Three is a magic number (maybe)

leoni milano

Happy Independence Day to my American readers. July 4 is also frockwriter’s birthday and today we turn three. How time flies. It seems like only yesterday that I was saying sayonara to mainstream media blogging (for smh.com.au and news.com.au) and venturing into the wild blue yonder of the indie blogosphere. What a ride it has been. And what can I say but, once again, thank you for your interest, your comments, your Tweets, your links, your trackbacks, your feedback and your shit-canning. Over exuberance of the latter at one point over the past year prompted me to finally upgrade my comments system. Couple of milestones. It took two years to reach one million page views. But just one to reach two million. What might it take to hit one million PIs per month? Certainly much more of an effort than currently goes into this blog, due to paid work commitments and other distractions (such as a family drama, which has occupied a huge amount of time over the past few months). But I’m working on it. Thanks to new advertising partner Pages Digital, the first ad campaigns have gone up. Early days of course. But baby steps. 

Thanks to Kent for his unwavering support. Thanks also to my mates. You know who you are.
 

Special thanks to the inimitable Andrej Pejic, the subject of frockwriter’s two most popular posts of the last twelve months (not to mention an in-depth current affairs profile on Seven Network’s Sunday Night program). The year’s other top posts included Pretty Babies, about the eight year-old stars of an editorial in the December edition of Vogue Paris - a post that attracted the attention of the US Christian Right and broke frockwriter’s comments record. Coincidentally, it also precipitated, by several days, the announcement of the departure of Vogue Paris editor Carine Roitfeld. Bulgari’s Lolcats and Givenchy’s Gender Bender (about transsexual model Lea T) were other popular posts.
 

Thanks to all the photographers, designers, editors, PRs and model agents for their generosity with tips, info, access and notably first looks at images, covers and campaigns - and of course the models themselves, who occupy such a huge part of this blog.
 

Thank-you also to the other bloggers, journalists and media outlets which regularly pick up frockwriter's stories. So very much appreciated.

And now for a commercial break

mad men barbie/amc

Just a quick post to flag a few changes to frockwriter. First up, as you will see, a slightly tweaked template. Please bear with me as I iron out the bugs. Secondly, back on July 4 I mentioned that frockwriter might one day go pro. Well this is that day - at least, for a trial period. To the right, you will notice a new addition to the layout: our first ad. In the interests of transparency, I just wanted to clarify a few points upfront. In so doing, I am not attempting to criticise choices made by any other bloggers. People make their own decisions, based on their own circumstances and business models. So here goes.

• This is a real ad – as distinct from a mockup, designed to show advertisers what their ads could look like. 

• This is a bona fide display ad. It is not affiliate marketing - or in other words, a free display ad that offers rewards (ie a small percentage of sales) following click-through sales of products to readers. 

• All advertising arrangements are managed by a third party. I have no direct contact with the advertiser.

• The display ad is the extent of the commercial arrangement. There will be no hidden extras, no sponsored links within the blog's content, no sponsored posts and no personal endorsements. What you see is what you get.

Pagesdigital.com is my advertising partner.

A pioneering Australian digital publisher that has been operating since 2004, Pagesdigital recently approached me with a view to selling advertising on frockwriter. It seemed like a good fit and so here we go. I approve the creative, but Pagesdigital otherwise handles everything to do with the advertising. There is no consultancy over content. Frockwriter remains completely independent.

Over the past two years I have been approached by multiple parties with commercial proposals. These have included several prestige online retailers which of course have to pay for display advertising on more established online outlets, offering affiliate marketing opportunities; several content aggregators (those polite enough to ask - as many other bloggers would be aware, others just take without asking); and one media player who approached me to supply content for their new online news venture - with the caveat that frockwriter would need to be off the air if I was involved because, they argued, "we wouldn't want to have to compete with you for the best content".

Just on affiliate marketing, for the uninitiated, it is estimated that a very high percentage of what looks like real advertising on fashion blogs is in fact affiliate marketing. Obviously this arrangement suits some people - notably advertisers. I'm not convinced it's a great arrangement for bloggers.

Like a small percentage of bloggers, I also happen to be a professional journalist who normally makes a living selling news to mainstream media outlets - which in turn, sell advertising around that content.

I would actually prefer to have no advertising at all on the blog.

For the moment, however, advertising appears to be a fact of life if publishing is to be sustainable. Because when you break it down, 30 news stories of 200-400 words apiece blogged over the course of a month – and there are months in which I write more than this – equate to 6,000-12,000 words. That’s a hell of a lot of content to be giving away to not only readers, but mainstream outlets that pay staff and freelance contributors to generate content - and which regularly pick up this blog's stories.

It’s been great building an online brand for the past two years. No idea, frankly, where it is heading but I felt this was a step in the right direction. If you enjoy reading this blog and you would like to continue having it as a news resource, then I hope you do too.

Thanks once again for your interest. On with the show.

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.

Pressing matters

I mention press pickups here and there on Twitter. And if you scroll to the end of any Blogger blog post, after the comments, you can generally see which blogs have picked up stories (although this feature is not 100% reliable). But I thought I'd start corralling media pickups of frockwriter's stories (and interviews). I'm not going to plaster the blog's white space with them, just include a new "press" button on the RHS, for anyone who is remotely interested, linking back to this page. At time of writing [but since updated], apart from a new Canadian news link to a June, 2009 post about Christopher Kane, top of the list is the deluge of coverage of the Abbey Lee Kershaw/Alexander McQueen shoe post from two weeks ago. This story went all over the world. Including, hilariously, one tv news bulletin in Italy - something I only spotted by fluke after trawling Google News and finding this Sky News player, above, embedded in one Italian newspaper mention.

This doesn't count a plethora of other outlets, blogs and forums that picked the story up, kicking off with Fashionologie and Modelinia. Refinery29, Jezebel and Sydney's Daily Telegraph, among others, took it from there.

You've got to love the viral nature of the net. 

Link love: The day our love for J-Woww was exposed as completely unironic, The Gloss, October 20, 2010

Chic in review, T Magazine, The New York Times, October 15, 2010

Celebrity’s not so flash when there’s a price to pay, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 16, 2010

Even cartoon models have drama, Philadelphia Weekly, October 11, 2010

Kate Spade’s Husband Cuts Her Hair While She Sleeps; Lara Stone Wants Gay Sons,
The Cut, New York Magazine, October 11, 2010

Australians: Mind sending us a Stella McCartney for Target care package?, The Frisky, October 5, 2010

Stella McCartney’s business booms, teams up with Target, BlackBook Magazine, October 1, 2010

Book your flights now ladies: Stella McCartney for Target.......Australia, Racked, October 1, 2010

Fashion bloggers, Art Nation, ABC, May 2, 2010

Move over Anna Wintour, there's a new fashion queen, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 28, 2010.

Fashion's new front row, Marie Claire Australia, March 2, 2010

Julia Nobis: Australia's Next Big Thing, Pedestrian.tv, February 25, 2010

McQueen sales soar, show to go on, BlackBook Magazine, February 16, 2010

Abbey Lee on the pressure to be thin, Pedestrian.tv, February 10, 2010

Christopher Kane: Atom Provocateur, The National Post, Canada, January 8, 2010

Modelky protestují proti velmi vysokým podpatkům, Tyden, Czech Republic, January 1, 2010

Sciopero delle top model, si rifiutano di portare tacchi troppo alti e pericolosi, Valdesa.net, Italy, December 29, 2009

Des top-modèles se liguent contre les talons trop hauts, 20 Minutes, France, December 29, 2009

Tacchi troppo alti? Modelle in sciopero, Libero, Italy, December 28, 2009

E le top-model «scioperano» contro i tacchi troppo alti, Corriere della Sera, December 27, 2009

Models revolt over heel hell, The Independent on Sunday, UK, December 27, 2009

Modeller nektet å gå med disse skoene, Dagbladet, Norway, December 24, 2009

Models refused to wear THOSE McQueen shows!, Grazia UK, December 22, 2009

Three Models Cut From Alexander McQueen Show After Refusing To Wear Armadillo Shoes, The Huffington Post, US, December 22, 2009

Models Refused to Walk Alexander McQueen’s Spring 2010 Show Because the Shoes Terrified Them, New York Magazine/The Cut, US, December 22, 2009

Q&A - Brave New World, Ragtrader, Australia, originally published in print September 25, 2009

Q&A - Blogger Vision , FTape, UK, September 7, 2009

Has Facebook killed blogging? The Age, Australia, June 25, 2009

The 5 best blogs and websites for Australian Fashion Week, PC World, Australia, April 24, 2009