Frockwriter turns two (and maybe, one day, pro)

rachel kara

Yesterday was American Independence Day, which means it was also frockwriter’s birthday – our second birthday. Just a quick word to say thanks, once again, for your interest, feedback, comments, links, slagoffs... Whatever your connection to this blog, thanks for noticing it. It's enormously appreciated, really. Because it's not like you don't have enough distractions out there competing for your attention. This time last year I mentioned that visitors had reached 200,000 and page impressions, 400,000. In twelve months, those figures have tripled, with frockwriter hitting the one millionth page impression mark on May 14. And this is in spite of the fact that half of the year, October through April, was almost spent on hiatus, while I was preoccupied with a freelance work stint which required a fulltime commitment. Much bigger blogs, of course, easily do one million page impressions a month. But at least it’s a gauge that this blog has managed to establish an audience. And that's motivating. If there wasn’t any interest, I wouldn't keep blogging.

Just on content, since I don’t (yet) have the functionality to show you which posts generate the most interest, I thought I would compile a snapshot of the most popular posts from the past two years.

Number one, by a long shot, is the last post I did on American teenage fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson. Quite ironically, the post was a year old when Gevinson hit the mainstream press at New York Fashion Week last September. It was the last of a series of posts I had done on her in 2008, but must have had a very high search engine rank under Gevinson's name. Once the world's media started writing about her, that's where a lot of people seemed to look for more information, helping generate record traffic that month (close to 100,000 page impressions).

That post proved almost twice as popular as the next most popular post: Abbey Lee Kershaw’s revelation, in December last year, that she, Natasha Poly and Sasha Pivovarova refused to walk in Alexander McQueen’s 'Armadillo' shoes for the Spring/Summer 2010 show in Paris. That story went around the world.

Here is the rest of frockwriter’s top ten most popular posts since launch, in order.

- Where's Abbey Lee? Full frontal and dogging for Terry
- Tiah Eckhardt to bare it all (again) for French Playboy?
- Carry on Pirelli: Kerr, Kershaw and McNeil rubber up for Terry Richardson
- Randy Johnston was not the only model who died last Saturday
- Where's Abbey Lee? Apparently in need of some TLC
- Out of Vogue: Nipple jewellery
- In Vogue: McBeha
- Tallulah Morton - apparently still partying with the Cobrasnake

Yes, four posts in the top ten focus on nudity and that's probably hardly surprising given the nature of the net. There is however a huge gap between the PIs of those posts and the two top posts mentioned above, which have got nothing to do with nudity. If I wanted higher traffic, I would deliberately aim to include more nudity. But that is not the reason it's there. Nudity is a part of the fashion business and it’s up for discussion and debate.

Just in terms of the past 12 months, I wanted to run through some of my favourite posts.

- The neverending adventures of Cassi van den Dungen, since she was crowned runnerup of Australia’s Next Top Model Cycle 5. There was the Facebook fracas with Alex Perry and Charlotte Dawson - in which even Dawson stopped by to comment. In February, van den Dungen found herself in yet another Facebook flap over comments made during a work trip to Paris. That story also whipped around.

- After twelve months of speculation – fuelled by numerous posts on this blog – Jenna Sauers finally outed herself as Tatiana, the anonymous model blogger of US womens superblog Jezebel.

- A bunch of Australian-born, New York-based fashion media heavyweights got together in the Big Apple to launch the Australians in New York Fashion Foundation and mentor young Australians. To mark the occasion, frockwriter picked the brains of a half dozen of them and ran a mini series of profiles.

- In September, Mark Fast hired some plus size models for his Spring/Summer 2010 runway show and his stylist quit. Broken on Twitter, then developed by frockwriter, the story travelled widely.

- Last week's Andrej Pejic series also seemed to generate quite some interest.

Lots of blogs and media outlets have picked stories up. I would just like to single out for special thanks a couple of the larger outlets that do so on a regular basis: various posters on The Fashion Spot (with a special shoutout to Bianca), Fashionologie, The Cut, Models.com, Pedestrian, The Sunday Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Thanks are of course due to my partner Kent, who has been incredibly supportive over the past two years as I invested time and energy into establishing the blog.

I liaise with many different bloggers, journos and new media peeps both on- and off-line. Perhaps it’s no surprise that after blogging for four years, some of my best mates are now bloggers. Special thanks to Bryan, Sonny, Matt, Sam and Isaac.

Thanks again to all of frockwriter’s readers, who now include over 1000 RSS subscribers. I really do appreciate your interest and hope to continue bringing you more of whatever it is that keeps you coming back each day in a crowded media marketplace.

Feel free to either comment or drop me a line re suggestions for material you would like to see more of, or something that I haven’t covered at all.