Sneakre bar detroit web pub paper 1
- 1. Ricky Calderon Prof. Lamer Intro to Web Pub September 15th, 2020 Sneaker Bar Detroit's Content, Popularity and Traffic Industry Overview Streetwear takes New York hip-hop style and California skate trends and molds it into the number one way to be fashionable in today's world. It is because of streetwear that sneaker culture boomed the way it did in the past decade. Sneaker culture is simply collecting or appreciating highly sought-after shoes. These shoes are released on dates sneakerheads call "drop days" and because of the nature of supply and demand, these highly sought-after shoes can resell on the black market for thousands, depending on the rarity and hype. The critically acclaimed sneaker that kicked off modern streetwear is an athletic shoe, the Jordan 1 by Nike in 1985. It was and still is a staple to have in a typical sneakerheads collection. Anyone and everyone can be a sneakerhead. At a sneaker event in Michigan in 2014 Rashone Bryant AKA "Afrikan Ceasar" recalls the diversity. He saw people looking like a typical hip-hop artist, 13-year-old suburban kids with their mom to middle aged adults you would never guess they love shoes. At these shoe events, there is no limit to the rarity in the sneakerheads shoe collections. Ceaser claims someone had the "Marty McFly's" which are the some of the rarest shoes in the world, on the market for $40K right now (Bryant). Since sneakers became high in demand, the market has been growing out of control. Sneakerheads created an economy where you could buy sell and trade shoes. Buying shoes
- 2. started to become an investment where you could buy low and sell high. Websites that allow people to buy and resell shoes turned shoes into "a kind of currency", similar to stocks (Griffith). Buy a shoe for retail price, ($120 for example) and you could resell the pair for hundreds more, even thousands if you're lucky. Even retail shoe stores like Foot Locker recognizes this growing trend as they invested $100 million in GOAT, a sneaker resell app (Griffith). There is a difference between athletic shoes and collectable sneakers. Athletic shoes focus on comfort rather than visual style. Collectable sneakers focus on trends and makes no priority on comfort. It is common to see a cross between these two, since Nike and Adidas are big names in the athletic shoe world and they also tend to sell stylish shoes. In terms of sales, athletic shoes were doing relatively well until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. "March sales were down by about 40% and April by around 50%" Then jumped up by 25% in June "driven by a huge increase in limited edition releases (Powell). This says a lot about collectable sneakers and their effect on the entire shoe market. The pandemic kept people inside, increasing sales in online shopping, leading to a huge increase in collectable shoe sales. "One week in April we saw a 105 percent increase in the sneaker category" (Moin). Company Information Sneaker Bar Detroit is an online news source on the latest collectable sneakerhead news. In their about us page, they pride themselves in being reliable and credible. They are not a resell or retail ecommerce website. The front page gives you information on drop days, pictures of the most relevant shoes that will release soon and links to resell websites to
- 3. purchase collectable shoes. The navigation tabs break down shoe news by brand because there is too much information to lump it all together. The competing website sneakernews.com is very similar. The few differences I see is if I wanted to purchase a pair of shoes, SneakerBarDetroit.com has less options and only link to aftermarket resell sites, whereas sneakernews.com gives a link in the navigation that lists online retail stores where you could possibly buy the shoes you want for a lower price (and gives a warning to links that are aftermarket sites). The about us page is more annoying to get to on Sneaker Bar Detroit and on sneakernews.com it was a lot simpler to reach that page. Brand trust & Authority Brand authority means everything when it comes to the sneaker world. SBD has been a registered website for 9 years, that makes your website seems more credible if it has been established for that long. The website SBD founder is Mario Briguglio, the guy has been a sneakerhead since he was 6 so he's been in the shoe game for a long time. This makes him a sneaker expert in my eyes, because it takes a long time to acquire knowledge. Alin Tiniuc is managing editor of SBD. There isn't much info about him on the SBD website but from Rashone "Afrikan Caesar" Bryant mentioned he was the web developer for the site. I tried looking for his personal social media pages but nothing comes up. Rashone Bryant is a writer, sneaker reviewer and SBD podcast host. In the discussion we had he said he is the face of SBD and goes to conventions and meetings around the world to represent them. On Instagram, SBD has 321K followers while Sneaker News has 9.5M. On twitter SBD has 42.8K followers and Sneaker News has 840.7K followers. On YouTube SBD has 5.39k subs while Sneaker News has 231K subs which seems like a huge gap.
- 4. Competing Site Sneaker News offer generally the same services as SBD but sneaker news has a bigger audience and different priorities. The striking difference between the two sites are social media content. The direction Sneaker News is taking with their YouTube content is doing a much better job at catering to their audience. For example, SBD's YouTube content is non-existent, they haven’t posted in over a year. What they did post was their podcasts and they only got a couple hundred views. Meanwhile Sneaker News's YouTube is pretty active and get thousands of views. Just recently they got 43K views on a Yeezy unboxing video. SBD could do the same thing; their most popular video is an Air Jordan 12 review but they decide not to continue for some reason. Images and text are very similar, but Sneaker News strays away from opinion articles and focus on general information. One of their biggest services include Sneaker Con, a shoe event where sneakerheads can meet people with similar interests, show off their collections or even trade shoes. On the other hand, Sneaker News doesn’t have a podcast and SBD does so there's a trade-off. Quality Content Assessment Content Overview During lecture we learned about the three c's (content, commerce and community). The first thing I notice is the clean logo up top. The main content is image overload, there are images of shoes all over the front page. The top images I assume are important upcoming drops with a quick one sentence description. Scroll down and you hit the "latest news" section with more images of upcoming releases with a title, date (no time stamp which is not good) and brief description of the shoe. Click on the image of the shoe you want and it brings you to
- 5. another page with a small article about the shoe design and when the shoe will be released. I noticed there is a "by line" that tells me Mario Briguglio wrote the article, as well as a time stamp and a link to the Nike section of the website. The text doesn't seem to be opinion based, just pure information. There isn't a shopping cart or checkout so this wouldn't be considered an e-commerce site. There is a "shop now" image-link however, it links to an eBay search for one sneaker I am not interested in. I know SBD has a podcast which is a big part of their content, but I can't find it on the front page. There's not even a section for it, I have to search for it and even then, the podcasts are out of order. I don’t see any other videos or infographics. Credible Content/ Unique Content Unique content is when no other content is like it anywhere else on the web. Unique content is important because google will prioritize unique content to the top of a search. When Sneaker Bar Detroit is ran through copyscape.com, there is an instance of non-unique content instantly. "Nike Blazer Mid "Spider Web" Releasing For Halloween" is on both SBD and The Elite which is another competing sneaker blog website. This tells me that some of SBD's content is not unique. It's possible SBD copy and pastes press release information from Nike themselves. It's not only the title of the shoes that are not unique, the description under the title is found on many other websites as well. The interesting thing is his name is found as a source on an ecommerce website called febsale.com. That could mean Mario Briguglio is being paid for the content. I tested this again, what I found is that the results were external duplicates that are links to SBD and the SBD Facebook account. One website (sneakerdebut.com) is not from the SBD
- 6. realm but doesn't mention SBD or Mario Briguglio. This tells me SBD does not write unique content all the time. The dates on the articles tells me that SBD does update more often, but the general content of images and text are the same. Quality content makes one think "was value added?". In this case there is not more value added than other sneaker blog sites. There was nothing I could find on SBD that I couldn't find on Sneakernews. Traffic Analysis Visit Analysis Sneakerbardetroit.com Sneakernews.com 3-month average monthly visits 2.806M 5.795M 3-month average unique visitors 1.384M 2.476M Visits per unique visitor 2.03 2.34
- 7. Definitions The visit analysis shows Sneakernews.com has an obviously bigger audience based on three-month averages. A visit is considered the number of sessions within a given time period (every 30 minutes). A visit can consist of multiple page views. One person can have multiple visits and each time would be counted as a visit in the analytics. Unique Visitors are "as close you can get to a human". A unique visitor is every visit to a website per device. The way this is tracked is by tracking the cookies, which are "crumbs" of data which tracks your identity on the web. Visits per unique visitors are sessions per-user. You can get this number by dividing the number of total visits by the number of unique visitors. Comparison Sneakernews gets roughly double the amount of average monthly visits. This is could be a consequence of the type of content that gets published on the website. I say that because on SBD, the main shoes I see promoted are Air Jordan's. Nothing wrong with Jordan's, but Sneakernews separates latest sneaker news and popular sneaker news on their front page. Sneakernews covers shoes I don’t see on SBD. whether you like them or not, you need to include what's popular. With that said the chart predicts the trajectory to go down for both websites in average monthly visits. This puzzles me but my only explanation is that kids are going back to school and already bought their new shoes to show off. I predict the monthly average goes up during the holiday season. Three-month average unique visitors for SBD are half of that of Sneakernews. This time the data isn't as bleak. 1.384M is a large number of unique viewers for any website. SBD's rate for average three-month unique viewers is raising, just much slower than Sneakernews. In June
- 8. 20th, SBD started around 1.250M unique visitors. A month later, they hit almost 1.5M unique viewers. Then it goes down again to where it is now, to 1.384M. Sneakernews goes from 2.1M, to 2.6M, and is going up to almost 2.75M. This begs the question, why is SBD staying stagnate while Sneakernews is going up? You could say that hot sneakers dropped in the summer, but afterwards SBD went down and SN went up; it's the content. Returning Visitors Returning visitors are possibly the most valuable part of your community. It shows that you are offering something that they can't get anywhere else. This is an area where SBD is doing well in. SBD has 2.03 compared with Sneaker News at 2.34. This tells me that people come back to SBD about as much as they do on Sneakernews.com. This also tells me SBD has as much of a loyal community as Sneaker News which is essential for any media company. Engagement Analysis Sneakerbardetroit.com Sneakernews.com Web Averages Bounce Rate % 73.75% 61.71% 40-60% Pages Per Visit 1.70 2.86 4.6 Visit Duration 00:10:25 min 00:05:03 min 3.1 min Bounce Rate Bounce rate is when a visitor lands on one page of a website before exiting. This is not a time-based analysis, and the page the visitor clicks doesn't necessarily have to be the front page. SBD bounce rate is 73.75% and Sneakernews has a slightly lower bounce rate at 61.71%.
- 9. Both of these bounce rates are out of range from the web average bounce rate, which is 40%- 60%. SBD's higher bounce rate could be a positive or negative. Positive because a high bounce rate could mean the SBD website offers exactly what the consumer needs and so they leave quicker. The high bounce rate could be a negative because it could mean a visitor did not like what they saw and immediately exited. Sneaker news has a shoe rating poll under a shoe you click and you don't even need to make an account to participate. When I click the same shoe on each site, the articles on Sneaker News are obviously much longer than on SBD (see screenshot example). This engagement with user poll participation would make the website more enjoyable and could keep a visitor from leaving after 1 click.
- 10. Pages Per Visit Pages per visit measures how many web pages a user view on a website (techopedia). Sneaker News has roughly twice as many pages per visit (2.86) as Sneaker Bar Detroit (1.70). Compare those number with the web average of 4.6 and you see neither website is even close to that. Something about Sneaker News is making users want to click through the website more. This could be either good or bad for SBD but I'm gearing towards bad. SBD's pages per visit being 1.70 wouldn't be so bad if the bounce rate wasn't so high. The bounce rate is way
- 11. above average and the pages per visit rate is way below average. This brings me to conclude that visitors click on SBD once and leave. Something I noticed that could contribute to this number for SBD is that some images on the front page looks like ads. The boxes that say "release dates" has an image of Michael Jordan dribbling a ball. Jordan is an amazing athlete but It looks out of place and random. Even the shop now link looks like an ad. I'm not sure if those are the right images to have there, or if there should be an image there at all. Ads could make someone not want to click through your site. Another possible reason why Sneaker News has more pages per visit is because they have more internal links per page. Another thing to look at is the graph on similarweb.com, it shows a downward trajectory in pages per visit by the end of September. Similar web also predicts a slight upward trajectory for Sneakernews. Average Visit Duration Average visit duration's definition is the average time a user spends on a site. The data on these metric surprises me because SBD beats Sneaker News out of the water. SBD's average visit durations ten minutes and twenty-five seconds, while Sneaker News average visit duration is five minutes and three seconds. The average web visit duration is three minutes and one second.
- 12. One reason that sticks out to me as to why the visit duration is so high for SBD is the podcasts. Even though finding the podcasts are a hassle, they are available on the site, there is no need to link outside to say YouTube or another website (except for audio services such as apple music). The podcasts are typically one to two hours so that could definitely "fix" the average visit duration to make it look like they stay on the site to browse when in reality they are listening to the two-hour long podcast. It also depends on what the visitor is looking for when it comes to visit duration. If someone was just looking for drop days, that is a quick in and out type deal. If Sneaker News has a lower average visit duration, it might be because it is easier to find drop dates for certain shoes there than to find them on SBD. Value Content & Engagement Improvement Recommendation Something that broke my heart is when I saw SneakerBarDetroit's YouTube completely abandoned and then seeing Sneaker News's YouTube doing relatively well. YouTube is an incredibly popular website that sneakerheads use to look at shoe reviews, unboxings and other interesting sneaker related content. When our class had a conversation with Rashone "Afrikan Cesar" Bryant, I recall him saying something like "who would want to see a rich celebrity shop for shoes?". Here's an answer; millions. Search on YouTube for famous rapper's sneaker shopping. They get a few million views per video depending on who is shopping. I'm not suggesting to do exactly that, because obviously it would be expensive to secure that type of deal with a high-status celebrity. What I am recommending is to have someone consistently create content to upload to YouTube. The most popular videos on SBD's YouTube are sneaker reviews from six years ago. They got tens of thousands of views; I don’t see why a business would just expel that outlet from their community. I watched their most viewed video
- 13. and it looked high quality, well edited and made Sneaker Bar Detroit look authoritative and trustworthy on the topic of sneakers. The video has 81,018 views, 651 likes and 14 dislikes. Those are good numbers and, in the description, they link to sneakerbardetroit.com; that brings more possible unique visitors to SBD's website. Popularity Analysis Quantity Total Backlinks No. of Referring Domains Average No. of Backlinks per Domain SneakerBarDetroit.com 6,534,480 6,317 1,034 SneakerNews.com 5,206,259 15,935 326.7 Definitions In website analytics, popularity is defined as the number of links and sites that link to yours and the quality of those sites. To determine popularity with proper data we will analyze the total number of Backlinks, and the number of referring domains. Via ahrefs.com, backlinks
- 14. are the total number of links from other websites pointing to your site. Referring domains are the total number of unique domains linking to your site. It is important to calculate the average number of backlinks per domain so we can determine if a small number of domains are spamming links on their website to the one you are assessing. It is also important what kind of websites are linking back to your domain. You want trustworthy domains to link to your website (like Nike.com) so that they are more likely to show up at the top of search engines. Analysis of Link Quantity: There is over a million more total backlinks to SBD and nine thousand less referring domains when comparing to SneakerNews.com. This could be because these sites could be linking to SBD as a source more often than others, or they could be spamming SBD in hopes for it to reach the top of google searches. When looking at link quality, you will notice the kind of sites that are linking to SBD are not as reliable as the ones linking to SneakerNews. This leads me to conclude that blogs are spamming SBD. SBD's backlinks per domain confirms the amount of times a domain links to SBD (1,034 for SBD and 326.7 for SneakerNews). SneakerNews has such a lower number which means a smaller number of websites link to while a larger amount of websites link to Sneakernews, per domain, it shows Sneakernews is not spammed as much as possible. This leads me to believe more reliable websites link back to Sneakernews. Analysis of link quality: The top referring domains in terms of quality is what matters in this type of analysis. For SBD, the top ten referring domains determined by ahrefs.com are as follows: bit.ly/Shop-SBD, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Jordan, ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Эминем, www.snaidero-usa.com,
- 15. www.aljadid.com, officialsbaseball.com, deadspin.com, www.rrmh.org, www.singlegrain.com, es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Jam. Number of restricted domains are 4002. Overall these are not very popular domains but there are a few exceptions. Wikipedia is used by many people use it to find general information that is most of the time accurate and SBD is linked as a source. Snaidero-usa.com is a 404 link but the website is an Italian interior design site, very irrelevant. Officialsbaseball.comwouldn't even load. Aljadid.com is an Arab news source, while credible, I don’t see much of a contribution to SBD traffic. I thought deadspin.com looked like a great site at first glance, but I noticed it had a link to theonion.com in the header. Rrmh.org was scary to load up, it was not secure and it looked like a novice web designer coded it (even though it has a .org domain). Single grain was one of the better sites of the top ten because they are a digital marketing agency that worked with Airbnb, Lyft, Amazon and more. It's like a night and day difference in the quality of referring domains Sneakernews has. The top referring domains are; theroadsiders.blogspot.com, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike,_Inc., bleacherreport.com/los-angeles-lakers, www.nytimes.com, www.nikesb.com, djtephlon.com, gourmetfootwear.com, ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Эминем, www.forbes.com, blog.cheapism.com. Many of these domains are recognizable news sources (Forbes and the New York Times). Nike's wiki and NikeSB are also very recognizable brands that dominate the shoe industry. The other sites are blogs that are not the most secure but they have decent articles. Total restricted domains for Sneakernews is 2602 which is less than SBD but the quality ref domains make up for it.
- 16. Works Cited Griffith, Erin. "Buy Low-Tops, Sell High-Tops: StockX Sneaker Exchange is Worth $1 Billion." The New York Times, June 26, 2019, Powell, Matt. "Sneakernomics: First Half 2020 Athletic Footwear and Activewear Sales Results." The NPD Group, Bryant, Rashone. "Event Recap: Michigan Sneaker XChange (MSXC) 2014." Sneaker Bar Detroit, Aug. 12, 2014 Janssen, Cory. “What Is Pages Per Visit (Pages/Visit)? - Definition from Techopedia.”Techopedia.com, www.techopedia.com/definition/27983/pages-per-visit-pagesvisit.