simontesla

a glowy cybermouse of some sort

Not a fan of the CEO of the company that shares my name. I came up with it first. :P



hvb
@hvb

alright, so i paid for an artist alley listing for 2wk to promote my new album - i thought, if this results in three (3) sales the listing pays for itself, and at worst i spent $20 to glean some info and support this webbed site. the listing was available when artist alley first opened.

so, what did that translate to? the answer i think is not much of anything. there were 22 visits to the iiiypad bandcamp from cohost during those two weeks, and it's possible some number of those came from my own posts about the album, e.g. during bandcamp friday, but it was at 15 before said friday.

also, the only sales during this period came from bandcamp friday - admittedly it was a pretty successful day though (thank you!!). it is possible that some number of those sales came from people perusing the #music artist alley tag that day. i can't really discern that particular point. but aside from the happy coincidence of having a music listing up during an external event that encourages music buying, i don't think this was a successful listing.

i think there's pros and cons to having the artist alley be its own separate section of the site that you can totally ignore; when i bought the listing i didn't quite understand that was how it would work. i like taking a peek at it every few days, and i'm sure there's others who do too, but overall my suspicion would be that visibility is low. i would also not be surprised if views of the artist alley section in general diminished after a few days... but that's just me speculating.

would i take out another listing though? probably! i could see myself trying to advertise differently or promote something else at least once or twice, but to keep using it regularly, i think i'd want to see some results. it is not the worst way to spend $10 but it needs to be more impactful beyond test runs...


kylelabriola
@kylelabriola

My situation is probably in the minority, but here was the supposed impact of my 2 week Artist Alley listing for my browser Twine game. It made me happy to see, and I hope those people did actually play the whole game through.

I rarely link to my game, so this is essentially a comparison between raw itchio discovery and cohost.


Codarobo
@Codarobo

this post reminded me to go check out the AA again. I'm definitely feeling like I would be okay with AA being even more prominent on the site; it wouldn't bother me at all to see one of these ads show up in the sidebar somewhere, especially given that cohost imo tends to have unused space in its layout that I find kind of useless.

also, I think it would be nice for people on here to periodically pop back in there to see what's new... while also recognizing that it might be awhile before artist's alley totally finds its footing and that there's improvements that could be made. I suspect that there was an initial pent up burst of people signing up with their existing projects, and now people who are still working on stuff (cough like me cough) are waiting until their stuff is more done before posting ads for those things, so it's slowed down a bit, and also created less incentive to actively check the page...


simontesla
@simontesla

As someone on the consuming, side I barely knew AA existed until I saw a few people post about it; there isn't anything to really draw me there otherwise. While I appreciate not wanting to shove new features in my face via UI shenanigans a-la tumblr, I think they could do something more than a passing mention in the sidebar to announce it.

As for getting people to check it out, maybe there could be an opt-in for getting a random clearly-marked AA post in your feed every day according to some interest filters you set up or something like that? I don't expect that it would become part of my routine without something reminding me that it exists on a more regular basis, but I don't know exactly what shape that'd take.

Anyway, it's definitely an interesting concept and I hope that it grows into something more but I don't know that "build it and they'll come" is the best strategy for it.


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in reply to @hvb's post:

I can give you a bit of perspective of how I used it if it helps. I feel like this would be a common pattern.

On the first two days, I actively looked at the AA, seeing a lot of cool stuff, being happy that so many supported the site and got their work out there in an "accessible" way. $10 for a week of ads? Everyone wins in this situation... But that comes with the caveat that everyone wins. You're suddenly competing for interest with everything in the AA, when before, it was organically coming up in relevant feeds.

However, the fact that AA is in the sidebar, and, well, IS an ad platform... I haven't really gone back to it. I can't bother to check for new listings constantly in the event that something new catches my eye, when most of the ads I had seen on there I had already seen when I had gone back previously.

The AA is an awesome idea, but... Maybe it needs to be more at the front of a user's mind to check. Perhaps a more forward facing AA is what the site needs?

i get that the staff probably don't want to compromise their "no ads" vision any more than this, and from an end user perspective it's nice that they are cordoned off where you don't have to view them unless you want to - they are ads after all! but yeah, it's hard to imagine that resulting in anything but low visibility/traction in the long run. i dunno what the answer is; i also assume other people are like me and tend to tune ads out automatically anyway when they crop up between posts on other sites.

good point about new listings getting buried by existing ones as a returning artist alley viewer - maybe something like the ability to hide listings easily would be helpful in keeping it fresh, so you could check back and actually see new stuff.

This is why the devs' reaction to realizing they forgot to expire ads and people got free weeks of ads being "oh well good for them!" didn't sit right with me. Aside from people who DID pay for more weeks getting nothing, more ads means those people that did pay got less eyes on their ads with over 100 ads there that weren't supposed to be there.

in reply to @hvb's post:

i signed up on the first day and got a meaningful spike in views and purchases, riding on a combination of the newness of the feature and presumably plain luck. in raw numbers, i didn't quite make back what i spent, getting 29 visits that led to 5 sales totaling $17 in two weeks, but i was definitely not expecting to make the investment back, that's not even the point

i was happy with what i got out of it, though i haven't been back to artist alley in a week or so, partially because when i visit it i see largely the same listings as before

extremely hard to tell how well my ad did, since bandcamp Friday also made it sensible for people to wait until then and then buy directly, but i did see a lot of visits from cohost to our page, so my gut feeling is that it did its job

however i think an ad longer than a week makes no sense. after a week the visits from cohost dried up almost completely. (for the record i don't regret spending $40 for the sake of the website, but i think it would be just as effective to do 1 week, and much more effective to do 4 different ads for 1 week each).

i agree a random ad should be served to the main page (under cohost corner seems fine to me), that would make longer-running ads more sensible to me...

as for me as a consumer, i do go to AA every few days and just look at the new stuff added. i can't be mad about AA because i found quite a few awesome things* but my usage pattern makes long running ads totally useless

*i made a whole post about this but i think at least allowing ppl to easily give ads more visibility on their main TL would also help a bit here

as a possible talking data point- i saw your ad on AA and wishlisted your album that day so that i could wait until bandcamp friday to purchase. to be completely transparent I clicked because i liked the album art, and bought after listening to the whole album a couple times and really liking it.

so at the very least for me the selling point was really the quality

this post reminded me to go back to the AA and I ended up buying a few things as a result. I think we can as a community maybe encourage each other to do this which might help.. I am definitely on team "it's OK to show us some of these on the regular dashboard even if its on its own little area"

it ended up being totally worth it to me, though i can echo other people's observation that you only really see returns on an ad for the first few days or so. my intention is to come back and buy a week once a month, for that reason!

though that being said, what i was advertising was free: i was looking for people to add my game to their steam wishlist. when i say it was "worth it," i'm using the industry assumption that about 10% of your wishlisters will buy the game. i do wonder if artist alley wishlist adds will be more or less than that?

I think chost should allow people to opt in to having artist alley appear on your feed, and perhaps make it default to show one or two at the bottom of the page. Tbh, I checked it once or twice, but it's hard for one thing to grab my attention when I'm shown dozens at the same time

I got 4 weeks for an album (Nestos Me Toi), that's currently still ongoing (only a few days in). I've gotten a spike of listens, no purchases. I went in vaguelly expecting to not get any purchases, since Nestos Me Toi is the kind of album with an extremely small niche of people who actually like that kind of stuff, and my label keeps putting the album on free album code lists without asking me first so I expect everyone who wants it has already grabbed it for free, or knows they can grab it for free.

Notably, though, I got my first clear sign of someone listening to the entire album all the way through from the store page. While I can see the album has been grabbed by a LOT of people with free album codes, nobody's actually listened to the whole thing from the store page or the official album stream yet; kind of a nice bit of validation I guess.

I'm more glad to have been able to give ASC a handful of cash for something that I actually want. None of the features in cohost plus are things that I personally want (something you'll always have to deal with running that kind of subscription) and it's easier for me to occasionally drop $55 CAD than it is to add another monthly fee over $5 CAD. I hope AA works out, but it does look like ASC will have to be a bit more proactive with making long-term ads worth it, like having an optional AA box somewhere on the main feed screen as suggested by others, or something like having a section at the top of the AA screen for listings from pages that you're following.

in reply to @kylelabriola's post:

in reply to @Codarobo's post:

I definitely agree that it should be on the sidebar. For mobile browser users like myself, I wouldn't mind it being at the bottom of the page right before the next page button. Or even after the next page button and before the Cohost Corner.