The Oscars, Anything to Learn?

The Oscars are by far the Creme del la Crème of the awards shows. They, like the Tonys, have had declining viewership over the last several years. The Oscars took it head on and tried to figure what their problems were and how to fix them. First, they added more movies to the Best Picture category. They noticed that the Best Picture nominees were often leaving out some of the year’s biggest blockbuster movies. Should we add more Plays and Musicals to the Best Play and Musical categories respectively? I am not sure that would solve our problem. Usually our blockbusters do make it onto the nominee list.

Another thing the Oscars did was embrace social media. With their average viewership age at 49.5 they tried to use social media to accomplish a couple of things. The Oscars streamed the nominees live on the Facebook page bringing in 170,000 unique visitors. Then there was my favorite the Oscar iPhone application. You could pick your predictions then see how you faired. They also upgraded the site this year. The goals of all this was to of course get viewership up. But to also enhance the experience and hopefully make people continue the conversations after the awards show was over.

This was the best year for the Hollywood Box Office so let’s see how that relates to their new strategies and lets borrow what we can.

Google Analytics

I send reports to my guest bloggers if they request them so they can see who is reading their blog entries and how many hits they get. When I shared this report with Jamie, she asked how I got such a report, so I thought I would share.

Google Analytics is a FREE way to track websites. If you have a website, go to the Google Analytics site and follow the easy steps to track your website or blog, and within 24 hours you will have all kinds of data.

To give you an idea of the data you can collect, I thought I would give you some data from this blog. I started tracking the date on April 30th. I have had 1,658 visits. My highest spike in hits by day were the posts about my friend David Twomey, and second was the post about the Tonys. If you look at individual page hits, though, it would be David first, and then the post about working for the St. Louis Rep.

I average 21 hits per day and average 31 hits on weekdays. Most people that visit my site are from the U.S., but I get visitors from other countries as well, including the United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, Sweden, and the Philippines, just to name a few. I receive the highest number of hits from D.C., Missouri, Virginia, Maryland, and New York, in that order.

So go! Start tracking your website and learn who is looking at it. It could help you in marketing, or at least give you some fun facts to share when talking about your blog.

“They say there is a recession.”

Last night I was speaking with a big Broadway General Manager. We were talking about the economy and the arts and how it was affecting area theatres. I asked how the economy was affecting him. “They say there is a recession, but we don’t see it.”

He told the story of how he has a new show he wants to bring into Broadway in the fall and he was looking into theaters and the owners said that the fall will be a busy time and theatres are pretty full then. He went on to say the economy has not hurt them much if at all.

I remembered reading the Broadway grosses earlier in the day and I was a little shocked by the numbers. Keeping in mind we had the Tonys and the Obama visit that boosted the numbers a little, but last week 8 shows were over 100% capacity. Amazing. 29% of the shows open are over 100%. Look at the rest of the numbers, the same percent (8 shows or 29%) are under 80% capacity. Not one show this week is under 50% and even then only one is under 60% capacity.

The other thing to keep in mind is after the Tonys we lost a couple of shows. But all in all I would love to be open on Broadway now. The summer is supposed to be a bad time for Broadway. I just don’t see it. Not this year.