It was also a good month for Shiny's wedding site, Bridalwave, which boasted very strong figures and for our eco site HippyShopper too.
]]>Shiny Shiny is also posting some great figures at the moment with some really superb stories attracting lots of new readers. Here are some of our favourites.
Has the iPhone kiled the girl phone?
Groupon and its rivals - why discount sites are getting big
The top ten hottest websites and apps for 2010
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TechDigest - Gadget news and reviews - 450,000 unique readers each month
ShinyShiny - Gadget/website/apps news and reviews - 330,000 readers each month
TVScoop - TV reviews and previews - 220,000 readers each month
Bridalwave - Wedding ideas and news - 470,000 readers each month
ShinyStyle - Fashion news, galleries and opinions - 300,000 readers each month
HippyShopper - Green gadgets 100,000 readers each month
Corrie - Coronation Street news - 90,000 readers each month
Brandish - Men's fashion and lifestyle site - 85,000 readers each month
We are looking for competition prizes for each of the surveys.
The brand/prizes will be mentioned in the headline of the post (it will be posted four times) and the post will also feature a picture of the product.
The only cost to the brand is the cost of the prize. The brand also takes responsibility for sending the prize to the winners.
If the brand would like to add their own questions to the survey there will be a small fee for this.
Here's an example of how a previous survey worked
For more details email Ashley
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No Shiny Media fashion website has ever hit 100,000 page impressions in a day, so we have our fingers (and everything else) crossed.
We have big plans for the website too. We have recently struck a new deal to source some top quality fashion images, while at the same time improving the gallery experience for the reader. There will be many more enhancements to the site over the coming months.
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Bridalwave is a wedding website which mixes recent wedding news with tutorials, how to's and galleries of dresses. And in January is had its best month ever - with almost 400,000 people visiting the site.
Much of the recent growth has been down to the excellent articles by Andrea @andreapetrou on stuff like beach weddings and hairstyles for the big day. However it is clear that more people are planning weddings again and searching for wedding content. Maybe in some small way this says something about the state of the economy too. Weddings tend to be pretty expensive and perhaps in some small way Bridalwave's growth illustrates a small, but significant upturn in comsumer confidence.
Bridalwave is on Twitter too - twitter.com/bridalwave
]]>If you do want to run a competition with us please email Ashley. However we do charge a fee of £500 for running the competitions. We agree the wording of the competition with you.
To maximise the impact of the competitions we would advocate using one of our sponsored posts slots to promote it
Sponsored posts are a highly effective way of a brand being able to integrate their message within a website.
These are available in two different slots
1 As a highlighted 5th post on the home page - with a box under the main story on the story page
2 As a rectangular box (MPU) on the home page with a box under the main story on the story page
For our five premium sites (TechDigest, Shiny Shiny, Bridalwave, Shiny Style, TV Scoop) these cost £2000 per month
If you want run something on the smaller sites (Hippy Shopper, iPhonic, HDTVUK etc) then please get in touch
If you just want to run a sponsored post on its own then this will cost £500. It will be clearly marked that it is a sponsored post - here's an example of how this works
We can embed the video in one of two places
As a standard sponsored post - for which we charge £500
Or as a video player in the right hand column sponsored post slot - this cost £2000 per month
TechDigest - Gerald Lynch
Shiny Shiny - Anna Leach
Shiny Style - Andrea Petrou
Bridalwave - Andrea Petrou
TV Scoop - Mof Gimmers
For all others sites info@shinymedia.com
TechDigest - One of the UK's longest established and most read consumer electronics/gadgets/technology sites. Tech Digest attracts over 400,000 unique tech-obsessed readers each month
Shiny Shiny - A mainstream technology website that looks at both new gadgets and online innovations and apps in a unique way. It has a much higher percentage of female readers than most other technology sites. It has a readership of around 300,000 each month
Shiny Style - Our flagship fashion website, Shiny Style covers high street and celeb fashion in a fresh and innovative way. It has 150,000 readers each month.
Bridalwave - Our most read fashion website Bridalwave is a mine of information about weddings from galleries of the latest dresses through to tips on how to make the big day run smoothly. It has 340,000 readers each month.
TV Scoop - Written by people who are passionate about TV for people who are passionate about TV, TV Scoop is one of the biggest TV focussed websites in the UK. It attracts 250,000 readers each month
We also have the following smaller sites
HDTVUK - A site that focuses on high definition TV from a UK perspective
Hippyshopper - Our green fashion site
Brandish - Men's lifestyle website
iPhonic - Smartphone website
Overall we have around 1.7 million unique readers each month of which over half are from the UK
We cover
1 Which sites Shiny Media runs
2 Who to send press releases to
We have left them until now as they are our two biggest websites which boast a very large number of stories and the highest number of unique users (TechDigest attacted over 400,000 users in November while Bridalwave had 320,000).
We have attempted to keep the designs as clean and simple as possible. The four key stories with images at the top of the page is something I have wanted to add to the Shiny sites for over a year now. They have worked very well for other sites I have been involved with like Anorak.
In the side bars now there is space for long tail/feature type content, something Shiny site haven't really had before.
This is however very much stage one on our journey. There are two major design tweaks for most of the sites which will go live in early 2009 that we are very excited about.
February 2009 will also see the relaunch of Brandish (as a men's lifestyle website) and iPhonic.
So which is the most powerful and influential blog network in the world? Well there are two contenders, the brit owned New York based Gawker media and Weblogs Inc, which for all intents and purposes these days is AOL. And when either of the networks tweak their designs the rest of the blogging world watches very closely. So last week's revamp of AOL's flagship blog, Engadget, has already become a big talking point among commercial bloggers.
Since purchasing Engadget and the rest of Weblogs Inc in 2006 AOL has established the gadget site as the number one consumer electronics portal in the world. It has moved a long way from being a typical blog both in terms of the content on the site and its design. Last week's tweak takes it even further away from what we used to understand as blogging.
There are lots of changes to the template but three stand out. Firstly at the top of the site there is now a floating bar that Engadget calls its hero module - this can be used by the editors to focus on any type of content they feel has a long shelf life. At the moment the bar is full of Christmas buying guides, next month it will be CES etc. Highlighting long tail content has become hugely important now for commercial blogs. Sure most still receive a large chunk of their traffic via quick news stories and are fed by RSS, Google News and organic Google search. However long tail content has enabled some websites/online companies to grow massively (Demand Media springs to mind) and it is content that inevitably has longer shelf life and more intrinsic value than most news content. The trick is to be able to balance the two and the new Engadget reflects this.
Underneath the hero module there is now a pictorial section which highlights top stories. These are housed in five large-ish images and are designed to pick on the day's premier news. Since Gawker added top story thumbnails to its pages many months ago this has become a standard feature on many blogs. It is highly effective in keeping casual readers on a site. In some ways it is surprising that Engadget has left it so long to add this.
Finally there is what are arguably the redesign's coolest feature - the hubs. These are like mini categories which focus on key individual products or events. Take a peek at the one for the recently announced Motorola Cliq phone, you get to access to all the stories that mention the phone along with videos, galleries and a timeline that shows which it was announced and when it was most writen about. Expect to see this kind of feature copied on a lot of other blogs soon.
Finally Engadget hasn't followed Gawker, and its gadget blog Gizmodo, to a home page that features just snippets of story and thumbnails Instead Engadget keeps the long established blog format which allows readers to access a lot of stories without ever having to click on. A bit like this blog, but not our recently revamped websites. This flies in the face of most current commercial web design which attempts to get readers to continue to click through - the more page impressions the site gets the higher its ad revenue. For me it looks a little dated and in spite of the really clever new features I think the redesign looks a little cluttered. From an advertisers point of view as well the main two ads - the banner and the rectangular ad on the right near the top - look a little buried to me. Still for a hugely popular site like Engadget this is probably not that much of an issue. Must get round to redesigning this site soon too...
Anyhow, the team at Engadget has come up with was really innovative, dynamic and user friendly redesign and it will be interesting to see if other AOL sites gets a similar treatment soon.
However things have moved on so I thought it was time for an update and to answer three questions that we are getting asked an awful lot at the moment.
1 Which sites do Shiny own? - Our main sites are TechDigest, Shiny Shiny, Bridalwave, Shiny Style and TV Scoop. Several of Shiny's original fashion sites are now owned by a new company called Aigua Media.
2 Where's the pink gone on Shiny Shiny? - Over the past few months we have been working on re-designing the sites and in the last two weeks we have gone live with Shiny Style, TV Scoop and now Shiny Shiny. The other sites will get the new makeover very shortly.
Websites, and in particular blogs, have come a long way since the last time the sites were changed back in 2007. We hope the redesign makes it much easier for readers to use them. They were a joint collaboration between our creative director Mike Poole and developer/designer Sheldon Daniels.
We thought that it was time for Shiny Shiny to lose the pink. Shiny Shiny has always attracted a lot of male readers as well as female ones, and that pink was starting to look a little tired. Losing the pink doesn't mean that there will be any huge change of editorial direction on the site. It'll still be a great place to visit for web fun, silly gadgets and buying tips.
3 Do your sites still get lots of views? - Traffic is rising quickly on most of the sites. TechDigest is on course to have its best monthly figure for 2009 while Shiny Style is starting to establish itself as a major UK fashion site. We lost a lot of ground over the summer but are starting to catch up now.