I recently ran a post challenging Fairfax’s youth site The Vine to substantiate their claim of being number 1 in youth. I got a big response after it was run on Ben Shepherd’s blog, Talking Digital. I never received a reply directly from Fairfax. Today Ben Shepherd posted some interesting figures from Netview that drive home my point.
In Ben’s words:
“How come 67% of The Vine – ie, the 18-29 targeting youth website – are over 35 years of age.
These aren’t made up stats – they’re part of the new Netview panel numbers.
The question needs to be asked, when an advertiser is buying either Essential Baby or The Vine … what are they really buying?
Are they buying hip youth or new Mum’s … or are they buying the same general older male audience they could get across The Age or SMH?”
Great to see some hard questions being asked and backed up with hard data that clearly spells out what the industry has known for ages. But I wonder if this message ever gets to the client or if it’s just discussed by media geeks like me? I don’t ever remember seeing a client comment on Ben’s blog or my own. Ultimately we can blog endlessly about this stuff, but if the decision makers aren’t reading it or choose to ignore it then it makes no difference. Any agency or client people out there reading this?
9 Comments
Jill 16 September 2009, 4:35pm
Yep - reading with great interest. Thanks.
Neil Ackland 16 September 2009, 4:39pm
Cool! Cheers Jill. Perhaps you should advertise on The Vine if you have any Sydney Festival events targeting over 35 year old males?
Tweets that mention 67% of The Vine are over 35 ye 16 September 2009, 5:10pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by NeilAckland. NeilAckland said: 67% of The Vine are over 35 years old according to Netview http://bit.ly/nhbGH [...]
Ben Shepherd 16 September 2009, 7:02pm
I think there needs to be more questions asked and more analysis done by those making the ad investment decisions. Ultimately at the end of the day the client makes the call ... but the advisor should be diligent around supporting data.
This Nielsen data is accessible for most agencies, there’s no excuse.
It’s the same for websites that claim extremely engaged audiences but users stay for 2 minutes and don’t come back. The spin is nice but ultimately incorrect.
Roger Lintzeris 16 September 2009, 8:39pm
It’s very interesting isn’t it!
When I think about it though, it kind of makes sense. You’d think a large proportion of The Vine’s audience is driven through from The Age & SMH.
If they really want a higher proportion of 18-29’s, maybe they should stop pushing older people there?
Zac Zavos 17 September 2009, 11:43am
This shows one thing very clearly: growing traffic when you already have it is pretty easy.
Building audiences on independent sites is immensely difficult.
But the upside for those who achieve reasonable audiences is that clients should know that they’ve earned their audience through great content, not funneling existing audiences through a network.
Granleese 18 September 2009, 6:21am
Don’t worry Neil, we’re reading it
Lunalola 3 October 2009, 11:30am
So if The Vine isn’t the King of Youth for Australia, does that mean sites like Pedestrian or say perhaps Life Lounge take out numero uno? I’m thinking Life Lounge may have an older skew too?
Neil Ackland 7 October 2009, 8:38am
Both Pedestrian and Lifelounge are not included in Netratings Market Intelligence so I don’t know what their traffic figures are like. I know the Pedestrian guys have posted here before so they may be able to shed some light on their traffic figures.