Shiny Media

Ok, so we might have had a bit of run in with Panorama the other week, but most of us here at Shiny do actually love the Beeb, we just wish that its bloggers and journalists would link out more.

So great to see that the blog of the beeb's Chief Football Writer, Phil McNulty, features a decent list of soccer blogs (including some British ones).

Cheers Phil. Now if only the BBC tech blog, which at the moment doesn't link to any UK blogggers and the entertainment bloggers followed Phil's lead.

Over the past few years I have grown ever more incredulous about the way that the BBC has consistently stolen from, patronised and generally belittled blogs, especially British ones. There seems to be a pervading belief within Shepherd's Bush that the corporation is the British media and that the rest of the people who strive away working in commercial sectors are just basically there to do their research. Bloggers, as this post highlights, are beneath contempt and clearly don't have worthwhile opinions.

The latest example of this arrogance is this week's Panorama expose of the way in which some of Primark's suppliers were employing child labour to finish their very competitively priced garments. It was gritty Panorama stuff, highlighting an injustice and sparking a debate about the ethics of the fashion industry.

Yet while the programme highlighted low pay and child labour the programme makers seemed to have no ethical qualms about screwing British journalists.

Ok, so we are actually number three. But ahead of us are two huge TV corporations - one of which we actually help fund - who spend millions of pounds on video content every year. We spend less than the cost of five minutes of EastEnders each year on YouTube vids yet are still not too far behind them.

Over the last few months we have averaged over a million views of our gadgets, fashion, games, green and footy vids and the number of subscribers is rocketing too. In fact we have twice as many subscribers as Gordon Brown's YouTube channel and an awful lot more than the massively hyped WebCameron, both of which you can find here.

As well as taking  advantage of YouTube's recently announced monetisation program we are  working with a variety of brands on our videos. For example LG has just finished a four month sponsorship of our Shiny Fashion TV videos as well as working with us on a media talent competition. We have other sponsors lined up who we will be announcing shortly.

I have always felt that there was a massive opportunity for Shiny to pair our quality written content with videos presented by the same writers. It is great to be able to read someone's words and then see them in action talking about their passion. It looks as if our readers/viewers feel the same way too.

Anyhow here's our latest YouTube star, Gary Cutlack, in action, and Zara and here Wi-Fi T-shirt. If only David Cameron was into batteries...

Oh how I love the Daily Mail. What a splendid newspaper. No really. Its online offering is now very good to the point where a US-exiled liberal friend of mine confessed to me the other day that after the Gruniard, it is his first online stop for UK news. If the Fleet St gossip is right too the Mail's site is really starting to take off and could well become one of the biggest UK online portals.

So the paper does itself no favours when it lets its columnists write utter shit like this. Yep, Keith Waterhouse, a man who is guaranteed a place in heaven for penning the wonderful Billy Liar, has a pop at Googlers (whatever they night be) and Bloggers who he argues don't have an original thought between them.

Mmm odd that when there is a great deal of talk in PR circles about how blogging is setting the news agenda and it is national newspapers who are pinching all the blogger's stories.

Another priceless classic is '

'They never acknowledge original authorship, believing as they do that googling has outmoded the law of copyright.'

Which paper do you write for Keith? is it the Daily Mail which very rarely links out to stories on other sites yet quite happily claims them as its own?

Like the story it ran the other day on the Fembot for sale on eBay. A story which first appeared on our blog Bayraider and was the result of our journo spending hours trawling the site looking for goodies.

Ultimately with Keith it boils down to the fact that the number of people who are interested in his tablets delivered from on high, is dwindling.

Personally I prefer to read opinions that aren't just ill-informed rants (which ironically he says is true of bloggers) but Keith everyone has a right to an opinion, even you.

Here at Shiny we are obviously huge fans of both MySpace and YouTube. You can find our content all over both sites. Yet while it was obvious to all of us that MySpace was going to be huge the minute that bands got a sniff of it, the speed in which YouTube has established itself has taken everyone, including us, by surprise.

The big debate now in the Shiny office is quite what impact YouTube is going to have on what the office pensioners refer to as the ‘music scene.’ Or as Katie so eloquently put it the other day, ‘It is so over for bands on MySpace now - YouTube is so where it’s at.’

The other day I spent an hour or so looking for some British gadget blogs. This was kind of inspired by the odd break in posting (it went dark, as the Americans say, for two weeks) on the otherwise excellent GadgetSpy. Sure there's Red Ferret, Gizmodo (UK version) and the big publishing companies have their own titles, but there wasn't as many as I'd expected, and certainly a lot less than there was this time last year.

Anyhow save me from spending more hours on Technorati and let know about yours. We need more UK blogs to link to on our titles.

Interesting to read an article in a national newspaper about gadgets for girls that doesn’t actually mention Shiny Shiny. Rebecca Armstrong, who is one of the Indie's games journos, wrote a piece in today's paper highlighting the growing trend of girls getting into gadgets, yet managed not to plug Shiny or  the hundred or so other gadget girl sites.

Instead, in what is a major coup for the PR who sold the story, she takes figures from Stuff Magazine which says its female readership has quadrupled in the last year. Stuff is a really interesting mag at the moment as, unlike a lot of tech titles, it has bucked the downward trend and is putting on readers. It now has nearly 100,000 a month. Its publisher Haymarket has assembled a really good team and the quality of the editorial of the magazine reflects this.

Nevertheless even if we assume that 10-15,000 of Stuff’s readers are women that’s actually minuscule compared to 300,000 unique readers (of which around 80% are female) who visit Shiny Shiny on a monthly basis.

Shiny Shiny is that rare thing, a British commercial blogging success story. It was the first women's gadgets blog, is the most widely read and influential and has spawned many imitators. How many other British blogs have broken new ground and attracted a worldwide audience? Can’t think of many…

Ashley

Well Ed Caesar over at the Indie can name more than many journos. Yesterday he listed fifteen top blogs and managed to mention a grand total of three British ones. That’s better than some commentators who wibble on about blogs without actually bothering to name a British blog, but still pretty poor.

So why the low number? Is it really because the British bloggers have nothing to say? Or did the fella simply not bother to spend much time researching the feature choosing instead to focus on the big US blogs? Given that Ed thinks Pete Rojas is the CEO of Weblogs Inc I suspect it is the latter. Also seems odd that he chose the big traffic US blogs, but two of the three Brit ones on his list almost certainly get less than 1000 users a day.

Ashley

How many British blogs can you name? Well if you have only been reading the UK papers and magazines recently not many. It seems that everyone has an opinion on blogging. In fact this week alone there have been features in The Sunday Telegraph, New Media Age and PR Week. The odd thing is that the articles hardly reference any UK blogs at all.

It is all very interesting pontificating on how blogs might kill the PR industry, prove enormously beneficial to cutting edge companies and re-define newspapers. But to share your views without mentioning a single UK blog as a case study seems very lame.

So how many British blogs can you name? It seems that most journalists are only aware of the ones in The Guardian, Telegraph and Times. The British blogosphere may be under nourished compared to its US and even European counterparts, but there are still some wonderful blogs and bloggers out there, some of whom, for example Treonauts , Blue Fish and This French Life are starting to make a lot more than pocket money out of their endeavours.

Ashley

I never ceased to be amazed by quite how well the indies in the UK website sector (that means Shiny Media, The Reg, Magicalia, Pocket-Lint) are doing. The Reg is way ahead with at least five million unique users per month.  Shiny Media has over a million users, Hecklerspray has over 300,000 and you’ll have to ask Stuart how Pocket-Lint is doing. There are games sites that have massive online readerships and Popbitch's reach is astronomical too.

To put that in some kind of perspective I read in Media Week the other day that FHM.com was very proud to have hit two million users per month. A good figure – but that’s from a global brand (FHM is big in the US too) backed by a major publishing company and after five years of investment.

In a profile of Rupert Murdoch recently in The Economist it was claimed that The Sunday Times, The Times, News of The World and The Sun between them reach six million unique users per month. Admittedly this sounds on the low side, but it is bizarre to think that Shiny Media's network of blogs, the oldest of which is barely two years old, are not far behind the online audience of some of the world’s oldest and most respected newspapers. Some of the bigger US blogs attract nearly two million users each day.

Does this mean that established old media brands are going to struggle against upstarts like ourselves in the new media era? Not necessarily, but it is clear that the old media brands that have ‘got their heads round’ blogging and seriously invested in it, that’ll be The Guardian then, will attract the young, tech-savvy audience that they desperately need. As for newspapers like this one who dabble in blogging but, judging by their first efforts don’t really have a clue how it all works, Murdoch’s pronouncement on the future of print might start haunting them a little sooner than they expected.

I like Future Publishing I really do. Over the years they have developed a stable of innovative and dynamic magazines. They have also helped pay my mortgage too and I do recall at one time writing for six of their publications in the space of a week.

I’ll even forgive them for launching against us in the girl's gadget space.

What I do find unbelievable now though is that in the consumer electronics magazine space in the UK they have a virtual monopoly. Cast your minds back to when they bid for Highbury Publications in 2005. One of the reasons the deal nearly stalled was because the Office of Fair Trading felt that if it went through Future would have a near monopoly in the games magazine market. The games mags were then taken out of the package and Future went on to snap up Highbury.

The arrival of the old rump of WV titles, which are staffed by some very talented and knowledgeable journalists, then gave Future a formidable stable of CE magazines. The result is that the company now has a virtual monopoly in the consumer electronics magazine arena. Apart from two mags at Haymarket and some smaller players, when it comes to AV, gadgets and TVs if you want to buy a magazine it will be a Future one. Surely there is something wrong when on press trips representatives from Future and their freelancers massively outnumber everyone else?

Given that Future has websites up against us it is becoming increasingly hard to find a freelance consumer electronics writer to work for us that doesn’t get at least half of their salary from the company. I just find it bizarre that the company were able to absorb all those tiles and that the OFT did nothing.

At least in the online space, and that’s where it really matters now, they have competition here, here and here. Unless of course they snap then up too. Btw hilariously if you type Future Highbury Games into Google  you get Games Digest’s story…