We’ve been very focused on driving our social media channels (Facebook and Twitter) this year, on Lost At E Minor in particular, and this has been crucial to the growth of the site. We now have 18,000+ Facebook Fans and 13,000+ Twitter followers. Meanwhile, the introduction of regular live blogging of significant Australian sporting events on The Roar has been a real spur to weekend traffic growth, which has, in turn, filtered through to the weekday traffic as well.

With more of all this ahead in 2012, it looks promising for an even bigger year.

Results from the past year (current numbers above corresponding figures from same period last year below):

LAEM
Visits
Nov 20, 2011 – Dec 20, 2011 = 575,761
Nov 20, 2010 – Dec 20, 2010 = 353,286

Unique Visitors
Nov 20, 2011 – Dec 20, 2011 = 411,492
Nov 20, 2010 – Dec 20, 2010 = 225,053

We really are focused on making each site the best in the world that day for content. We compliment this through a very active social media presence which tends to amplify the most popular posts of any given day and give them a second life beyond their initial run on the sites.

Big credit, too, must go to our our growing community of fan contributors across both sites, who use Lost At E Minor and The Roar as their blogging platform. They share their thoughts and finds with other like-minded people, all of which creates a unique dialogue between our readers, our writers and and our editors. Conversant by name, conversant by nature.

So it’s nice to continue the recent traffic posts by sharing more news on the traffic front.

The Roar just tipped 400,000 unique browsers and 1 million + pages over the past 31 days. We’re still doing over 20,000 comments and publishing 330 fan articles monthly.

Our TV ad is probably helping a bit on this front, so are a number of other things we’re doing to grow great Australian sports traffic.

And while The Roar has almost quadrupled in traffic this year, Lost At E Minor has also experienced rocket-like growth.

The past rolling 31 days has Lost At E Minor reaching 313,000 unique visitors on just under 1 million pages. (We saw 33,000 unique visitors to the site yesterday and today’s about the same, so if I wrote this post tomorrow then that 313,000 would be more like 370,000.)

Lost also posts about 20 articles a day, about half of them submitted by our audience, who are spread out across the world and who know how to find the right mix of high and low-brow culture we aim for.

Part of what’s fueling this traffic growth is our focus on social amplification (yes, that’s a buzz phrase…apologies). Just have a look at our ‘Best of‘ page to see how many people Tweet or Facebook Like our posts.

And this post has had a lazy 6,000 Likes and 900 Tweets. Not bad.

We have some solid things around the corner, including newly re-designed sites which will be faster and simpler while still letting our content shine through.

And a domain change is on the way for lostateminor.com. It’ll be shorter and will set-us up for success in terms of reaching 1,000,000+ visitors monthly.

Why does this matter?

For online businesses, everything turns on distribution (traffic). Traffic means we have good content. It’s also our currency, as advertising is our primary revenue source.

In a way, traffic is the new barrier entry. The printing press, if you like, is no longer a barrier to entry. Anyone can set-up a website overnight. So traffic, and reach, is the barrier to entry.

We don’t pay for our traffic; it’s almost all organic. (I use almost as we do do very small things to increase our awareness, but it’s trivial compared with our overall traffic flows).

So, the race has begun between The Roar and Lost At E Minor for which is the first site to reach 1,000,000 page impressions monthly.

Watch this space.

When he finally turned up in the last week, we had to do something more than just enjoy his company and his funky mix of music.

Paddle board surfing was the original thought, but the surf stayed away for the better part of a week. With the ocean out of the picture, we instead decided to hit the go-karts at the local track, with mixed form.

Zolton demonstrated that he has spent too much time in the US, attempting to negotiate all turns NASCAR-style by turning left at every corner. At least, that’s why we think he was so slow…

Zac hit the ground running and put in a few hot laps, but didn’t have the crucial ingredient to go hell-for-leather: a lack of sanity caused by breathing in petrol fumes.

Mark Webber fanatic Tristan clearly has inhaled his quota while watching F1 GPs. Consequently he was speedy, but may have overdosed and was black-flagged after attempting to drink Red Bull on track while muttering something about “gives you wings, gives you wings”.

A great afternoon out on track.

Our whole organisation is focused on good quality traffic growth. Why? Because everything turns on having growing traffic for an online publisher.

So it’s nice to post that we’re now reaching 415,000 unique visitors (Feb, Analytics) to our sites each month. This is up from 320,000 in October 2010.

Our audience come to our sites 685,000 times each month, and read 1,500,000 pages.

The rest of our interactions stats remain strong; showing how massively engaged our audience is with our sites.

In addition to providing funding and advertising to further increase our growth, we see this deal as a great strategic fit for The Roar. Network 10 is investing heavily in sports via its free to air channel, ONE HD and its associated website, http://onehd.com.au/.

The full combined press release is below.

The Roar of the crowd comes to onehd.com.au as Network Ten invests in The Roar

28 January 2011

Network Ten – broadcaster of Australia’s leading sports channel ONE – today announced its investment in The Roar Sports Media, publisher of leading sports opinion website The Roar (theroar.com.au).

The partnership will provide ONE’s online portal (onehd.com.au) with access to The Roar’s expert and fan opinion and community discussion, complementing onehd.com.au’s expert commentary. It will also provide The Roar with a platform for growth as it seeks to expand its online community and advertising revenue.

Network Ten chief digital media officer Nick Spooner said: “The Roar is a perfect fit for onehd.com.au. Not only will it complement our established roster of on-air experts contributing commentary and analysis of Australian and international sport, it adds a compelling point of differentiation from other sports sites: the voice of the fans. Fans can stand alongside the on-air and online experts as a legitimate voice on major sports news and issues.”

“The model of ONE has certainly demonstrated the effectiveness for advertisers in speaking to a targeted and highly engaged audience of sports lovers. With The Roar, the fans value the reactions and opinions, robust debate and deep analysis, while advertisers value the chance to engage directly with high quality user-generated content from a demonstrably committed audience,” Mr Spooner said.

The Roar Sports Media managing director Zac Zavos said: “Australian sports fans are among the most passionate in the world. They crave insight, analysis and the chance to share and debate their sports opinions. News and results are important, but it’s the opportunity to contribute directly which drives our traffic numbers and has created such a strong and informed
community of ‘Roarers’. The fact that the user-generated stories on The Roar receive on average five times the number of reads compared with newswire stories on the site suggests the level of community that has been created on The Roar.”

“We’re excited about the opportunities that will come from the investment by Network Ten, as we look to grow our community and attract new advertising revenue,” Mr Zavos said.

The Roar is an Australian sports opinion website which blends expert analysis with discussion and insights contributed by fans. The Roar has more than a dozen professional columnists, and thousands of amateur writers, making it arguably Australia’s largest ‘citizen journalist’ website.

Established in 2007, the site has grown rapidly and now attracts an engaged and loyal user base, with 140,000 users visiting the site each month, and a high level of community participation with an average of 16,500 comments per month. More than half a million words are written on the site by fans each week.

onehd.com.au was launched last month to build on ONE’s broadcast brand by giving viewers and advertisers more opportunities to engage with ONE’s great sports content. The site features ONE’s broadcast content, in addition to coverage of live press conferences, exclusive video content such as extended interviews, as well as scores, results and news for major
sporting events in Australia and around the world, and opinion and blogs from some of Australia’s leading sports commentators.

The Roar joins onehd.com.au in early March.

The Roar also offers an iPhone application, a daily email newsletter, and a powerful, customised content platform. The Roar powers the fanzones of Rugby.com.au and AllBlacks.com, and is seeking opportunities to expand this established fanzone model.

The Roar Sports Media is majority owned by Conversant Media (http://www.conversant-media.com/), an online publisher that also publishes Australian popular culture website, Lost At E Minor (http://www.lostateminor.com/).

– Ends –

The Beast

The Beast is a widely circulated, highly respected, occasionally irreverent magazine for Eastern Sydney’s beaches and bays. Each month over 62,000 copies of the 100+ page magazine are distributed through the Eastern Suburbs to an eager readership. Local topics touch on current affairs, community concerns, celebrities and new businesses. We fondly remember reading The Beast when living in and around Bondi, so when the boys asked us to take The Beast online we were excited. Scott Robertson directed artwork for the digital design.

The Beast website is a whopping, engaging online publication featuring photo galleries, news, events and classifieds. And if you’d like to flip through a copy of the mag, you can do that online too. Readers can submit photos, articles, events and classifieds via sophisticated user profiles, and social media integration and email newsletters keep the punters engaged and traffic moving. Have a read through the articles and check out the Recent Local Snaps gallery.

Ursa Major

Ursa Major makes stellar skincare products for men who live. Based in Vermont, USA, the brand has adopted an outdoors, organic and spirited ‘live major’ philosophy that permeates the products, marketing, and lifestyle of the founders. Following amazing branding work by Ptarmak (Austin, TX) we created the Ursa Major website and online store to showcase the growing product range and engage a community around the brand.

The marketing strategy is largely focused on blogging, social media and blogger outreach. Early media coverage says Ursa Major’s Stellar Shave Cream is ‘out of this world‘; an endorsement we entirely agree with. Take a look at Stellar Shave Cream and stop by the Ursa Major Blog Cabin to experience an organic adventurous brand from snowy Vermont.

So when that first email went out to a few friends, I’d never have guessed it would end up into the business that Conversant Media is today. So, what does the business look like?

Across our sites we now (October) reach 320,000 unique visitors each month. We don’t spend money on traffic sources, so these folks come to our sites to find our content.

While at our sites, our crowd read well over 1 million pages monthly.

But apart from these raw numbers, what else do our audience do?

Well, they contribute almost 300 articles to our publications and leave about 25,000 comments monthly. On The Roar, we have the equivalent of War and Peace written each day.

We have several thousand Facebook shares, Facebook comments and retweets respectively each month and have over 15,000 social media followers.

Finally, we publish at least 600 unique articles each month and send dozens of newsletters.

The Conversant team draws in on the expertise of a range of great people and it’s these guys, along with core people like Mike and Andy, that let a small online business deliver this reach and see these interactions across our properties.

The Conversant Mobile solution works for any premium online publisher – not just organisations typically known for producing online media. To see how well it’s working for Australian Rugby Union – and to stay updated with the latest rugby action – grab the Wallabies app from the iTunes store and take a look.