October 5, 2011 What Artists Should Know About ReverbNation's Promote It
Running a Facebook ad campaign is confusing. You bid for ad placement, but the price you pay bears little relation to your bid. What’s the difference between reach and social reach, connections and clicks, CPC and CPM? More importantly, is there any way to tell how many people played, downloaded, and shared your song, or signed up for your mailing list? (answer: no, there’s not)
ReverbNation’s new Promote It tool addresses those shortcomings, and then some. You pick a song, photo, and budget, and it automatically generates dozens of optimized Facebook ads based on past Promote It campaigns, and continually optimizes your campaign based on the performance of those ads. New fans click through to customized landing pages that track not just clicks and likes, but plays, downloads, shares, wall posts, and mailing list signups. As I’m quoted as saying in the press release, “It’s the ultimate ‘set it and forget it’ fan-making machine!”
I was invited to try it out and provide feedback during the beta period, and I’m flattered that some of my suggestions made it into the final product. So far I’ve run six campaigns. Let’s walk through the creation and performance of my latest and most successful one.
As of this writing, there are two types of campaigns available: promote a song, and promote your Facebook page. Soon you’ll also be able to promote a show or release. Most of my experience is with promote a song, so let’s continue with that:
Setting up your Promote a Song campaign requires nine simple inputs:
1. Which Song Would You Like to Promote? You should pick one that grabs the listener in the first 5-10 seconds. The song I chose starts right in on the first verse, with no instrumental introduction whatsoever.
2. Pick 5 Similar Artists. Since I was promoting a Depeche Mode cover song, I picked the band and its members’ solo projects: Dave Gahan (lead singer), Martin L Gore (songwriter), and Alan Wilder (long-departed yet still beloved keyboardist/producer) - plus Erasure, since half of that duo was in the original line-up of DM. The product manager for Promote It told me that artists who have between 50,000 and 500,000 likes work best, and my results bear that out:
The Dave Gahan ads performed so well that they completely crowded out the rest. Perhaps it’s because Depeche Mode has millions of casual fans, but only the most serious ones keep up with the lead singer’s solo work, and are therefore more motivated to check out my cover.
3. Write Ad Text. You can choose to author one of the ads yourself, or let Promote It generate them all. Since my custom ad was outperformed by the auto-generated ads, I won’t bother sharing it with you.
4. Choose Picture. Your choice here can make or break the campaign! My previous campaign was identical to this one, except I used a close-up of yours truly. The results were pathetic. It should come as no surprise that a photo featuring 1) a world-famous band and 2) an attractive female does a better job of catching the eye.
5. Geo-Targeting. Choose between local (your state), national, all English-speaking countries, or global. Theoretically you should get the best results from global, but national did just as well for me in my limited experience.
6-8. Name Your Campaign, Sync with Facebook, Start Date. Pretty much self-explanatory.
9. Budget. Choose between $25, $50, $100, $250, or $500 on a one-time, weekly, or monthly basis. I recommend you experiment with successive $25 campaigns until you find a winning formula, and expand from there. My $50 campaign lasted six days. Here are the results:
I was most pleased with the 44 mailing list signups, but 57 likes is nice too. There’s sure to be some overlap between those two figures, but in any case, that’s a lot of new fans who will be hearing from me on a regular basis.
How does Promote It compare to running Facebook ads directly?
It really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you just want to boost the number of likes on your page, direct ads have a serious advantage: you can structure them so that a click is a like.
But if you’re looking for the kind of things we musicians tend to care most about: song plays, downloads, shares, and mailing list signups, there’s no way to know which is best. Facebook doesn’t provide that information.
And no, you can’t just take the best performing Promote It ad and copy it over to Facebook. ReverbNation doesn’t share the text of its auto-generated ads with you, perhaps for that very reason.
But who says you have to choose? I use both.
How is Promote It working for you? Please share your results in the comments. To see it in action, check out this short video.
Brian Hazard is a recording artist with sixteen years of experience promoting his eight Color Theory albums. His Passive Promotion blog emphasizes “set it and forget it” methods of music promotion. Brian is also the head mastering engineer and owner of Resonance Mastering in Huntington Beach, California.
Developing a Strategy, Effective Publicity and Promotion, Expanding Your Fan Base, Facebook, Internet Strategies, Resources, & Websites, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Music Sites, Music Social Media, Selling Your Music, Social Media, Understanding Your Market, music sales tagged Facebook, Marketing, ReverbNation, passive promotion, promotion | 1 Reference
Reader Comments (27)
When I answer my (lets be friends) posts and return to my profile: my paid for profile reappears empty of any information, please tell me why this is happening. I just recently added Google + to my network and since then my facebook and RN profiles have been screwed up ;-/ How can I fix this problem, please help me as I Like RN and what it is doing for me and other talented musicians. Thanx, LLaka5050 LVNv
@leland luster,
Please send your issue to support [at] reverbnation.com. I promise they will help you get to the bottom of the issue in a timely fashion.
Jed,
COO, ReverbNation.com
Problem Encountered:1. I go to my paid RN profile page via Google browser-opens fine showing pertinant info 2. proceed to answer incoming friend requests- I send approve or disapprove message to sender, then return to profile page. 3. Profile page has no info there anymore? Please tell me how to remedy this glitch that has been going on for 4 days now. I Like RN and what it does for talented musicians there and don't want to drop the site, please help me with cure. Thank you, LLaka5050 LVNv
Although I consider facebook a completely useless network for indie artists, I would like to ask you something. Did you really pay $50 just to get 57 likes, 49 downloads, and 44 mailing list subscribers??? I think it's high time to create my own social networking site. If artists are willing to pay $50 for 57 followers, then I'll definitely become a multi millionaire within one year!
Sakis Gouzonis
Free music downloads at www.SakisGouzonis.com
Let us know how that goes. ;)
You can see from the graphic there were other metrics as well: 305 plays, 14 shares etc. Even taken alone, $1 per mailing list subscriber is very good.
Brian Hazard wrote: "Even taken alone, $1 per mailing list subscriber is very good".
Yes, it's very good, if they are real fans of your music. So, could you tell me how many of those 44 subscribers bought at least one of your albums?
Sakis Gouzonis
Free music downloads at www.SakisGouzonis.com
Hi Brian and thanks for your excellent post on Reverbnation's PromoteIT. I have to say looking at the metrics that it is not better than going direct to Facebook. The main reason is that at least with FB Direct you can tweak the campaign and set the amount you're willing to pay per sign up etc.
I think paying $1 per mailing list sign up is ridiculous especially in the context of Facebook. Granted you can contact them directly and email them whenever you have any news. You could do the same on Facebook for 1/100th of the cost.
The thing with Facebook is it is more suited to a streaming only solution and a soft sell approach in general. So instead ot trying to convert Facebook fans into buyers you should focus on "sharing" your music with them. By the way I found you on Facebook through a Facebook ad of yours (the A-ha Living A Boy's Adventure Tale cover) and listened to your music and eventually bought your CD. Will I do that again? I would probably buy the downloads to play in the car (the reason why I bought the CD in the first place).
Understanding how people consume content on FB is important too.
To recap I think you can design your own Facebook campaign much more efficiently than RN can and that is not to dismiss what they are doing. It is a great too but we need more control of it if it is to be a success.
Sakis, defining a "real fan" as someone who has bought at least one of my albums is a pretty high bar, considering they've been on the mailing list a couple months max, I haven't come out with anything new in that time, and I could only potentially track direct sales.
Kehinde, lots of good points! Yes, one's approach on Facebook needs to be more casual than on one's mailing list. That's why we want them on our mailing list! It's a much more valuable line of communication, and far more likely to actually be seen. Not to mention Facebook eliminated page updates, so now we can just hope to end up in peoples' news feeds.
I have to question your math though. Even if you equate Facebook likes with mailing list subscribers, you can't get likes for a penny a pop. My long-term campaign, which is roughly similar to my Promote It campaign above, averages $0.20 CPC. The a-ha campaign bottomed out at $0.07, but that was a long time ago, and rates have risen considerably across the board since then.
Brian with the right kind of targeting and tactics you can get 1c clicks with Facebook. Fan updates may have ended but as someone who not only have run many internet campaigns across platforms I can tell you that the value of mailing lists these days are vastly over-rated.
You may think it is worth the money spending $1 to acquire an email address via Facebook but it is not. If you really want to pay that kind of money then you are better off going to someone like http://www.permissioncorp.com/ or better still burn a load of CDs and hit the streets.
If you want to market effectively with Facebook you need to know what your objectives are.
Facebook is NOT about selling but sharing. I like many Facebook users keep in touch with my favourite artists on Facebook. I hardly check my emails for anything other than really important stuff and do you know why? Because everyone is trying to sell me something by email and I am now immune to it. My spam blocker blocks a lot of band emails and the ones that get through do NOT carry the same kind of weight they once did.
The point of Facebook is about creating a tribe and then sharing with them what you're doing. During the course of doing this, those that want to buy your CDs will buy from you and then at that point you can capture their email data.
Also if you have a decent Facebook fan page you can use competitions and the like as a cost effective method of capturing their data.
Marketers are often talking about owning your own mailing lists but they have no idea about how the modern consumer is evolving AWAY from email and into Twitter, FB updates and the like.
So for artists, growing your fanpage is your number one priority then your next step is to engage with these fans. I know it sucks but hey the most cost effective form of promotion for music does NOT capture fan data. When you listen to a song on radio you don't share your data with the artists you love. In fact until the internet era most fans did NOT join any fan clubs or mailing lists and they never needed to.
Kehinde, I completely disagree with you. Your facebook/myspace/twitter profile/page is NOT yours, you are a guest on those networks. They can delete your page/profile in a second for any reason and without any previous notice. So, if you do not have a mailing list and your old profile is gone, what will you do? Start a new page/profile from scratch??? You must be joking. An official website and a mailing list are 1,000,000% necessary for all artists and not only.
Sakis Gouzonis
Free music downloads at www.SakisGouzonis.com
Sakis
I know where you are coming from but as far as music is concerned you are totally misguided.
For a start ask yourself honestly why are people using Facebook to communicate with fans instead of using it as a draw to their own websites?
It just does not happen. The reason is people are fed up with spam and signing up to your mailing list is asking to be spammed (according to many consumers).
You ask Brian how many of the 44 bought his album, well I would hazard a guess (lol no pun intended) that none would have. This is not to say that having a mailing list is not important, it is not as important as many people say.
As for your claim that your Facebook page is not your own, can I ask you one question. Who is hosting your website/mailing list? Most professional mailing lists are run from 3rd party services with similar issues as Facebook. Even if you host your website with someone like Hostgator and others, you might want to read their TOS and you will find that you don't actually own your mailing list either.
Let's say you host your mailing list on your own computer, you are sending it out through your ISP and may also be running into issues doing that. If you get a spam complaint you could find yourself booted from the net so let's not spread paranoia about Facebook.
If you abide by their rules you won't be booted. Also I never said you should not have your own website but your fans are on Facebook and are reluctant to move from it so integrate your site into Facebook and find a way to make it seamless. You also have to understand that unlike other businesses selling real products, music has little value to Joe Public so they won't care about your mailing list and won't join it. The cost to try and get people to your site to join your mailing list is not really worth it. Instead accept Facebook and its risks and of course give people the option to join your fanclub but without a good reason to do so, why should they when they can get all the info from you on Facebook?
Having said that competitions might be a good way to do this.
Kehinde, you are completely wrong.
People are fed up with spam, that's true, but when they sign up to a mailing list with their own free will, this is NOT spam. They WANT to get e-mails from you, that's why they sign up.
The professionals are NOT using facebook just to communicate with their fans/customers, but they are using it to draw traffic to their own websites. On facebook, there are literally millions of links to other websites. A professional artist/manager/etc knows that he/she does NOT own their facebook pages, and they can be deleted at any time. Having an official website and at least one mailing list is extremely important.
Facebook page is NOT yours. They can delete it in a second without any prior notice. All your facebook contacts can be deleted in a second. That's why you NEED an official website that you OWN. As long as you PAY for it, the hosting company CANNOT take it down (while Facebook CAN do that).
I asked Brian how many of those 44 "fans" bought his album, because a real fan is someone who buys and spreads your music; not someone who just "likes" your facebook page. Your facebook "likes" are not fans of your music in most cases.
My mailing lists are either on my own computer (people are giving me all the time their e-mails with their own free will) or they are on hosting companies which I PAY, and where people are also signing up with their own free will. Nobody forces them to sign up, they are signing up because they want to. No spam at all.
To answer your last question, Facebook is a completely useless platform, and many artists worldwide (including me) are not using it, and they never will. Nobody has ever been discovered through facebook, it's a useless network as far as music promotion is concerned. But that's another topic.
Sakis Gouzonis
www.SakisGouzonis.com
Sakis for a start I have my own website thank you very much and if you think your hosting company cannot take down your website without warning then you are really living in cloud cuckoo land. They can. In fact if you use a third party for anything, you can lose it in an instant.
So unless you host all your own content yourself then you're just splitting hairs because the same rules apply.
As for your claim that Facebook is a completely useless platform....is this a joke? surely you are having a laugh aren't you?
This topic is about the use of Facebook ads to build your fanclub. The last time I looked, every major label is on Facebook as are tons of indies and artists. You say no one got discovered from Facebook, no one is arguing about Facebook being an a&r platform, stick to the subject at hand, mind you no one got discovered via a website, internet, mailing list or (insert anything you wish here). Of course such sweeping statements are nonsensical. You cannot make such an assertion with authority because you have no idea what role Facebook plays in any acts signing.
Actually Sakis you are also talking nonsense as I discovered Brian through Facebook and guess what I joined his Facebook fan page and read all his updates via Facebook. On top of that guess what? I downloaded his song "Living A Boy's Adventure Tale" and then bought his album. All via Facebook. Do I read his emails? No. Why? because I see it on Facebook whereas if I don't read the email there and then, chances are I would not read it at all.
You are very naive about how people are communicating today and to say you will never use Facebook is just like saying you will never use a computer or mobile phone.
Now let me dispel a popular myth peddled by the likes of yourself. Facebook are not in the business of shutting down people's accounts on a whim. I know a few people who have had their Facebook pages shut down and this only happens on account of copyright infringement, inappropriate material and in almost every case once you comply with Facebook's rules they will reinstate your account. I do know that your website is you greatest asset but even the mighty Google can block access to your site from their search engines.
The people the fans they are the ones who are speaking and voting with their feet or with the clicks of the mouse. If you are able to sign up lots of people to your mailing list and comply with all the 'spam' laws then that's fine but don't rubbish Facebook when you don't even use it (for music purposes of course).
For one last time:
A hosting company CANNOT take down a website as long as the owner of the website is in good standing with the hosting company. When you buy a domain name (e.g. yourname.com) you OWN it, while a facebook page/profile is NOT yours, you do NOT own facebook.com/yourname.
Facebook DELETES facebook pages/profiles all the time; not only pages/profiles that violate their TOS, but any kind of pages/profiles without any prior notice.
Facebook IS a completely useless platform. If you think that acquiring one real fan (someone who buys your music) per month makes facebook a successful platform, then you are fooling yourself. Ask as many artists as you can, how many CDs or downloads they have sold the last six months through facebook, and you will surely have a clearer picture of how "useful" facebook is.
Unfortunately, I do not have the time to continue this conversation. Take good care of yourself, my friend... and good luck with your... "useful" facebook page.
Sakis Gouzonis
www.SakisGouzonis.com
Brian, as always your generous sharing of the most rare of helpful info - actual hard DATA - is greatly appreciated.
In the real world of today's ecommerce, an email address for a buck is doing pretty well. It's true that email value is decreasing due to greater use of social nets, but if even a small percentage of subscribers buys an artist's products (music - especially in premium form, merch, tickets, etc), the return on investment (ROI), can be very good.
As much as possible the best strategy is still to use social nets to drive traffic to your own website - although I acknowledge that is getting more difficult for the reason Kehinde states.
However, the biggest issue isn't being blocked from use of FB, but rather what happens if they eventually go the way of MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, etc. Oh no you say, not the mighty Facebook!! Well for a 25 yr old artist with a solid career, will they be as strong or even around in another 25 YEARS?? Maybe but maybe not. Once they go public or are bought, ANYTHING can happen!! Or even if Zuckerberg, who now owns approx 24% of the company, loses control of the board - like Jobs did at Apple, was ousted and look what happened... WAKE UP! In the 11 rounds of funding FB has raised 1.3 BILLION...if things go south at some point those investors will want to take over...how long did it take for the buyers of Bebo and MySpace to kill those companies - after investing nearly a billion in each?
So many people think things will stay as they are but by now it's clear they just don't in this age of global interconnectedness, with greed and incompetence running so rampant.
I have a good friend who build a dedicated following on MySpace of over 100,000 "friends" and nearly 5 MILLION plays - all legit through working at it hours each day for several years. I ask a year ago if she was planning to rebuild on FB...she sighed and shoulders slumped...just doesn't have it in her and by osmosis only about 4k fans have come over. Think she wishes her energy was spent on building an email list?
Not knowing what the future holds means buiding an email list is still the wise play - and yes perhaps email itself will become obsolete - but not overnight so there will be a chance to move true fans to whatever comes next. With Facebook all MAY be lost. Do YOU want to take that chance?
Thanks, Brian, for shedding light on the subject!
Sorry I'm late to the party! I've been swamped the past few days.
I've always considered my mailing list and web site my biggest assets, but I'm doing everything I can at Facebook as well. It's not an either/or thing.
Advertising on Facebook gets me new fans there. When those new fans hear my music and want to download more, they share their email address. My Facebook updates all link back to my web site.
If Facebook goes the way of MySpace, I'll still have my web site and mailing list (both of which are backed up regularly).
I use ReverbNation's FanReach for my email management, and exporting the subscriber list is a cinch. I own that list, and if I wanted to switch to FanBridge or AWeber or something, I could do it in a day.
If someday my mailing list and web site become useless because email is obsolete and tablets come pre-installed with a Facebook app but no browser, I'll still be okay, because each mailing list subscription started as a Facebook like.
Sakis if you can't stand the heat stay out of the kitchen. How about I ask you the same questions you ask Brian.
You claim to have over 250,000 on your mailing list (which I don't doubt, you're a Christian after all and I am sure you won't lie about that). How many of them have bought your albums? I have not seen you on any iTunes chart or anything about you indicating thousands of sales. This forum is for artists and professionals to share and you jumped in on Brian's thread. So perhaps instead of criticising me how about you give us some solid facts from your experience and show us how your mailing list (gleaned from social networks i imagine) translated into sales for you.
Also Sakis you talk a lot about Myspace and your achievements there. All well and good but I have heard every single point you levy against Facebook, used against Myspace.
Working in the music industry I came across many who said Myspace was totally useless for artists. Then there are others, especially in the media, who champion Myspace as the liberator of artists, citing Artic Monkeys, Sandi Thom, Lily Allen and many others who broke through Myspce. Of course the truth is somewhere in between.
In case you haven't noticed, i never ever said don't build a mailing list on your website, I am just saying that in the music industry, it just does not carry the same amount of value as it does with other industries. The only exception is where you've built a mailing list out of people who actually bought something. They are paying customers and their email address has a lot more value compared to someone who just signs up for a free download who has no intention of buying anything.
In my opinion using a free download as an inducement for signing up to a mailing list is flawed. Yes I know we all do it but we are sending the wrong signals and we only fool ourselves if we think these people will ever buy anything because they won't.
If that is the case then perhaps a DIY Spotify solution is the answer but increasingly the all pervasive Facebook is controlling everything. I just think we should get real and instead of spending energy and lots of money getting people to sign up to our mailing lists we should concentrate on making it easier to buy a CD or record or whatever, at source, be that Facebook or whatever.
Facebook fanpages are not perfect especially as a sales channel. Arguably that is what they are not. I said earlier that Facebook should be a sharing channel where you share your thoughts, your life, your music with your fans and as a result of that you share when your music is out on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you like. I do think that we need to also think about monetised strategies when doing this and using things like ads, product placement and even a Youtube series will go a long way to help. Youtube does convert to sales but on a 0.001% ratio on average. Facebook remains to be seen but it does work as I can testify, in the case of being a fan of Brian's music, whom I found on Facebook.
One more thing I should add. How many mailing lists of our favourite mainstream artists are you guys a member of?
I know from my POV I am not on many. Does it make a difference to me? No. Because as soon as I hear, via the media, Facebook, grapevine, etc about their new record I will go on Youtube first for a preview and then bang straight to iTunes to download it.
My point is your music is more important as a sticky item and we should not ascribe mailing lists more value than they deserve, especially in this day and age where people are moving away from them. But thanks to everyone for their contribution, and thanks to Brian for sharing his experience with Reverbnation, which is what this discussion is actually about lol.
Weird how people believe email is dying off when you still need an email account to create a Twitter or Facebook account!
The real answer of course is we artists don't get to choose which platform our fans prefer. We can only make decisions on where our time and energy is best spent. For me, that's the email list and blog, no question. I still use both Twitter and Facebook because it's foolish to ignore them, just like it was foolish to ignore MySpace in the early 00s.
But it's equally foolish to think that Facebook will do the right thing. In fact, didn't Facebook just recently do away with the ability to message your fans directly? Now you have to post updates to your wall and hope your fans notice. It's that kind of stuff that further convinces me that an email list, owned and operated by me, is the basic foundation. In the end, I can export an email list and take it with me. Can't do that with Facebook fans.
May I remind everyone this subject is called "What Artists Should Know About ReverbNation's Promote It" It is about using ReverbNation to promote your Facebook page or song. It is not about email lists or your website.
The only reason I brought mailing lists was in relation to Brian's experience where it cost $1 to acquire an email address (effectively that is). I the pointed out that as far as music is concerned, mailing lists are NOT as important as people make them for a number of reasons.
1. Historically speaking only a fraction of your fans will join your fanclub. So putting your energies into it is a waste of time and money. Grab the sale, make it easier for people to buy from you. If you sell music from your website, grab their email address after the sale. You have an email of a paying customer. A mailing list where someone is expecting a freebie is not worth it. You're better of using a fan page which you can get very cheaply and embed a monetised video and stream your music there. Add a link to buy the CD/digital etc.
2. Most people have relegated emails to a large extent, especially emails from artists. Do the research and you will find out that I am talking the truth. They prefer less obtrusive ways of communication.
3. Facebook wall updates get seen more than emails on your average mailing list. Most fans will read your updates but over half won't see your email because it will end up in their junk folder and those that do will ignore it because of email fatigue. Spam has ruined email for most people.
4. Important emails do get read. But the reality is as an independent musician you are NOT that important and will find that your emails will be missed by most people. Heck even major label artists have
the same problem. Why do you see them put a lot of effort into Facebook? It is because that's where people are congregating.
5. At the end of the day I do know how emails work and I have worked in the email and list server industry and I can tell you for a fact that due to really stringent anti spam rules your ISP, webhosting company, email list server host, and the govt can shut you down in an instant if you get complaints for spamming. You can even go to jail for it. For that reason I am not surprised that Facebook has disabled direct email communication for fan pages. They are removing their own risk of liability. How many musicians are aware of the anti spam rules in their country? Or the Data Protection Act rules (in the UK) that govern the management of email lists. This is a big deal and if you fall foul of it you can get into hot water.
6. We have to work with what we have and even if Facebook or Twitter go south it makes little difference to you as an artist. Remember the most important thing is the music and people will find you. Arguably the most important thing you can have is your own website. If you can integrate it with Facebook, Twitter, etc then your fans will always find you. You can post updates there (on your site) relayed on Facebook etc and your fans can subscribe to your posts. We have to move with the times and listen to the fans.
Love the debate going on here, but maybe I can settle it by saying this:
We observe over a million artists conducting marketing campaigns using various different channels - some free, some paid - some online, some offline - some social, some not.
The range of outcomes varies widely for each channel, from genre to genre and even artist to artist. Some artists and labels achieve better than a 35% open rate on their emails, some less than 2%. Some Artists and labels get higher than 10% click through rate on their facebook posts, some lower than 0.01%. And so on, and so forth.
There are a myriad of factors that contribute to these outcomes for any artist. Based on these observed outcomes, I think its inaccurate to be unequivocal about what works and what doesn't.
For some artists "likes' are very valuable. For others collecting emails may be worth as much as $20 each (lifetime value).
The answer, as always, is that it depends.
What we've tried to accomplish with the Promote It product is an end-to-end system that does a great job at achieving many of the most important outcomes our Artists have told us they value (likes, emails, downloads, recommendations to friends, rsvps, etc). But in the end, the return on investment for an Artist comes down to how valuable each of the outcomes is for them, and how well the campaigns do at delivering them.
To deny the usefulness of social media sites like facebook is asinine. People are not taking into account how valuable it is to have targeted advertising on one of the most popular websites in the world. This Sakis guy is out to lunch, Jed + Brian thank you for your insights, I'm probably going to start a promote it campaign soon because of this. -J
Since there is all this debate about mailing lists on here, I'd like to say one thing people forget is that people change their email addresses on a fairly regular basis. So as far as the value of an email address versus the value of a MySpace friend in 2008 or a Facebook friend in 2011 that information will most likely be invalid for any of those by 2015. When everyone migrated from yahoo/hotmail/aol to gmail, I saw my mailing list drop by 1/3 as far as contacts.
As far as the value of a Facebook ad in particular & all internet ads in general, one thing to remember is the amount of people using ad-blockers. I bought an ad on Tiny Mix Tapes a while back & wrote to them about my ad not appearing & it ends up my ad blocker was blocking most of the ads on their site. My ad blocker also blocks most of the ads on Facebook. So at that point, you realize per click is probably the way to go.
Anyway, good article, like it when people give real numbers.
Great article and discussion!
Reverbnation sucks! Do not waste your money there. You get NOTHING in return!
This is a load of sh..T! Reverbnation makes money off the desperate dreams of dumb ass musicians wanting so much to make it. They charge you for everything and provide NO label, no future, no success. Its a scam. They make money off numbers and private information sold to banks, spam companies and homeland security for millions of dollars and we just want the dream of making it BIG! Reverbnation does absolutely nothing for artists. Take if from a President at a Universal Label. Mi5 Recordings Universal Music Group. www.mi5recordings.com I hate when the public is scammed. Ted Mason
So ReverbNation sells our data to homeland security? Conspiracy much? ;)
I dunno - I've always liked ReverbNation. They offer some great tools, mostly at the bargain price of zero. That said, Promote It is long gone, so the article doesn't really apply anymore.