

The incredible power of a 16 year old video blogger - ALee
http://www.22michaels.com/2010/03/juicystar07-and-world-of-new-media.html

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teej
"Unfortunately conversions is a different story as Juicystar07's audience is
primarily 13-17 year old girls."

There's a hidden lesson in this story. 22 Michaels learned this lesson the
hard way. The lesson is simple: not all traffic is created equal. It turns out
that Youtube views, Youtube comments, Youtube ranking, Facebook shares, and
pageviews don't mean much. They're vanity metrics - nice to look at but
lacking content.

The only thing that matters is sales. Find traffic sources that generate sales
and pour money into the channels the most sales dollars per advertising
dollar.

~~~
greendestiny
Well the lesson could be that they should aim their product more at 13-17 year
olds. If they are disproportionately interested in your site it would make
sense to optimise for them as customers. My unscientific guess is that custom
shoes aren't ever going to fit quite into the premium shoe price range -
because at that end you want some extra validation like a famous
brand/designer.

~~~
derefr
How does one do that? I can't imagine 13-17-year-olds having the means to
order shoes online.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
In Scotland 17 year olds start University. I had a debit card account when I
was 16 (quite a few years ago) and it's quite common for teens (14+) to have
part-time jobs even if they're still in full-time education.

Kids tend to get allowances and spending money as gifts for birthdays,
Christmas, Easter, etc. in the UK at least.

~~~
derefr
By "means," I didn't mean "money", but rather specifically "a credit card."
Parents don't like to let their children have them here—they forsee bad
spending habits and debt; that's why "reloadable" service-specific gift cards
are so popular.

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ryanjmo
Our start-up creates Facebook Applications for these popular YouTubers. Blair
is one of our top clients (<http://apprats.com/partners/>) and her app is
here: <http://apps.facebook.com/juicystar/> She has been a really awesome
person to work with; I have been continually impressed by her.

We have been able to get around 250,000 Facebook monthly users in just over 2
months because of all the traffic these YouTubers can push. I think people are
still underestimating how influential and valuable these YouTubers are.

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hnsummary
The power of social media isn’t lost on any of the visitors of HN but it’s
still worth taking a moment to read about how Shoes Of Prey worked with 16
year old video blogger Blair Fowler to make a make a YouTube video and post it
to her account. She has nearly 300,000 youtube subscribers and the promotional
video sent nearly 200,000 visitors to the Shoes Of Prey website. To give some
perspective, Techcrunch was only able to deliver a tiny fraction of that
number of visitors.

Visitors don’t always mean sales though. The Shoes Of Prey blog says they
didn’t get many sales out of the deal and speculate that Blairs follower
demographic of 13-17 year old girls can’t afford the expensive shoes. I don’t
know how much they paid Blair to do the video but I’m sure enough of those
kids were able to convince their moms to buy some shoes.

[http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/28/the-incredible-power-
of-a-16...](http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/28/the-incredible-power-of-a-16-year-
old-video-blogger-2/)

~~~
Confusion
Well, this'll be interesting. I think this comment is valuable (good summaries
of articles usually are), but the site you link to isn't (because other
comments are also valuable). However, as I suspect you're the guys from
mixergynotes, I don't think this account has a chance in hell.

~~~
hnsummary
If I get down voted consistently then I'll stop. Most of the value of HN is in
the comments so I'll link back to the original HN post in each summary.

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petercooper
Gotta say this is impressive, though.. a world where a 16 year old both looks
_and_ talks like a 25+ year old is a pretty alien one to me. I'm only glad I'm
out of the dating pool! When I was 16, the girls were spotty, wore no or bad
make up, and were into screaming over boy bands. It's a different world :-)

~~~
davi
I don't think the lesson here is, "Boy, girls today!"

This 16 year old is an outlier, despite her mainstream looks. She has built up
her audience to the point that she can attract 450,000 views to a youtube post
on shoes, and she has monetized this audience. I don't like a lot about what
she represents (teenagers should aspire to $305 custom-made snake skin high
heels? ugh) but she is very good at what she does.

When we were kids, there was essentially no way for an ambitious,
entrepreneurial, but non-technical 16 year old to do this sort of thing. Viva
la internet.

~~~
petercooper
_This 16 year old is an outlier, despite her mainstream looks._

Good point, but unless you're trawling social networking sites,the ones
plastered over the TV (MTV, 90210, et al) are the only ones we see a ton of
:-)

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drtse4
The comparison with TechCrunch in not relevant, i guess that only a small
percentage of the average techie tc user visited the site, let alone buy
anything. A girl oriented site/whatever was a better way to promote something
like this. Btw, i'm impressed with the results too, trying this with a more
tech related vlogger (if there are any) for a more tech/web2.0 related startup
could be a nice experiment.

------
chamza
This is reminding me of a post I read on HN about some guy who was trying to
start an advertising business focused around getting popular video bloggers
from youtube to advertise products.

Does anyone have a link to that post? Im intrigued on reading it again in
light of this.

