Shiny Media

If you are a UK tech start up there's really only one place to be this week and that's on the Web Mission trip to Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Over the next few days reps from twenty or so UK companies will be networking like crazy, bashing the ears of top US VCs and meeting the odd web 2.0 superstar. I have managed to sneak along for the ride and will be blogging the event both here and on TechDigest.

It's an impressive list of companies too with some you will be familiar with, like video experts Coull and innovative music site Slicethepie , alongside some that are new including edocr which bills itself as the YouTube for web documents.

It'll be fascinating to watch all these companies swapping investor stories and comparing notes on business plans and even more interesting to see what the Americans make of it all. The trip formally kicks off on Saturday night with a cocktail or two in the Clift Hotel on Geary Street.

Btw if anyone fancies meeting up for a quick beer or breakfast to talk Shiny things (I am here until the 25th) email me on ashley@shinymedia.com

Here at Shiny Media we have always held the strong belief that the future of the web will be video-based. So even as far back as 2004 we were choosing .tv domains for what in those days we text only blog sites.

Shiny has also been a major player in the development of online video in the UK. In the last two years we have shot and uploaded to our sites over 1000 videos- much more than any other UK publisher.

We have now reached a pivotal point in the evolution of online video with viewing figures rocketing, imaginative new shows appearing on an almost daily basis and the migration of video advertising from TV to the web. We have also seen an explosion in the number of consumers creating their own videos with YouTube alone hosting almost 80 million clips.

In the US eMarketer Inc. predicts that the number of online video viewers will rise to 190 million by 2012 and will only start to tail off as Internet use reaches saturation level at nearly 90 percent of the population.

We are also convinced that video is going to permeate almost every aspect of the web which is why we have decided to partner with Cisco to undertake some research into how consumers engage with online video.

Cisco has coined the term Visual Networking to explain how consumers will be using web-based video not only as an entertainment tool, but also as the most important way of communicating.

At Shiny we completely buy into this view of the future. For example we are very excited by the concept of Telepresence, which has the potential to transform the way in which we communicate with each other.

Cisco also sees Visual Networking as the next chapter in the story of Social Networking. It believes that online communities will provide the engine by which consumers will discover video online. So instead of using traditional search engines, people will find new content through recommendations from their friends.

Over the next month or so look out for the questionnaire and competitions we are going to be running on our sites. The results will not only illustrate what our readers currently think about visual networking, but how they see it developing too. It should be fascinating.

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...

5:45pm: Home time!

5:31pm: The lovely Georgia has won our presenting job - she's got true Shiny style, complete with making fun of the way she fluffs her words! True Shiny presenting... And the editing job was won by Richard. Again, his editing was tres Shiny, and he's all about delivering great work fast. And they're off to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, so look out for their work.

5.30pm: The results are in. Who's it going to be?

5pm: Time for the results of the second challenge! All the videos are dead polished, which makes me wonder if Shiny Media willl dump their older long time video wife for this younger funkier model... Luckily I signed a pre-nup.

4.15pm: Chris has decided that we have to channel Simon Cowell and Sharon Osborne in our judging (which is perfect because I have stupid hair and he has high waisted trousers).

3pm: I've just had a little chat with everyone and checked on pastry consumption. Everyone seems to be getting on like a house on fire, and they're fine for pastries. Good news.

2pm: Having completed the first bit of our quest, everyone's now going off to record their second video. It's all about proper reviewing this time around, so we've given them a full two hours to make the video and edit it together to a final fabulous product.

1.45pm: Everyone has put together lovely packages, and there's lot of smart editing to disguise the fact that they've only just picked up the phone. That's how we roll here at Shiny Media...

1.30pm: OK. Everyone's put together their first video package and we're about to settle down with the popcorn.

12pm: The directors are now busily editing together their packages, and the presenters are trying out the phone. There's loads of specs, so luckily there's lots of lovely features to talk about. 

Well Shiny has left the building and the gadget-fest that was CES 2008 is now history. Yep our crack team, myself included, had an amazing time in Vegas and are already arguing about which hotel we are going to stay in next year.

Our coverage was amazing with Techdigest and Shiny Shiny between them racking up almost 500 posts in a week. If you are in a rush there's a great list of the 50 hottest products here. We also shot around 80 videos which, in the space of a week, pulled in a fantastic 585,000 views. That makes us more popular than a few TV channels we could mention.

If you want to read the coverage go here and here. For more videos (this was my favourite product at the show) go to our YouTube channel.

There really is only one place to be in the first week of January and that is not hanging around a semi-deserted, freezing cold London listening to people moan about how long it is to their next pay day. Nope the place to be is of course in sunny Las Vegas for the world's biggest and most exciting consumer electronics show CES 2008.

This year you won't be able to move for Shiny staff - we have seven bloggers out in the city - who'll be posting all the latest news, getting hands on with the coolest new gadgets, doing strange things with video and generally having an amazing time.

So if you'd like to say hello, please get in touch via here.

Ashley

When we launched the Pies clubs sites (Arsenal Pies, Chelsea Pies, Liverpool Pies, Manunited Pies and Spurs Pies) back in August we hoped that they, in conjunction with the main Pies site, would pull in over half a million readers per month by the end of 2007.

Well thanks to some amazing growth, particularly on Spurspies, we not only reached our target a month early but have actually smashed through the 600,000 barrier.

It is all down to some fantastic content from Ollie Irish, Jonathan Weinberg and the rest of the team.

We are now aiming for one million readers per month across the whole network by the end of the season.

Forget The X Factor. If you want to be famous, or at least get your first step on the showbiz ladder, then you need to enter our exciting new talent competition. We've got together with our friends at LG to create the LG Video Media Talent Award.

Two internships at Shiny are up for grabs for the lucky winners - one for a budding video presenter and one for a video production person. So if you fancy becoming the next "Gadget Guru" like our own Susi Weaser (below), a star of Shiny Fashion TV or a behind-the-scenes production wiz, then watch the video below. 

Entering requires you to submit your own videos to our YouTube channel - click here to see what other people have submitted so far! So how do you enter the LG Video Media Talent Award? By simply clicking here that's how! The competition runs until December 16th - so not much time to dust off your camcorder and editing software.

Wayhey - we've gone all community. Shiny now has its first very own social network via its Who Ate All The Pies footy blog which we have developed in collaboration with Tagworld. Just click on the button market 'community' and you'll be whisked away to a place where you can create your own page, start you own debate and upload your favourite football vids and images.

Not all the functionality is live - so it is in cough, cough, beta - but I think it illustrates that blogs and community sites can live happily together.

We are working on some very clever community type stuff for our wedding blog Bridalwave and will soon have some interesting things happening on our fashion blogs.

Ok, so I don't want to labour the point, but... I went back and checked our traffic figures for six months ago in February.

Unique visitors - 1,754,954 Page impressions - 2,619,855

compare this with August

Unique visitors - 3,521,976 Page impressions - 5,379,535

Which in my book means that we have doubled our traffic in six months. Ok, so we have launched several new blogs in that time, but most of the growth has been around established blogs like Catwalk Queen, TechDigest and Who ate all the Pies? What could be really exciting is that if we double our traffic again (and given that we are approaching the busiest web months of the year this is a strong possibility) we will have hit 7 million readers per month. This is an astounding figure for a UK company, especially given that we didn't really exist two years ago and also that we haven't spent a penny on buying Google Ad words.

August is usually a bit of a rubbish month for websites as many would-be surfers are otherwise engaged basting themselves on European beaches. So it is a tad amazing that in August Shiny posted its best ever figure of 3.5 million visitors to its sites.

To put that in some kind of perspective that's up 700,000 readers on July. If we keep up this level of growth those BBC online execs should start to worry sometime around 2011.

There are some obvious reasons for the growth. We have had a few technical problems of late most of which were resolved in July. Also we launched five new footy blogs and have seen some wonderful organic growth on sites like Bridalwave and Kiss and Make Up.

So let's hope that four million user figure isn't too far off.

Also we have also just signed a huge sponsorship deal (our biggest yet) and seen ad revenues start to rocket. Good times indeed!

Shiny has a shopping list of talented bloggers that one day we hope will join our team. So I am massively pleased to say that  we have managed to tempt one of our top targets, Gary Cutlack of UK Resistance and Idiot Toys, to come on board. I could witter on about how he is a hugely funny writer and new media genius, but instead I'll let him do the talking. Over to you Gary.

Ashley

Hello new friends and existing internet enemies! I'm Gary. Shiny Media's just hired me to work on its games and gadgets blogs. This is pretty much my dream job, as even if I was unemployed I'd be sitting in front of a PC writing games and gadgets blogs all day for free. So lucky old me.

I used to work at Future Publishing on its games magazines. Before that I worked at Computec on its games magazines. And before that I worked at Emap on its games magazines. I've been around a bit. It's time for a change, frankly, and working on the web is much, much more exciting than the slow-moving, continental drift world of magazines.

Shiny Media's kicking arse in the blog world right now, and the opportunity to reach Shiny's millions of readers with my poorly-thought-out, one-sided opinions and sweeping generalisations is too good an opportunity to miss. The two existing sites I write - Idiot Toys and UK Resistance - have joined the Shiny network too, so I'll be able to blog HARDER, LONGER and about MORE STUFF than ever before.

I've already posted a few rambling messages over on Tech Digest and look forward to keeping you full of news, gossip and the occasional outright lie when nothing interesting happens, over the coming months. I look forward to being brutally slagged off by each and every one of you in various comments sections across the Shiny portfolio.

Gary Cutlack

Which isn't bad for a bunch of Limeys running a company with a suspiciously large quota of Antipodeans. You can read the post - from fashion blog FashionIQ - here. Seriously though, we didn't set out to target US readers. Catwalk Queen, Shoewawa and The Bag Lady are aimed mainly at Brits and it will always be that way. So it is a real compliment that we are so well regarded on the other side of the pond. Any takers for Shiny Fashion USA? Now that would be a challenge.

The Shiny boys’ tuxes are back from the dry cleaners, while the girls are fending off calls from major Italian fashion houses. Yep the awards season is on its way. And up there with the Globes, the Oscars and the south Suffolk Marrow growers' Vegathon is the annual Shiny awards.

Each year Team Shiny, in conjunction with a crack possee of gadget know-it-alls from The Sun, Guardian, Q etc get together to vote for the best and worst gadgets of the year. Among the categories are serious stuff like Green Gadget, Best Smartphone and Web 2.0 innovation as well as a few more entertaining contests which we’ll let you know about very soon.

Sorry to say that the Chav Gadget award, won so spectacularly by the Apple iPod shuffle last year, is no more, but we have come up with a suitably cheesy replacement. We are also teaming up with several European blog networks to launch the first ever Blog readers Euro-Gadget of the year. You’ll get your chance to vote on that very soon too.

Over the next week or so we will also be posting the nominations on Shiny Shiny and Tech Digest. The awards will be held in a swanky central London venue on February 21st. Now where did I put that satin sash belt…

Well the rumours on this occasion turn out to be true. Shiny Media, a company that until a year ago was headquartered in three London bedrooms, has secured $4.5 million (US) worth of investment.

The money comes from a new firm called Bright Station Ventures and you can read about the deal in this Sunday Times article.

I don't have a great deal to say at this moment other than to state the bleeding obvious that we are hugely excited about how we can use the cash to develop Shiny.

We started Shiny with nothing other than some great ideas and a passionate belief in the potential of blogs. We now attract almost three million readers each month to our 22 sites, employ over thirty bloggers (some full-time, some freelance) and regularly attract big name advertisers.

We have come a very long way in a short space of time with no money.  The investment will help us make some of more ambitious dreams realities.

If you have any queries contact Darika.

Ashley

Shiny has had its best month ever in November with over 2.3 million people visting our sites during November. There has been a massive growth in our technology blogs in particular with over one million people checking them out.

The figures for the unique visitors in November (with one day to go) are

Shiny Shiny 362,000
TechDigest 331,000
Shiny YouTube tech video channel 192,000
HDTVUK 108,000
WiiWii 51,000

There has also been strong growth on Bayraider and Brandish.

The figure for TechDigest is actually down as we moved the site to UK-based hosting which obviously affected traffic for a week or so.

The video channel has done spectacularly well, especially given that a dedicated video site like Videojug, which has had a large amount of investment, only does 3-400,000 uniques per month.

Apparently a couple of big UK publishers are about to unveil gadget websites. Well they have a long way to go before they can catch up with us.

For in November we are on course to hit over one million unique users on our Tech blogs (in other words, Tech Digest, Shiny Shiny, HDTVUK, WiiWii and Tech Reviews).

The entire Shiny network of 25 blogs attracted 2.1 million readers last month and will probably go as high as 2.3 this month.

We are all avid readers of the PRBlogger round here and we get very excited when he namechecks us. He (he works for Edelman, by the way) has done it again today. Apparently Edelman has teamed up with Technorati to develop a method of working out who the most influential bloggers are in the UK.

We're pleased to say that in there at number four is our very own Tech Digest. Can't quite see how Shiny Shiny didn't make the list, especially as using the Technorati criteria it would be number seven. But as someone who is constantly compiling blog lists, I know what a nightmare it is to be comprehensive.

For the record, though, Shiny Shiny is the second most linked to UK blog, while Tech Digest is the third - using this criteria.

Interesting to note too that most of the top ten blogs are at least three or four years old. Also that it doesn't include Mashable and Liveside, both of which are Brit blogs and would surely be in the top ten.

We have always been huge fans of Hecklerspray - in our eyes the best British ents blog - so we are very pleased to announce that the two of us have teamed up.

Basically Hecklerspray has joined the Shiny stable which means we sell ads for them and work together on new projects.

In August's Shiny's 24 blogs attracted 1.4 million unique visitors. Hecklerspray grabbed 500,000, so between us we are pulling in 1.9 million uniques per month.

When we launched Shoewawa in Nov 04 we had about 300,000 uniques per month. So in the space of two years and with no funding (we have grown completely organically) we have pulled in sextupled (is that the right word?) in size.

Anyhow the full release is on the turn

Last week those wise old sages at the Daily Mirror put together a list of the 50 coolest websites in the world, and we are pleased to note that smack in the middle is our very own Tech Digest. You can read the full list here.

Purely coincidentally (I think) Time Magazine produced its list last week too and alas no Shiny blogs made the cut (Bayraider was there last year). Instead they gave the gong to a no mark site called YouTube!? Must check it out some time.

Regular Tech Digest readers will know there have been some big changes recently.

For starters we have doubled the number of posts so there are now at least 20 stories a day. We have also significantly staffed up with Susi Weaser joining us as Reviews Editor (she also works on Shiny Shiny too), Andy Merrett of Blue Fish fame picking up on all those software and web based stories and the incomparable Stuart Dredge in a Libero style role delivering interviews, top tens and much else.

We also have Shiny regular Mof Gimmers finding a YouTube clip of the day and Hippy Shopper/Shiny Shiny star write Gabrielle Taylor seeking out weird and wacky gadgets. The site will continued to be edited by David Walker with Ashley Norris and Chris Price chipping in from time to time.

Coming soon is a re-design, a move to some new blogging software, and a slew of Blue chip advertisers. Tech Digest was the first gadgets blog in the UK, it is also the most read and hopefully you’ll agree that after its revamping it is also the best.

A couple of weeks ago we conducted a survey across all of our blogs. The response rate was fantastic in that we got 500 replies within the first 48 hours, and this was in spite of the fact we specified that the respondents had to be from the UK.

The survey made fascinating reading for us as well arguably providing the first ever snapshot of the state of the British blogosphere.

Here’s what we found out.

Our readers are young-ish. - 70% are between the ages of 18-35

They are also pretty affluent - Nearly 50% earn more than £26k per year. Of those on lesser incomes over half are students.

They are a bright bunch too – A quarter are students, 20% work in IT and just under 10% are involved in the media.

He shoots he scores. Yep Shiny’s latest blog the World Cup-tastic Who Ate All The Bratwurst has gone absolutely ballistic. We’d hoped to pull in about 10,000 unique users a day when the big tournament starts next  month. However yesterday we topped 8000, which is astonishing for a blog that is less than six weeks old - and with the World Cup still over a month away we are confident we could soon have Shiny’s biggest blog so far.

We are however still without a sponsor for the blog, so if there are any parties who would like to sponsor Bratwurst or attract thousands of football mad fans via CPM ads contact us here pronto.

Btw it is also getting great Google traffic too. Try typing the name of the Sun's World Cup single into Google and see where you land.

• 1.5 million page impressions
• 1 million unique visitors
• Second Telewest Shiny Awards

Shiny Media celebrates its first anniversary today with the news that November is on target to be our biggest and best month so far. Across our network of 14 blogs we look set to record 1.5 million page impressions in 30 days, over 1 million of them unique visitors.
But that's not all. In the latest Google page rankings - a measure by which higher quality sites receive a higher score, our sites have all performed exceptionally well. Shiny Shiny - the world's leading girls' gadget blog - is the only UK consumer electronics website to have a ranking of 7/10 for its home page. That's higher than T3, Crave (CNet), Pocket-Lint and Stuff.
This Thursday also sees the return of the Telewest Shiny Awards in which readers and top industry journalists decide on the best and worst gadgets on the market. Thanks for all your support in making this last 12 months so exciting. And look out for new launches from the rapidly expanding Shiny Media network over the next few months.

After securing sponsorship from Telewest last year and Dyson earlier in 2005 we have three more shiny new advertisers. The big news is that we have once again secured a deal with cable company Telewest to sponsor our upcoming Shiny awards, these will take place at a central London venue probably in the first week of December. We are also pleased to announce sponsorship from Sony , which is running an an advertorial across three of our sites Tech Digest, Shiny Shiny and HDTV UK to promote its upcoming web activities. We have also been running an ad across all our blogs from AOL too

No doubt aided by The Sun, The Guardian, The Register and our fave Scandinavian read www.prylfeber.se/,  Shiny Media had its best day ever yesterday with our sites registering over 45,000 page impressions in one day. We are not daft enough to think that we’ll get that traffic every day, but hitting a million page impressions across all our sites this month is now a real possibility.

Here at Shiny Media Towers we're all very excited about our latest sponsor. Dyson has specially chosen our flagship tech blogs, Shiny Shiny and Tech Digest, for its latest teaser advertising campaign (we'd like to tell you more about the actual product they are announcing next week but we'd have to shoot you).

Rather than your normal run of the mill banner ad this one is fantastically innovative (and we're not just saying that because they're paying us shedloads of cash). Remember the game Pong from the 1970s where you used your TV set to play tennis with a bat and ball? Well, they've reprised the game for the web which means that if you're bored reading our blogs - something we can't really imagine - you can always while away a bit of time, idly playing  the game across your computer screen. But don't take our word for how great it is - head over to the sites to play it for yourself. Just one more thing. You'll need Internet Explorer 6 and your screen maximised in order to take part.

The teaser ad runs until Monday when - hopefully - we'll be able to tell you more about the actual product!

Big thumbs up to the team at our favourite online new media website Net Imperative, who have just nominated Shiny Media for an Imperative Digital award. Sadly Best Media Owner slipped us by as did Best Site for which we thought Shoewawa was clear favourite. Nevertheless we are in the running for a Best of the Rest Wild Card award, where we are slugging it out with some rather impressive opposition.

So we need your help. If you have ever pinched a story from any of our sites ever, you can avoid spending extra time in purgatory by voting for us here. It is a fairly simple process and only takes a minute or two, and besides you can sign up for various Net Imperative newsletters which are well worth receiving.

Shoewawa, our wonderful shoe blog, reached an important milestone today when it received its 100,000 hit. Sure we won’t rest until it is getting that number of hits in a day but still it isn’t bad going for a site that has only been running for two months.

In that time Shoewawa has been featured in almost all the British newspapers, graced several US publications and even got the thumbs up from the Hindustan Times. We hear whispers too that Shoewawa might also make a brief appearance in the March issue of the UK version of Marie Claire.

We spotted a really lovely story today on Neil McIntosh’s excellent blog Complete Tosh, where The Guardian scribe basically implies that between the two of us we pioneered commercial blogging in the UK.

We’d love to say he’s right, but modesty forbids and all that. Nevertheless today Tech Digest notched up its 1000^th post – not bad for a blog that most people, us included, thought would run for abut two weeks. We celebrated with a pot of Earl Grey, some Green and Blacks chocolate and a lie down.

Of those 1000 posts only two have got us into trouble - one with a leading west London based publishing based company and the other with a US ‘very quick email on your phone’ company - so we are obviously not trying hard enough.

Cheers for all your support and here's to the next 1000.