Win a WineCave

posted by philip in Snooth, Partnerships

If you’ve spent time on the blog or on the forums, you’ll have noticed we’ve been building a lively community on Snooth. And to make it even better, we need more people.

To make it more enticing to invite friends and colleagues who haven’t yet checked out the site, we’ve come up with a contest in partnership with the Wine Enthusiast Catalog.

In exchange for signing up new members to Snooth, you get credit towards a prize—something that we think just may tempt oenophiles the world over. The more people you sign up, the more chances you have to win. We’ll be drawing the winner on August 4th.

More specifically, the main prize is a EuroCave temperature-controlled Wine Cellar (valued at $1,200) which will keep your wines at the perfect temperature. Short of having your own drafty castle to age your wines, this will do the trick nicely. There are several smaller prizes as well.

More about the EuroCave:

According to the Wine Enthusiast Web site - The EuroCave Premier Wine Cave is a self-contained wine cellar that recreates the natural cooling environment of a chateau wine cellar. Suitable for small, growing, and extensive wine collections alike, these cellars are flawless in temperature and humidity control, remarkable in hand craftsmanship, and supremely beautiful.

The rules are straightforward. Sign up to Snooth, or if you are already a member just opt in to the contest, and you will have an entry to win the EuroCave. Sign some others up and you’ll have more chances.

Want to get started? Check out full contest rules here.

Blogger Tool Economics

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

A few of you asked me to explain the economics behind the blogger tools. Specifically how someone can earn money on the bookmarklet when the per-click rate is just a few cents.

The following illustrative scenario highlights how, if a blogger were to make this part of their routine, the aggregate value of all the links in perpetuity would continue to grow and become very significant.

Lets say this sample blog receives 200 readers per day and each embedded link receives clicks according to the following schedule:

• Day 1 (the post is new and people receive it in the RSS feeds): 10 people click a link
• Days 2-7 (people are commenting and linking to the post): 4 people click a link
• Days 8-30 (the article is no longer on the blogs home page): 1 person per day clicks
• Days 31+ (the post is old, but google still deep links to it): 1 click per week

The key here is that even after day 31 the link is still active and brings in a few cents a week, for as long as the blog is active. So even though the first day would only net $0.50, at the end of the first year that link would have bought in $4.10 - and thats per link. Each subsequent year would net $2.60, again, per link.

OK, so $4 isn’t a whole lot, but now lets assume the blogger publishes 2 articles per week. Now you’ve got 100 links, per year, each pulling in $4 in their first year and around half that in subsequent years.

Fast forward 2 years, and if the numbers hold true, you’ve $600-$800 per year. Once we begin to plot that you end up with something like this:

Each link trails off fairly rapidly, but never hits zero. So, like with any long-tail (or power law) distribution, over time these onesies and twosies add up and become very significant. The blue line, which represents total revenue, grows exponentially - and thats how the money is made. Of course, the real amount that you would earn specifically would depend on number of links, traffic and click through rates. The example here is really to illustrate the power of aggregating the long tail.

New Blogger Tools

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We spend a lot of time here at Snooth HQ thinking about how Snooth can better serve its constituents, and recently we’ve been thinking a lot about bloggers.

With help from our 20 odd blogger beta tester’s (thats “20-odd” bloggers, not 20 “odd bloggers”) we just released the following two affiliate tools which are unique in the industry. Also, particular thanks go to Ryan Opaz for his help in rallying people together to help test the two tools.

Snooth Bookmarklet - The easiest way for a blogger to drop contextual links into their blog, allowing them to monetize content in a more relevant and engaging way than ads - just click on the image below to read more about it.

Installation is literally just a case of dragging a link to your address bar, and then when you need the bookmarklet, just highlight some text, click on the bookmark and it’ll popup with everything you need. From there, you just paste in the link and start earning money.

Snooth Quick Search - A simple implementation of the common side bar search, however with the same search capabilities as Snooths main search engine there’s full support of foreign characters, food pairings, tasting tags and weird queries.

Both these tools are super simple to use, come with tracking code already implemented, and with no monthly traffic minimums and full Paypal integration setup, and payment is a 2 minute job.

Please let us know how you find these and of course, just holler if there’s anything else you need.

Snooth press releases

posted by philip in Snooth

Our press releases get posted on the blog, but they can seem a little stark, so I thought I’d better temper that last one with some chit chat. This is in a separate post, as it wouldn’t look quite right to have me waxing in the exact same post.

Today we announced our advisory board members, and I’m really pleased. We have 5 external members and they come from diverse backgrounds and between them really cover a huge swathe of the industry. Jean-Michel Stam of Global Wines and Spirits, the worlds largest wine B2B marketplace (please brace yourself for lots of superlatives in this post) covering the B2B space. Mike Mitchell, of MMP, formerly of NextAction where he built a multi-hundred billion strong database of purchases from major catalog retailers nationwide. Mike covers merchandising and data architecture. (One of the worlds largest databases I believe - I had the pleasure of seeing the server room and its pretty impressive).

Paul Mabray and Andrea Johnston of Inertia, the worlds largest software company for wineries - they obviously represent wineries, but also technology in the wine space. And last, but by no means least, Rodolphe Boulanger of The Wine Messenger, a national wine retailer covering 25 states in the US. This is the USA, and with wine laws 25 states IS national! Neck and neck with Wine.com I dont know another retailer thats legally allowed to ship to this many states. Rodolphe represents retailers.

So what does the Advisory Board do? Basically, once every month or so we all get together and talk about a single issue. I like to keep it to a single item, so we actually have the hope of coming up with concrete suggestions in the allotted time, but basically this is where I can get yelled at!

There’s a bit of: Are you working hard? Yes sir! Could you work harder? Yes sir!

Generally, though, we focus more on what we can improve. Our last discussion topic was “Engagement”, and a lot of whats being launched over the next few weeks is the result of our talking. The tweaks to the sign up process, the karma ratings that are being launched this week, the blogger tools that have been in private beta for a few weeks now and so on all came out of that meeting. There’s a lot more too, although the global 3D head-up-display navigable map showing soil types by vineyard might take a little longer to implement, its a really good exercise to have Snooth stand there and present its ideas for an external group of observers.

So, please join me in welcoming the newest additions to the Snooth team, and with a bit of their whip cracking hopefully we can produce more cool stuff for you over the next year.

Snooth Names Advisory Board

posted by philip in Snooth, Press

New York, NY - June 10, 2008

Global, interactive wine resource selects leading industry names

Snooth, the world’s most comprehensive wine review site, today announced the formation of its advisory board comprised of leading names in the wine industry.

The board will play a key role in advising Snooth’s management on a variety of issues, including its role within the industry, as the site continues to expand into a global wine resource, complete with social elements, detailed recommendations, editorial content, and seamless merchant connections.

The members include:

• Paul Mabray - Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Inertia, the leading provider of web-based technology used by wineries to manage direct sales and marketing.
• Andrea Johnston - VP Channel Development of Inertia
• Mike Mitchell - COO MMP, former Director of NextAction, a company that partners with over 1,000 retailers, catalogers and e-retailers to develop customer acquisition and retention programs.
• Rodolphe Boulanger - President of the The Wine Messenger, a national online wine retailer, licensed to ship to 25 states.
• Jean-Michel Stam - VP Global Wines and Spirits, the leading B2B e-business market place for people in the wine industry — a joint venture between Société des Alcools du Québec and Mediagrif Interactive Technologies

Paul Mabray, founder of Inertia, said, “Snooth provides a much needed solution for aggregating wine content – a single source for information that the consumer can both contribute to, as well as access, thereby democratizing wine information.”

Jean-Michel Stam, VP of Global Wines and Spirits, added, “Snooth is a very exciting company that is a true innovator in the business of wine rating and appreciation. We are honored to have the opportunity to witness and contribute to its growth.”

Philip James, CEO of Snooth, commented, “We are very pleased to have access to such a talented group of individuals. Our Advisory Board has a breadth of experience and degree of operating skills in all facets of wine marketing, retailing and merchandising and will be pivotal to Snooth’s ongoing development.”

About Snooth:

Launched in June 2007, Snooth is a highly interactive, social database of the world’s wines, offering both casual and expert wine drinkers the ability to search, obtain personalized recommendations, interact with fellow wine lovers, as well as seamlessly buy from a global network of over 8,000 merchants.

Users have the ability to search by their own personal preferences (bold, peppery, fruity, etc), by a specific meal-pairing, price, or by region or producer. Snooth’s recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become.

Please visit www.snooth.com for more information.

Contact

media@snooth.com
(646) 723-4328

Happy Birthday to Snooth

posted by philip in Snooth

Snooth turns 1 today!

This is an exciting time for us, the site is officially one year old. We’ve come a long way since we launched, and each and every little milestone has been a great learning experience. Its funny looking back at the little things we got excited about: our first mention in a blog post anywhere, our first users, the first time we had 100 users in a day, the day we got techcrunched!

Ultimately all those things pass and its on with what we do best, but I wanted to pause and say thank you to all those who have supported us in our little adventure. Finally, the biggest thanks of all to you, the 1,203,443 visitors to Snooth since we launched exactly 1 year ago. Without you the site would have been a whole lot emptier.

Book Review: Vintage Humor for Wine Lovers

posted by philip in Wine

On the pointlessness of dinner parties: “After all, what is your hosts’ purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they’d have simply sent Champagne and women over to your place by taxi.” P.J. O’Rourke.

Vintage Humor for Wine Lovers by Malcolm Kushner is an eclectic collection of jokes, snippets, quotes, stories, lists and other aggregations from around the world of wine. I’m not sure how often this phrase is used in the US, but to me this is perfect bathroom reading - an easy read, short vignettes and a book you can pick up and read a few pages of at any time.

Malcolm’s book draws from a lot of sources and its not uncommon to see a quote from Oscar Wilde in the vicinity of a mention of Marilyn Monroe. As such it can be pretty disorientating, but its clearly a treasure trove of party material. Who wouldn’t be impressed if you were to whip out this Champagne related quote by Napoleon:

“In victory, you deserve Champagne; in defeat, you need it.” — Napoleon

Malcolm clearly has a thing against wine critics and bashes them at every opportunity. There’s also an abundance of drunk driving, sex and regurgitation related jokes. Although to be fair, its been a long time since I heard a funny soil type joke, so you have to play to the crowd. Personally, I was most partial to the quotes, funny news stories and other factual information.

Its a quick read, but there’s a lifetime of material. Malcolm has done a good job of separating the material into chapters, and a commendable job of pulling such a disparate array of material together, yet still retaining its readability.

With Vintage Humor for Wine Lovers, the material’s there, the comic delivery, however, is still down to you.