Ze Frank vs RocketBoom: Decision goes to Andrew Baron of RocketBoom
I was disappointed to see one of my favorite videobloggers, Ze Frank go after my other favorite videoblogger, Rocketboom on the issue of which side gets more downloads.
Ze Frank pointed out the always highly questionable Alexa stats(see below) that show Ze Frank with a commanding lead over Rocketboom when it comes to visitors to their site:
Andrew Baron, who has had a tough 2006 with the loss of his host and 49% business partner, Amanda Congdon — a messy and very public divorce — and now he has this nonsense to deal with.
In the departure of Amanda Congdon, I think he came out all the better with the hiring of the classy Joanna Colan, whom I personally prefer to Amanda, but that’s just me.
Back to the topic at hand…
The bottom line is that more viewers may well go to the Ze Frank site to view that day’s episode than Rocketboom. But going to Ze Frank’s site is pretty much the ONLY way to get his content, which is not a good thing. Andrew Baron, as he calmly explained on his Dembot blog, provides a far wider number of ways for his readers to access Rocketboom’s content: Tivo, iTunes, various direct download methods, etc.
So bottom line, though Ze Frank’s SITE may get more visitors in a given day, Rocketboom gets its content viewed by more people because it provides more ways to get it. That’s 300,000 viewers a day — enough to justify the $40,000 -$80,000 weekly rates Baron charges to advertise on his site.
And THAT folks, is the rub between these two gentlemen… I think Ze Frank, who has been reduced to selling images of duckies on his site to raise money, is jealous of Baron’s success in selling his highly creative, custom made advertisements for his sponsors.
I think the answer for Ze Frank’s dilemna is quite simple: open up his means of distribution for downloading his content in the same way Rocketboom does… and use that highly creative, extraordinarily intelligent and funny mind of his to come up with some custom ads for sponsors who might be drooling to get in front of his audience. Then we’ll see who has the bigger download count (and bank account), but if he does it right, it really won’t matter.
In the meantime, hats off to Andrew Baron, who has once again exhibited extraordinary grace under pressure.
Andrew: you rock!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For those of you who haven’t visited my other site, ZBIZ.TV lately, I’m currently featuring an interview with Bob Petrie of Vidavee entitled Bob Petrie Lays Out Vidavee’s Compelling Vision for the Future of Video Services. Check it out.
Subscribe to this blog
ze does have an rss feed. i watch him on fireant.
Yes, he does. But he doesn’t have an iTunes feed and could probably benefit by doing a TIVO deal similar to RocketBoom’s.
I get him via iTunes and watch him on my iPod. Also he’s been prominately featured on iTunes front page. I believe he’s also been in the itunes top 100. And really iTunes will pick up any RSS 2.0 feed–there really is no such thing as an “iTunes feed” officially. Yeah Apple messes with the RSS 2.0 spec a little but you can subscribe to any RSS 2.0 feed with audio or video content in iTunes and there are lots of feeds in their directory that don’t comply with the iTunes RSS specs.
But I agree generally that Alexa ratings aren’t everything especially considering syndication. But there is a huge disparity between Rocketboom and Frank, when I suspect that they are likely to be much closer in popularity. With anomolies like Microsoft Bits and probably some others that we don’t know about it’s easy for download numbers to become inaccurate and inflated.
If that’s the case, then I stand corrected on the iTunes issue.
Perhaps our good friend Ze Frank is not counting those downloads and perhaps he should. Maybe the difference comes down to TIVO and the other venues RocketBoom uses.
How does one account for such a disparity and why would a smart guy like Ze Frank be selling duckies on his page rather than attracting high quality sponsors? I think the guy is awesome and can’t fathom why he doesn’t have advertisers banging on the door.
Hey, I think the duckies are brilliant, insofar as someone can make small recurring revenue while driving audience participation. Ze is king of audience integration into his site. I am thrilled with micropayment ways to show fan support. My friend, Chris, bought a duck, and I thought it was a swell way to show support and to pimp his website, all at once.
And I like Andrew a great deal. I respect his abilities as a business person. He also cares a lot about the community, and does lots to raise awareness of the community at large. He’s also a great business person, savvy, and knows plenty about the ins and outs of this new industry (if one views it that way).
I think we should be working hard on quality of shows, distribution, and then the ecosystem surrounding independant video.
They may be brilliant, but they aren’t going to haul in $40-80K per week the way Andrew’s ads are, and somehow, I think that was the crux of the issue and why Ze Frank lashed out against Rocketboom on the stats issue.
Ze Frank, sadly, says he is retiring from his site on March 17th, 2007. Hopefully, that’s not true. I love his dark humor and witty insights on the news.
It may be a case of RocketBoom being around longer, but I can’t imagine that accounting for much. I also don’t know if RB has a sponsor now or not. I haven’t seen them do an ad in a while. I also can’t imagine that TIVO is going to brng in a huge amount of viewers, but I could be wrong about that. I say this because I don’t know anyone with a TIVO, but I know lots of people with iPods. So I don’t think that TIVO could make a huge dent in the numbers compared to say iTunes.
One thing (and I can’t imagine Andrew not accounting for this) but some Microsoft based agregators can make your stats really inaccurate because of the way they request files from a server. Microsoft Bits (as I mentioned earlier) is the cause of this. Instead of downloading a file all at once it makes multiple requests for different parts of the file. Each of these appear in the server stats as individual downloads. So a single request can be loged as a few hundred requests. But like I said, Andrew is no dummy and I would be really surpised if he didn’t know about this.
I saw an ad for battery recycling last week on RB, which I attempted to lift from Google Video, but it wouldn’t run so I just added a link to it (see article above). I haven’t watched this week, so am unaware of any new ones. I know that overall, they come and go.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch took a close look at the numbers (Andrew provided him access) and he verified they were on the up and up, so given the veracity of those two sources (Andrew and Marshall), I tend to take their word for it.
I’d love it if Andrew made a separate blog entry and provided specific numbers of a given day to back up his claims. That would help clear up the whole controversy.
In my case, I’ve met Andrew and found him to be a straight shooter. I believe what he says.
Maybe if ZeFrank did a little more digging in to his own numbers, he would find that he actually gets a whole lot more than the 30K he currently claims…
The “classy” Joanne Colan. You guys really are suckers for an English accent, aren’t you? If only you knew….
I met Joanne on the very same day I met Amanda. They were attending PodCamp Boston. I spoke to Joanne for a while and found her to be very honest and forthright. Had nothing at all to do with her accent. Just a sense I had about her.
according to the rocketboom wiki, andrew sold one week of ads on eBay, did another week thereafter with another company, and a year later did three days with the battery company. that’s 13 ads out of 500+ shows.
andrew recently claimed 400,000 viewers in an interview (ze used the lower 300,000 number from andrew’s blog) and andrew says that tivo, phones and other non-web sources aren’t part of that number.
something like a separate 50k. that’s an impressive number, but given the mysteries of the 400,000 number starts to smell a bit fishy.
as other people pointed out, ze supports rss, itunes, is prominently featured in itunes, provides a feed through feedburner, and he is widely syndicated through revver.
revver allows people to build their own video portals with just a few clicks. revver will also get you onto phones.
the founder of creative commons named revver one of the top “2.0″ companies this week, which makes it all the more strange that andrew attacked ze for being “1.0″ and “old media”.
andrew also says that they have an exclusive deal with tivo in his blog. if so, that might explain why ze isn’t on tivo. and it would also be a rather uncool deal for andrew to sign.
i don’t think andrew is totally in the right on this one. i’ll be curious to see how it plays out. i do wish andrew would provide some real stats, this “between 250,000 and 350,000″ thing is a little fishy. take four weeks of traffic, divide it by 20 shows, and let me know what the numbers are please. then at least we can talk about it.
You have raised some excellent questions, MeanGuy. I hope as this story evolves Andrew puts his numbers out there for everyone to see. Probably would be helpful for Ze to do the same. That would clear this whole thing up!
BTW, you don’t sound like much of a mean guy…
you can see ze’s video stats directly on revver. they’re open for all to see. (i thought that was the whole point of his response, actually.)