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...
i am curious what other peoples' experiences with the alley have been, especially other music people but really anybody who used it
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.
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...
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.
