If last month’s Golden Globe awards are any indication, next Sunday’s Oscars are going to be very good for the web traffic of traditional media outlets covering the Academy Awards, a NYT article suggested. While the TV audience drew 20 million viewers, within a day of the Golden Globes broadcast, People Magazine’s people.com attracted 39.6 million pageviews. Celebrity news magazine sites Vanity Fair (vanityfair.com), Entertainment Weekly (ew.com), E! (http://www.eonline.com), along with the entertainment sections of dailies like The LAT (theenvelope.com), and many others have dedicated sections of their websites to all things Oscar (speaking of daily papers’ entertainment coverage, somehow the Times forgot about its own special Oscar blog, The Carpetbagger).
Although special Oscar sites are nothing new - most of the above sites have existed in one form or another for past Academy Awards shows - there is a new appreciation of the benefits that can accrue from administering a site that provides added layers of coverage and access. As Martha Nelson, editor of Time Inc.’s People Group, told the Times, “Any time you have more traffic, you’re going to sell more subscriptions.” Aside from that point, as Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, unlike print products, websites do not cost any more to produce whether they are viewed by 30 people or 30 million. Over at parent Conde Nast, Thomas Wallace, the company’s editorial director, added that Conde Nast readers are renewing their subscriptions through the web at twice the rate of those solicited by mail. Moreover, they are on average six years younger.
And with so much at stake, magazines are scrambling to differentiate their sites. VanityFair.com, for example, promises to bring its exclusive Oscars after-party to the web, where it will post video and photographs and will blog from the event.
Not to be outdone, people.com will promote its “After Midnight” party photos and, possibly, video from the event. Additionally, its “Red Carpet Confidential” web feature will have reporters transmitting items from behind the scenes and even showing viewers what kind of celebrity swag they’re missing out on.
Paradoxically, the Oscar-crazed web activity by traditional media has helped raise the profile of older sites like oscarwatch.com, which was started by Sasha Stone in 1999. Initially worried about the competition, Stone said there is an odd sort of symbiosis that goes on among the Oscar sites at all levels. “People have their bookmarks and they hit one site and then another. What’s good for one site is good for them all.”
And as the Online Journalism Review noted a few weeks ago, traditional media still has to play catch up to independent sites like oscarwatch.com and Movie City News, which attained have the kind of clout once reserved for their print rivals.
Related:
-- E Online’s Webcasting Golden Globes Pre-Show; Launching Six New Broadband Channels