Case History: Mediabistro Parties On with Newsletter
Call it a one-stop-shop for content professionals. Or call it a place for people to seek new jobs or sign up for a class while perusing the latest media news.
Call it anything you want—but call mediabistro.com successful.
Founded by Laurel Touby in 1997, mediabistro.com has evolved from being an organizer of networking events for media pros into a thriving, multi-layered business. And it owes that success, at least in part, to The Daily Media News Feed, an e-mail newsletter that keeps readers up to date on the latest news, job openings, educational opportunities and insider gossip.
The Daily Media News Feed is shipped every business day to 70,000 subscribers who have opted in on the mediabistro.com Web site. It began in 2002 with under 10,000 subscribers and has been adding a couple of thousand names per month, according to publisher Kyle Crafton.
The newsletter was conceived as a way to help spread the word about mediabistro’s products and services, but it has grown in editorial reach. Arriving in in-boxes as a text-only document, it links to media-related news stories culled from newspapers and magazines across the country. To bring readers back to the mediabistro site are internal ads for the job of the day, educational seminars and workshops, and paid advertisements.
The Daily Media News Feed also has a viral impact, with people passing it around which increases traffic to the site. “We track clicks on the job of the day and it can generate 1500 clicks a day, depending on the job,” Crafton says. “We track clicks for paid advertisers if they request us to and we just started tracking clicks on in-house ads. In the future we’ll be looking to see what kind of messages are the most effective to get people to the site for purchases.”
The site, which has 325,000 registrants, produces revenue with its educational offerings and job board (both included on the Daily Media News Feed). In addition, it offers the AvantGuild membership, which allows members premium content access and the Freelance Marketplace.
The 7,000 members who have paid the $49 AvantGuild membership fee also receive a biweekly newsletter, The Revolving Door. This E-zine contains job news and listings and trends and analysis. Crafton has a good knowledge of who his subscribers are, where they are located and what they do for a living. Fifty percent of the recipients are located in the New York metropolitan area and all are media professionals. But the audience is expanding as designers including radio, TV and marketing professionals. Two thirds of the newsletter recipients are women,
How successful is the Daily Media News Feed? Successful enough. According to Crafton, the feed “more than breaks even on paid advertising.” And there are additional income and benefits from the marketing of educational sessions, workshops and classes. “We’re putting more quantitative research into those numbers now,” Crafton says. “We’re starting to track clicks to inhouse ads and conversions.”
Editorial is are inhouse at the mediabistro’s New York office. Web analytics and statistics are handled by Omniture.
Currently, there is no newsletter segmentation. But site visitors can sign up for invites to the company’s signature networking events in various cities as well as media happenings and classes nationwide. Those e-mails are sent on a sporadic basis and mediabistro members manage their subscriptions online.
Future e-newsletter plans include the promotion of blogs that the site recently started publishing. Half of the blogs will focus on sectors—TV, news, book publishing and design and the other half will focus on geographical locations, NY metro, LA metro and Washington, DC.
“We’re becoming a source of media that’s more specific,” Crafton says. “We have plans to send out newsletters summarizing the content of our blogs.”
According to Crafton, the company has been growing at a rate of 50-60% yearly. He partially credits that growth to the newsletter—because it increases site registration, membership and attendance at events.
