Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 27 May 2010

27 May 2010

Idle Diary here, stepping into the breach of the Diary's scheduling hull. Thursday is traditionally the 'quiet day' of our week, scrounging around for the dregs of news. Still, at least we aren't obliged to pad out our column inches.

The only news of slight-substance is Town might be after Bury's injury-blighted striker Andy Bishop. While I've not had much time to explicitly go through my emails the past week, anything that has the subject "Hey [insert my real name here, which you all probably know anyway]" gets first pickings. There's only one of these, but it's from sometime tipster Mat Hare asking about the club's digital media rates, blatantly advertised on one of the site's news pages (in the more traditional press this sort of upsell thing was called an "advertorial" - these days it's most bloody pages on sites like Town's). It was only a matter of time before the club pawned off any remaining space they held, in this case their digital presence. £200 for sponsoring their emails , £400 a month to be the main website sponsor. Do they represent good value? The club claims the emails are sent out to 20,000 GTFC supporters - what they don't say is how many of these emails are opened and then read, and a little eyetracking research on the design would also be interesting to see response to the advertiser's presence. As for getting your name across the masthead of gtfc.co.uk, a season would cost you about £3,600, which isn't too bad in my opinion, although possibly a quick-fix way of making up some of the downturn in advertising revenue from being a Conference club. It's just people tend to ignore those sort of things, stuck away at the top. Again, placement and design dictate exposure and resonance (which is why people do this), but no doubt expect a press release sometime into the season selling either of these again and bragging about "click through rates" and other such antiquated ways of measuring the advertising. (You did ask, Mat.)

Hundreds of thousands of Town supporters though? Really? Quantify that empirically. Go on.

Talking of the SNOS, their Conference Club Guide has you feeling, like a McDonald's burger, unsatisfied and wanting something meatier and more filling, then let your tummy rumble that little bit longer, as the Cod Almighty team are preparing for the return of our awesome rough guides. A new division means pub research for these ale hunters, and while we're doing that we might as well look into the clubs we'll be visiting. It might not stop there - we might do a redesign while we're at it. And while we're at it, what about a mobile app? Only joking with that last bit. We'll try to make the site more accessible by mobile devices though. Even regular Diary's got one these days! On which note, time to head off. Cheerio!

Oh, and, by the way, we're still chuckling and "urrrrrring at "League 3".