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SpiralFrog still croaking
Yes, it might surprise you that SpiralFrog is still a going concern - just about. The ad-suppported music download service made just over $20,000 in the third quarter. Not surprisingly, it made a loss, but the scale of the loss - $3.4million across the quarter - is eye-catching.
Still, the company is keen to press on - presumably until every last dollar in the US has been burned - and is cheerfully optimistic of finding some chumps willing to throw another $25million in over the next twelve months.
It's got a plan, see:
“Execute marketing campaign in the United States aimed at 13-34 year olds, through one or more of the following approaches: hire gorilla (sic) marketing firms for unconventional promotions; consumer targeted press releases; advertising on some of the youth community sites; or hiring ‘bloggers’ to attract attention to us on the internet.”
Gorilla marketing - that'd be what Cadburys did with that monkey-on-drums advert, presumably. We especially love the idea that - nearly two years in - they've suddenly thought "hey, why don't we do some marketing to young people?"
Full disclosure: this blog entry is happy to attract attention to SpiralFrog without any financial reward. Isn't it amusing that a company trying to persuade people it understands the internet uses quotation marks round "blogger", like it's a crazy term people might not have heard of.
2 comments:
Keep in mind that Spiralfrog started the website in the third quarter. If you observe many real-life examples, over 90% of startups will experience losses in their first year of operations before it gets established. You can't be so critical of a business that is trying something new.
And the word "blogger" isn't really a word yet. They were just trying to be correct. Don't pounce on their every word.
Personally, I love the service. Its fast, free, legal, and it works. What's not to love about it. The more people it gets to join the website, the more famous it will get, the more music companies will give it music. So it'd be better to promote it to make it bigger. Go Spiralfrog!
Okay, I'm done. Flame away!
Goodness, you do a post about Spiralfrog's plans for gorilla marketing, and then an anonymous person pops up on your blog singing the company's praises. Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
Yes, the service might not have launched before September - but that was part of its problems. 2007 wasn't its first year of operations, was it? It started to promote itself back in 2006. It's burned through vast sums of money before it had a single download - and I note that it's only managed 400,000 sign-ups in the first three months, which while not a disaster is a bit weak for a company with what should be a strong proposition.
Blogger, by the way, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on the March 13th, 2003. I think anyone confident on the internet has stopped using quotation marks around blog a long time ago.
Why do you assume that someone who disagrees with you would be flaming you? Spiralfrog are a company with a poor execution of an interesting idea. To dismiss people who point out the flaws in its tawdry approach to marketing, it's dreadfully slow attempts to get itself properly launched and to suggest that it doesn't quite seem like it knows what its doing isn't flaming, it's debating.
After all, why are trying to convert users on a UK-based website when, erm, we can't sign up anyway?
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