The amount of traffic she got from these was minuscule in comparison to popular online sources (Design Sponge).
The magazines in particular do tend to get put online and feed a small amount of views over time.
[+] [-] TrevorJ|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nakedrobot2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] localhost3000|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kybernetyk|13 years ago|reply
I got ~500 uniques more that day. I guess in 2004 german TV audience wasn't too much into internet ;)
[+] [-] Terretta|13 years ago|reply
For top cable shows (top 5 in weekly cable ratings), a rule of thumb we've found works for planning is 100 thousand uniques per second of time the domain or URL is shown or spoken, during and following the ad. If the brand is the domain, that counts too.
So 15 seconds of clear call to action exposure can drive 1.5 million uniques. Numbers are lower without a call to action.
[+] [-] onemorepassword|13 years ago|reply
Even when I used to work for a major TV station and we did very strong promotion in and around well viewed prime time shows the spikes in traffic were nothing shocking.
Of course this says nothing about the long term effects.
[+] [-] brador|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] singold|13 years ago|reply
In this case it worked relatively well, because (probably) there is a segment of the public of the site that is more on TV than on internet, so they saw the mention on TV and then went to the PC
I doubt you can get this kind of result from a TV mention (or ad) of HN ;)
[+] [-] zalew|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlanders|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrwhy2k|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digao|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] digao|13 years ago|reply