Zvents, the events lister, is reporting 35 percent year-over-year growth with over eight million unique visitors, largely due to its powering events for 285 local media brands, including major newspapers and the NBC owned-and-operated TV stations.
CEO Ethan Stock cites Quantcast data showing Zvents Media Network as the 250th most used net on the Web, ahead of Citysearch (#267) and Local.com (#291). “We’re a very large local property by any measure,” he says.
The company, which has raised $32 million over its five year history, also claims it has been averaging 12,000 monthly event listers. These use the site to promote a wide range of local events and activities, including live music, performing arts, sporting events and community activities.
Of those listers, roughly 1200, or 10 percent, are now boosting their presence by taking out ads via self–serve – a percentage that Stock thinks will climb to 20 percent in 2010. The company also sells regional and national accounts via telemarketing and national sales, with top categories including major concert promoters, sports teams, casinos and home and garden events.
High end shopping, with its sales-oriented events, such as Williams Sonoma cooking demonstrations, are also becoming more important to Zvents bottom line. “There is a significant segment of consumers who perceive shopping as entertainment,” says Stock.
The key to the company’s future in local, however, is to stay away from the trap of focusing on directory-type advertising. Instead, Zvents will stay focused on events and shopping, he says, which have the most highly motivated advertisers. “They are also relatively concentrated in terms of the volume of advertising.”
Indeed, the company’s focus on events and advertising puts it most in competition with social sites such as Facebook and Google, rather than local sites such as Citysearch and Yelp, who may be more directory oriented, says Stock. Other events oriented companies include Eventful, and “new city guide” players such as Center’d and American Towns.
In hindsight, the company’s initial focus on teaming with newspapers “look like a very smart choice,” adds Stock. While newspapers are commonly disparaged in today’s climate for their declining circulation and advertising, “they have high repeat traffic. Much more than national partners.” Top Zvents newspaper partners include SFGate, the Denver Post, Seattle PI, Boston.com, the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Daily News, and the Orange County Register.
Stock also sees a major boost coming from renewed efforts in local from national partners such as AT&T’s Yellowpages.com, which has been an investor in the company ; and from MSN, where Zvents listings will be showing up in Bing, and trigger Instant Answers via Silverlight search.
Local Onliner Book Review: Ken Doctor’s ‘Newsonomics’
The debate about the future of journalism reached the height of silliness last year when journalist-turned-banker Steven Rattner suggested that The New York Times be subsidized by the government like the BBC. But the economics of journalism has always driven the format, aside from journalistic labors of love ranging from penny savers in colonial times to hyperlocal blogs today.
As recounted in Ken Doctor’s valuable new book, Newsonomics, “the institution of American journalism owes more to the institution of the department store than the First Amendment “– a 1988 comment attributed to Knight Ridder exec Jim Batten.
But what’s happened? The department stores have consolidated and shifted much of their marketing; big chunks of paid classifieds have been Craig’s Listed; and the circulation (audience) has increasingly moved down the slippery slope to a potpourri of “continuous partial attention” news channels. Indeed, the details found in newsprint aren’t always especially sought after. As Doctor notes, just 44 percent can be bothered to click past the headlines in news aggregators like Google News to get to the original source.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Nobody in their right mind would plan a future at a newspaper or TV news broadcast anymore, right? But then there is this inconvenient statistic: applications to journalism schools have more than doubled in the past several years – even with tuition bills exceeding $50,000 at the elite institutions.
For the journalist who will pursue his or her avocation, plentiful options exist, notes Doctor, a former Knight Ridder Digital exec and publisher at newspapers and alternative weeklies who currently does analysis for Outsell, inc. and writes the Content Bridges blog. The solutions are structured in the book as “twelve new trends that will shape the news you get.”
The trends are right on and more than familiar to our Local Onliner audience (“Itch the Niche!”). But happily, Doctor avoids the blue sky and covers the bases with the aplomb of an all star. His comprehensive review, interesting detail and demand that the relationships between business and journalism be creatively re-explored makes this a valuable book for those who care about the future of journalism, and its critical role in democratic societies.