High quality audit numbers on webpages are hard to come by, but there are ways to get reasonable approximations - at least good enough to find trends.
BuyMusic.com was launched with some fanfare and millions of dollars last Summer. The press made them out to be the iTunes Music Store killer, but the user reaction was not very positive and they are probably working with seriously reduced expectations these days.
Napster 2.0 is the current hot kid on the block with huge amounts of advertising towards certain demographics. It is also called the iTunes Music Store killer by much of the press and millions have been and are being spent.
So how are they doing?
The current Alexa reach numbers for Napster are running about 505 per day per million ... with 70 million Internet household users in the US this translates to 35k visitors per day. More interesting are the page view numbers - 3.1 per user - and the visits to register.napster.com -- about 2% of visitors (an upper limit of 700 new people signing up per day).
BuyMusic.com seems to be in serious trouble if you believe the Alexa numbers. Their reach numbers are about 46 per day per million -- about 3200 visitors per day. This has been falling rather dramatically since late July.
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I have never seen any numbers on the percentage of page views that result in a sale. My own experience has been that I buy a track after listening to 20 tracks. Assuming the average person has a better idea of what they want, let's assume 10% .. Now do a bit of multiplication and estimate the number of tracks sold. Now calculate the cut for the online store -- about 20% to 30% in most of the deals, but this is dramatically reduced by overhead costs.
By a show of hands, who wants to move to a better business model?
One is reminded of the Underpants Gnomes. (there is even a theme song..)
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Mr Jobs' business model is different - use a store to help sell hardware. So far it seems to be working well, but it remains to be seen if it can sustain itself.
I can only speak for Napster 2.0 and their Samsung player.
My 30th birthday was last week and my family got me the Samsung Napster player and some money to spend at the Napster 2.0 site to sooth the pain. At first I thought the gift was great, but the Napster software caused real problems with my new Dell laptop running Windows XP. Lots of crashing.
In between crashes I tried to spend some money at the Napster 2.0 store, but couldn't get through. I spent two hours of phone hell with the help people. Two hours on hold that is. When I finally got through they told me their store doesn't work with my WiFi connection. They also told me that I shouldn't use my firewall. Sure. Like you can use the Internet and not have a firewall.
I'm taking the player back to get something better.
For the music stores I would rather buy CDs.
Napster 2.0 is really f*cked up.
Posted by: john | December 08, 2003 at 20:13
Napster 2.0 is already being used as an example of a failed brand name in our B school.
The name was all they had and it was repurposed to mean something completely different from the original name. Never mind the company didn't have a realistic business model. They aren't exactly quoting numbers. Only Apple is these days and their numbers show their store to be a big loss. There are some traffic numbers floating around that make you think anyone who believes in the company is also into the tooth fair and easter bunny.
It is only a question of how long they go 'till someone pulls the plug.
Posted by: Seth | December 10, 2003 at 06:11