Since we started on the journey to beat The Spinoff with the number of paid members we have starting learning a little more about our audience.
There is some fascinating data out there for us, and also for our competitors.
Today I will just focus on two metrics, Audience Geographic Location, and Audience Source.
First up Geographic location.
As you can see, most of our audience is New Zealand based, with strong support from the Anglosphere.
Compare that to The Spinoff:
Just 40% of their audience is New Zealand based. For some reason they have a reasonable chunk coming in from India and Pakistan.
Not as much as The Daily Blog has though:
Over 80% of Martyn Bradbury‘s audience is amazingly from the sub-continent! It appears that someone is buying their traffic.
David Farrar enjoys 84% of his audience from New Zealand.
By way of comparison, here is Radio New Zealand audience by geography.
The next metric is Traffic Source. This data shows stark contrast as well, and probably explains the geography discrepancies. Here is The BFD‘s:
80% of our traffic is Direct. That means that we have a highly engaged and more importantly, loyal audience that doesn’t just happen by our site via search engines or social media.
Compare that to The Spinoff:
Most of their traffic, which is about the same as ours, comes from search engines or social media like Facebook or Twitter.
More than 50% of Martyn Bradbury’s traffic comes from search and social. Nice to see that two fifths of his audience is direct.
David Farrar’s audience is highly engaged and direct as well. That means he has a good platform for members too.
Again, by way of comparison, here is Radio NZ‘s:
Radio NZ has a pretty even split between direct traffic and search engines.
Now, what does all this mean?
Well, it shows that our audience are highly engaged, come back to the site again and again and do so directly rather than via search engines.
Unlike The Spinoff, we don’t allow comments to live on Facebook. We aren’t going to hand our audience to an evil empire like Facebook. If you want to comment on our articles then the only way to do so is in our comments section. This leads to higher reader and audience engagement. Kiwiblog is the same.
Knowing this really shows that we should, with similar traffic, be footing it with The Spinoff when it comes to paid memberships. A membership at The Spinoff doesn’t actually give you anything, except a virtual pat on the back and a smug glow. And yet they have 10,000 members, giving them $100,000 per month and $1 million per annum.
With a paid membership of The BFD at the very least, you get an ad-free experience. On top of that, more advanced memberships give you access to member-only content which is constantly being expanded.
The more support and paid members we have the better the quality of the content. At the moment we are staffed mostly by enthusiastic amateurs, with big ambitions.
Having 10,000 members would give us a war chest to combat the predominance of left-wing media.
Shortly we will be launching an Affiliate Program which will share revenue with those people and organisations who help us gain new paid members. If you are interested in becoming an affiliate of The BFD then send us a quick email to register your interest to [email protected]. We will be publishing more information on this shortly.
In the meantime, if you aren’t already a member please consider joining. Every little bit helps.
To all our members a big thank you. We couldn’t achieve what we have so far without your support. It is more than just content, The BFD is a real community and a community that is expanding.
MyBFD is the start of building that community and membership of MyBFD is open to all paid memberships except the Basic membership. More features will be added to MyBFD each month. The next major feature will be secure video conferences inside MyBFD. Just in time for private briefings for the election.