This morning I saw this post from Todd Cochrane about his coverage of last year’s CES. Like last year, I’ll be speaking again at CES and look forward to seeing both Todd and Andy. We bump into each other a lot at the Bloghaus and always have productive conversations.
What caught my attention was this [emphasis added]:
While we reached over 13 million viewers from our CES coverage last year, the opportunity remains for a company or companies to get some major exposure by being a dedicated sponsor for the event.
Wow! “…13 million viewers…!” Unique individual viewers? Todd, CEO of RawVoice, has been a champion of podcasters using accurate numbers, statistics and download reporting, so like many others I hold him to a high standard – one which he has embraced. But 13 Million viewers? Where does that number come from? We all know you can’t count viewers. Letting that slide, let’s just assume he means potential viewers. To put it in perspective, assuming all those pulling his content own computers (not a stretch) and probably also own TVs (also not a stretch) that would give Todd and crew a Nielsen score of roughly 13! Using last week as a reference that would have sandwiched him between 60 Minutes, Deal or No Deal and the Survivor China Reunion. I don’t need to tell you but that should return gargantuan advertising revenues! I have to admit, I have questions…
- Todd sells ads for podcasters as a business. At any reasonable CPM he can take Andy and a whole lot of other folks to CES and tear up the whole town Sinatra style! What is the problem?
- Are advertisers/sponsors not interested in buying 13 million unique tech savvy “new media” video impressions?
- Why hasn’t he sold the inventory yet? If the numbers are right it should be a slam dunk and I assume, the crown jewel of his Blubrry Network.
- 13 million viewers – why is Todd asking for “CES Fund” donations for his trip?
I’m not one for controversy but something about “13 million viewers” just caught my eye. Why? Because as a consultant to Fortune 100 companies on podcasting and new media I sit in conference rooms and have to answer questions like, “This guy says he has 13 million viewers, why don’t we?” I’ll let you infer what my answer is, but frankly, it is not one I like to have to give.
UPDATE: Todd has edited his original post to clarify what he meant as explained in his comments below. To keep my post relevant, here is a copy of Todd’s original post to which I refer.
Will be curious to see how Todd responds to this one.
That statement by Todd definitely needs clarification. He might mean “views”. If I recall, I got about a dozen videos from him at CES so taken in aggregate including website and video views maybe 13 million is possible.
Even so, yeah… why is Todd begging for money with these numbers?
Michael, thanks once again for holding folks accountable for what they’re saying.
It’s 13 million “views” spread out primarily the six to eight months following CES 2007 across the 100 or so videos we did. We got a huge bounce by a number of the companies we interviewed in that they put the videos on their home pages for almost a year.
The number of actual counted downloads that came through geeknewscentral.com, techpodcasts.com and slashdotreview.co were higher than our normal podcast numbers but not that many.
The largest number of views came from the videos that were put up on blip.tv and the resulting embeds the interviewed companies dropped on various places on their websites.
The 5 videos we did as part of the Hitachi Sponsorship were pretty big. They did over 2 million views combined with the Blopper reel doing over 500K
Those views did not happen overnight they had a very long tail with the interviewing companies largely responsible in the views.
This is one of the reasons my phone has been ringing off the hook with companies wanting us to stop by again this year as they got a lot of mileage from the coverage.
Hope that clears up any questions.
Todd..
As a secondary follow up, I got started late in looking for a sponsor for the event. When we let a lot of revenue go down the drain last year I increased the sponsorship package significantly and I really think we scared some companies in the pricing.
I should have been shopping the sponsorship around in June but because things were so crazy I did not get it out till Mid October and that was a month to late.
What surprised even me was the numbers. I had not been watching the blip numbers at all and about fell out of my chair when I did a review on it in preparation to put out the RFP
Taking a crew of 6 to CES is not cheap but we will be their regardless, and Michael when I see you at Bloghaus ask me to give you a copy of the handout. 🙂
Todd,
Thanks for the clarifications. As you know, there is a huge difference between “views” and “viewers.” No small difference and I appreciate that you have updated your original post. You are a huge proponent of accurate podcasting stats and I appreciate your clarification. However, I’m still not sure what the number is you are trying to promote to sponsors. Given the fact you produced 100 videos, potentially your viewers are reduced by a factor of 100! 13 Million becomes 130,000. Nothing to sneeze at – but a very different neighborhood when it comes to total reach. I look forward to seeing you, Andy and team at CES.