In today’s Business section, the Statesman has a story about Blastro.com, a hip-hop video site based in Austin. The main thrust of the story — a small company run by guys who love what they’re going is finding some success — is fine. However, I found some of the numbers cited and the classification of the site as “the most popular place for hip-hop videos on the Web” a little misleading.
There’s mention that “competing against giants such as MTV and RollingStone.com, Blastro has managed to hold its own”. And while it’s true that Blastro, MTV, Rollingstone.com all offer similar content, there isn’t much comparison in scale. August numbers from audience measurement company MediaMetrix had Blastro with 519,000 unique visitors, while MTV.com recorded 8.2 million, BET.com had 2.3 million, and Rollingstone.com had 1 million.
The story says that “Blastro has found a niche as an online version of the BET or MTV cable television networks”, but BET and MTV already have online versions of themselves.
Finally, Blastro’s COO puts last year’s revenue “between $500,000 and $1 million”, which I would imagine is mostly via advertising. Based on the MediaMetrix number of 7 million page views from Blastro in August, that means the company is getting an average of a $10 CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions, the typical model for online advertising buys) on their ads across the site, which is not bad. The “junk” CPMs are down in the $2-3 range, while the $15-25 range is reserved for high-quality content on very targeted sites.
Other than a few eyebrow-raisers around the wording in the story, it does seem that the Blastro folks are making a good business out of something they obviously love doing.
1 response so far ↓
1 Jesse Brede // Sep 12, 2006 at 11:28 am
Interesting review of the article. We certainly do love what we do.
Check out our contest with HBO.
Hit me up if you have any questions.
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