Editor’s Note: This a guest post by Shoes of Prey co-founder Michael Fox. Shoes of Prey is an Australian startup that allows people to create custom shoes online. You can read more about Shoes of Prey in a post we ran on them a little while back. This story first appeared on Michael’s blog – 22 Michaels.
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Well, it’s taken me a week to think through all the ramifications of this and put it into a blog post, but last week was the best ever for Shoes of Prey by a large order of magnitude, and it’s all thanks to this video by a 16 year old YouTuber, Juicystar07 aka Blair Fowler.
Yes, that video has had over 450,000 views and more than 90,000 comments, each of which is a potential customer who has visited our site, designed a pair of shoes, then written a description of those shoes and what event they would wear it to – talk about brand engagement!
The video was the 5th most viewed on YouTube worldwide last Wednesday and the most commented on video worldwide for the day. It was the 58th most viewed video and 2nd most discussed video worldwide last week! Our Google Analytics traffic graph is my new favourite image of all time:
We’ve now had over 700,000 visits to the Shoes of Prey website, and 500,000 of those came last week!!! Our previous best day of traffic was 17,092 visits during the week that both Springwise and TechCrunch covered us. That day now looks like a speed hump compared with our new best day of 197,104 visits. And the traffic sent by the traditional fashion magazines and newspapers that have covered us over the past 5 months looks like the flat line graph on a heart monitor after someone’s had a heart attack!
Unfortunately conversions is a different story as Juicystar07′s audience is primarily 13-17 year old girls. They love shoes and clearly love to design shoes but we’re a little out of their budget. Tee Twyford of NZGirl did a piece on us on one of the popular morning TV shows in New Zealand last week and we’ve actually had more sales from that, so traditional media is far from dead. Still, this is phenomenal and given how much Blair’s followers have engaged with our site I’m sure if we were targeting 13-17 year olds sales would be going through the roof. 5 years ago there was no way a 16 year old could have achieved the following and influence that Blair has. The fact that she can more than triple our total traffic in a couple of days after 5 months of work from us shows the power of new media like YouTube.
And even at 16 she’s a savvy business women. We paid her for the review, though she doesn’t do videos for everyone, she reviewed our shoes herself first before agreeing to take payment and do the video and all this is disclosed on her YouTube channel. And we worked with both Blair and her agency to put together the competition so that it would work best for us and for her viewers.
Clearly we’re big believers in online media, but we’re still in the process of picking ourselves up off the floor after witnessing first hand the fact that a 16 year old YouTuber can deliver us 3 times the traffic in a couple of days that some excellent traditional media coverage has over 5 months.
Juicystar07 and new media, we love you.
Jayzus, the best I could manage so far was landing on a vid that did a piffling 60,000 views and the traffic spike looked nothing like yours, well done!
I saw a spike in my traffic when I added a kd lang video to my site after she sang at Vancouver's 2010 Olympic ceremonies. YouTube works.
This is pretty telling of where it is going. The age group of 13-17 year old girls is a little special though. They are responsible for all those cheesy boy groups, american idol stars ect. to sell millions. Their interest most likely wears off when they are older. With Juicystar07 it will be different though. I am sure her fans love her and they will grow up with her and once they are all 5 years older and her following quadruplified her ability to bump a site like yours and boost sales is going to be mindboggingly redunkulous! Siiickckkk! Love the post. Love where this trend is going! Thanks.
Thanks Mal.
Given she's only 16 now it's amazing to think what she'll be doing in 5 years time. A few years ago you would have said, “She'll be picked up by a TV station to do her own show”, but she already has more regular viewers than a lot of cable TV shows, and YouTube is a much better channel for her than TV ever could be because it's social, which suits her audience much more.
Yeah, being fashion victims we love Michael's Shoe's of Prey… And we've learned from Blair Fowler and look for some serious bloggers to appear in our soon to launch social vid for http://foursquarefashion.com