The independent Finnish Internet is in a pretty sad condition when looking at the number of quality destinations let alone ones with significant traffic. There are two categories of websites that prosper however: Fashion blogs and knitting blogs (cooking, we believe, is also coming fast). Now a group of people have figured out that the former can also be a quite lucrative business if you collect all the eyeballs under one roof. Indiedays is exactly a destination like that. It’s a portal and a platform for Finnish fashion blogs with 21 independent fashion bloggers and 19 fashion blogs.
The blogs have been ported from their old domains and now run on the Indiedays platform which is essentially a Wordpress blog. The company will place brand advertising on the portal landing page as well as to the individual blogs and is very likely going to sell their own advertising. The niche can be profitable and one of the easiest to monetize, but there are clear limits how big such a business can be in Finland. The 19 top Finnish fashion blogs will pull altogether roughly 100K unique weekly visitors, which is a clearly a very valuable audience for any fashion or beauty brand but won’t scale into a business which for example Weblog Inc. had and what AOL is currently busy building. The best performing individual blogs currently have 20K to 30K weekly unique visitors.
Sweden, where online media has always been light years ahead of Finland, has seen this wave of fashion blogs and their commercialization happen already some time ago and the visitor numbers are closer to one million than one hundred thousand.
The man behind Indiedays is Esa Suurio, who is also one of the key people behind WOT or Web Of Trust that uses onlinen community to website reputation rating. Other people behind the company include Jani Uljas (owner of a Finnish travel site rantapallo.fi), Hannu Matilainen, Helene Auramo (CEO of Zipipop and owner of Digitytöt) , Kirsti Lehmusto (Director at Finnish advertising agency Taivas), Minttu Vesala.
The bloggers themselves are young girls who will get smallish payment for the blogging they do, but Suurio declined to comment on the exact figures. The bloggers are also free to blog on whatever topics they please just as before when they were blogging under their own domain. It will be interesting to see how fast Bonnier or Sanoma will attempt to acquire the new site, just as Bonnier acquired (link in Finnish) the Finnish Paras aika vuodesta blog which had at the time around 20K weekly uniques. Equally interesting will be what the bloggers themselves will think of it when Indidays will sell the portal to a giant media house. Regardless, it is great to see Finnish online media take step forward and even better that its not one of the big media companies shoving another bulk site down our throats, but an entrepreneur (or a team of them) packaging quality content in a smart way and with a passion to match.
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
nerds! chill! deep breath!
“…just as Bonnier acquired…”
not everything in this world happens along start-up rules (of innovation-milkround-bootstrapping-milkround-acquisition).
I bet no money changed hands in the deal, but she was hired to do the blog for Olivia as photographers are hired to take photos and columnists to write columns.
Agree with you in that the Olivia deal the money was insignificant at best. But the point regarding Indiedays sticks, it can a significant enough business for acquisition. 100K weekly uniques in a strong vertical like fashion is business.
It would be extremely interesting to know how much the bloggers pull in from the deal. As you said, the figure is likely smallish. My best guesstimate is somewhere between 200 – 1000 euros a month, depending on the blogger.
However, some of the Indiedays bloggers have monetized using affiliate advertising, paid posts and even sold direct advertisements on their blogs prior to joining Indiedays.
According to hearsay, one of the top Indiedays bloggers has been raking in around 2000 euros from different forms of advertising and nearly double of that in free mechandise and services.
I agree with Ville – 100k uniques has passed the critical mass as a targeted, niche online media proposition. In that sense this can turn into a business but not a monsterous one.
1) This aggregator is also new (at least for me): http://www.muotiblogi.fi/
2) My quesstimate for 100 000 weekly unique visitors would be around 300 000 euro yearly incomes. Not much to share between 19 bloggers and the company. And even for that amount of money, somebody’s has do a lot of footwork selling ads.
Hope they’ll get more money out of this, love the indie attitude and passion.
3) Paras aika vuodesta got 20 000 weekly unique visitors. Now Olivia has wee bit over 15 000 – with the blog *and everything else*. Fashion blogging is a difficult path to master.
You are right in that – but any digital media business is a difficult one.
With standard CPC and 400,000 (not necessarily unique) per month to display ads they would make something like:
400,000 visitors/month x
EUR 0.10 /click x
1% click rate x
12 months =
————————————–
EUR 4,800 in annual revenues
That’s why running digital media with ad-funded model online is difficult and why almost only people making money there are the aggregators (as even agencies typically make loss on digitalmedia planning and buying).
4,800 euros in annual revenues. Jesus Christ and Holy Mary! Why the fuck would a well-targeted media with a clearly defined audience take standard CPC as their primary business model??
Do the terms ‘CPM’ and ‘brand advertising’ ring any bells? I’m pretty sure with a 100 000k uniques (and a ‘normal’ page impression/unique visitor ratio), the ad revenue will be at least the 300k mentioned by Petteri.
With a half-decent (banner/sponsorship/etc.) ad sales operation (even if it’s run by a broker with, let’s say, 40% commission), 500k is not impossible, especially with some affiliate arrangements on the sidelines.
And this would be with the current online ad spend in Finland. Once the economy picks up, the revenue/unique user will undoubtedly continue it’s upward trajectory.
On another note, I can’t think of any good arguments why paid blog posts would be a rational way forward. Affiliate deals yes. And introducing some tailored content to increase affiliate conversion maybe also yes.
This is actually quite amusing how engaged people get on a fashion blog – and prove your point on higher CPC/CPM…. ;-)
Why? Because people get enthuastic they become more affected to media and thus form a more valuable audience from advertiser point of view…
At Blyk UK we had enthuastic youth audience with net advocacy compared to leading digital media brands/services like Facebook and Youtube – and this youth audience was passionate about the Blyk brand. The UX we developed – together with the brand – contributed to high response rate on average 25 percent compared to mobile on average between 3 and 6 percent for messaging and below 1 for banners. This further makes higher CPCs (SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER) to access this responsive youth audience on targeted manner. So it proves that high quality commands premiums — nothing new, this works across all 7 mass media channels. And then you have other models like you point but they requifre more selling and are harder to scale.
My point was more to illustrate that running digital media is not easy..
I agree that running digital media in a small country like Finland successfully is not easy.
But quesstimating that 400 000 monthly visitors would yield 4,8k€ in annual revenues – when there are several sites with 100k-200k weekly uniques whose revenues are in the hundreds of thousands – is simply discouraging people on false grounds.
Whilst I do accept that passion can’t be excluded entirely, I don’t really believe it’s a factor in the media economics of this type of case. Brand advertisers (which I assume are the main advertiser group in a vertical like fashion) want reach (eyeballs) – preferably in a well segmented/targeted manner. If you can deliver 100k+ eyeballs from a sought after target group, media agencies will buy ad space from your inventory. This being Finland, most of it will be time-based or CPM, so CTRs, response rates, or other “action metrics” don’t enter the equation. In a Blyk-type model the situation is obviously different.
And yes, “traditional” online brand advertising is somewhat harder to sell (I assume that your comparison is to an AdWords-type automated CPC platform) and the selling doesn’t scale. But hey, this is media. Most aspects of it don’t scale anyway ;) And this “old school” online media sales is what brings in the overwhelming majority of the ad revenues of a typical “proper” ( = 100k+ uniques and good content) Finnish online media.
I buy your point on brand ads vs action metrics for a site like this.
And again, the calculation was to demonstrate the difficulty not to get an absolute number.
But anyway – based on your experience on Finnish online media sites, targeted ones – how much you think CPMs are and, for example, how much could one charge in this type of set-up for e.g. sponsoring or another lucrative media offering/product not going with a standard Google-driven aggregation model?
Whilst I’m not an expert on fashion-related online media and don’t know the full details of Indiedays, I can provide some educated guesses.
I am basing my assumption on the fact that Indiedays develops into a very high-quality destination – *the* place to spend your budget for fashion and related advertisers – with a reach between 150 and 200k weekly uniques.
For a good quality business media, the CPMs for standard IAB banner formats hover between 9 and 13 euros, and for a tech media from about 6 to 15 euros. I would guess fashion commands a bit lower rate, so between 5 and 10 euros is probably not far off the mark.
For pre-roll online video ads, a CPM would probably be around the 20 euro mark.
I’ve no idea whether Indiedays will sell their inventory on a CPM or time basis. But even if it’s time (i.e. weekly fees), I wouldn’t think the rough level of revenues differs drastically.
As for sponsorship deals, it depends on how the deals are structured. But with 150-200 weekly uniques, I would guess a one-week of full branding (i.e. the whole site sponsored) would cost between 5 and 10k. Smaller sponsorships obviously less.
If someone with more insight into the specifics thinks I’m way off the mark, I’m more than happy to stand corrected ;)
In my opinion, and this is a strong one, the power of blogs is in the trust. Put it bluntly, whatever these girls tell their audience to buy, they will buy.
Here is the basic formula I would use for the revenue calculations:
50 000 uniques/day x
50 EUR average value of the item being touted x
5 % sales commission x
5 % conversion rate x
1 blog post per day x
365 days
——————————–
2,2 MEUR in annual revenues
I would give these girls some lessons in affiliate marketing and also sell paid blog posts like crazy.
Performance marketing FTW here, folks.
Markus, if one would do just that – selling paid content – your level of trust goes down. It’s essential that a blogger appears objective (which in Fashion surely ain’t easy, its a very subjective subject after all) and I am sure the girls have their own style – I reckon it would appear very unbelievable if they now start to advertise “Item X at Store Y” if its not fitting in with their style. It actually might cost them readers if they would do that, imo.
I think the team behind IndieDays and the bloggers themselves would do well to try their current model of ads, and then see how they can expand on it. There’s no rush, and for most of the girls a hobby, one of which they surely do not expect to make huge amounts of money.
Hendrik,
In Sweden for example the infamous Ebba did exactly that already last year, namely advertise “Item X at Store Y”. After that the item sold out immediately. And the readers love it.
Hendrik, I present you with a challenge. Go read the blogs and then say what you just said with a straight face.
Out of curiosity, I went through today’s blog posts by the Indiedays bloggers to see which of these posts were sponsored: http://www.markusossi.fi/sponsoroidut-blogipostaukset-muotiblogeissa/ (in Finnish)
Verdict: Without disclosure, there really is no way to tell.
Hi,
I don’t understand too much Finnish but is this similar to http://www.chicisimo.com in some sense. They don’t have ‘real bloggers’, rather just average people showing what they wear. Kinda cool.
Oliver
wear loads of dark and bright colors like orange goes owsum with blue,grey and purple to have a cozy and safer feeling in the season of hot and cold.i’d like to mention Leigh Lezark’s unique style and Erin Wasson to get a cindy crawford feeling and girl olivia and Nicky Hilton are next to mention.
That’s the way it’s going to be! Milloin tulee seuraava vastaavanlainen konsepti?