The Daily Peg: Pegasus News, Inc. Founder's Blog

Pegasus News launches

http://pegasusnews.com.

My new blog is at http://www.pegasusnews.com/blogs/pegasusnewsblog/

Blog, interrupted(Sort-of)

(Real posting date on this one is 12/5/05. Read below for nominal updates)

We had a good first week with the new site launch -- without any promotion, we averaged around 1,600 visits a day on a holiday week and got some nice press mentions along the way.

I also came to a realization as I wrote the post below:

Six weeks ago, I would have given naming rights to a child for a mention in [PaidContent's] hallowed pixels. Now, I'd much rather see a positive bulletin post from a cover-band bassist on MySpace.

Another was that the euphoria I've experienced this week comes from the fact that I much more enjoy being in business than writing about it. My only regret about this early mini-launch is that we didn't do it six months ago.

And the lesson is that although the 733 posts I've written on this site over the past year have served a valuable purpose-- testing theories against the wisdom of my readers; building buzz; drawing our team -- there's nothing I can do right now that is more personally fulfilling (or value-building) than working on our business.

So, to that end, I'm putting this blog into a state of suspended animation. I may come back and post from time to time when I've got something really "inside baseball," so keep me subscribed on your feeds. But don't expect more than a post a month.

I'm also taking the link to this blog off the Pegasus News homepage. It has always confused the hell out of locals who come here and think we're trying to build a business around my mediati snark. The archives will stand as a diary of the work-in-progress business plan over the past year.

For those masochistic souls who fear that they'll miss my sparkling prose-- take comfort. I'm starting a new blog on the TexasGigs site today.

It's called The One That's Not About Music. The title is partly a hat tip to the album titles of Levi Smith, a local musician whom I've discovered while working on the site. It also is what it says it is-- A blog on TexasGigs that doesn't primarily focus on music. I plan to use it as an outlet to shoot my mouth off; a place to play with some local news concepts; and a place to report to the community on our progress.

Meantime, to get your daily dose of media-industry news and views, check out the sites on the blogroll at left. And if you want to limit to only a few sources, I recommend:

• PaidContent
• Jeff Jarvis
• Fred Wilson
• PressThink

Like I said, don't think of this blog as dead -- It's just sidelined while we focus on what's really important.

Thanks for reading...

Launch announcement; Obnoxious made-up word for the day

We look to finally be launching on 11/24/06. You can follow the progress here.

Thinking about this long and winding road, and looking in on another player in the "hyperlocal" space today, I realized that we probably shouldn't be considered part of that space.

If you want a meaningless term to describe us: hybri-local.

What does that mean? You'll see in a couple weeks.

Clocks

Reposted from my other blog:

With our new pretense of being a "real company," we've just done a bit of office decoration that I've had in mind for almost four years. I'm an old newsie at heart, and I grew up on images of newsrooms adorned with clocks showing the times in cities all over the world. You can kinda make out what I mean in this Mary Tyler Moore shot:

At Pegasus News, we have the same thing in our lobby, with a hyperlocal twist:

 

Here's a detail.   

 

16 clocks in all, representing various DFW communities, all set to the same time. (We'll get the second hands synchronized when we switch for the end of daylight savings time.)

It's a reminder to our team that covering the happenings in our neighborhoods should be every bit as important and sexy as covering New York, Rome, Paris and London.

This makes me ridiculously happy.

A sip of champagne

Reposted from my other blog:

I  can't remember where I read it, but a few months ago I was struck by an essay admonishing entrepreneurs for "saving all their champagne" for the end of a project, for that mythical day when the "Mission Accomplished" sign is hung. People can only think long-term for so long, and they need to celebrate important milestones along the way, with a metaphoric sip of champagne.

Today is a HUGE milestone for us. After I finish this post, I am signing Pegasus News Inc's first-ever payroll checks. We've occasionally thrown our hardest workers a (very) little bonus as a thank-you, but these are real, honest-to god, regular paychecks complete with witholding and the promise that in two weeks there will be a sequel.

They're still well under-market, but they put us in an entirely different mental place. Yesterday, we were a rag-tag team of volunteers. Today, we're a company.

My partners, Gary and Kevin, have been working full-time since April, 2005 without pay. And many others on our team -- Alan, Blair, Chris, Laura E, Laura S, Todd -- have been working nearly as long.

I was interviewing an ad rep candidate the other day who asked about whether or not we have a good work environment. I told her to look out into the office bullpen and see ten people who have been working a year without pay. That's the only answer I felt she needed.

Today certainly is not the biggest day our company will ever have. The day we launch Pegasus News this November will be bigger. And the day we figure out how to make our first monthly profit will be far bigger. But today is a big one for us. There's never been a time in my career or a team I've worked with of which I've been so proud.

Don't expect a lot of site updates this afternoon, as we'll be taking some time for a well-deserved "sip of champagne." Well, more literally a gulp of tequila -- but we're in Dallas, so same difference.

My personal thanks to everyone who got us this far, and especially to those who stuck with us when we were well past our freshness date. There's more to come.

An update

For those who thought we'd disappeared (and you're apparently legion), here's what we've been up to, in handy press release format:

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 22, 2006

 
Pegasus News’ Preview Product Wins International and Local Awards, Shatters Local Web Traffic Barrier

DALLAS, TX — Only six months after relaunching Dallas / Fort Worth area music blog TexasGigs.com as a complete multimedia entertainment service, Pegasus News accepted Editor and Publisher’s EPpy Award for “Best Entertainment Site with fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors,” besting finalists from The Arizona Daily Star and El Pais in Spain.

Other winners in the competition included The Washington Post, CBS News, Newsweek, Slate, Sports Illustrated, The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The Houston Chronicle, NY Newsday, MTV and Lawrence.com.

The EPpy win comes only a week after The Dallas Observer named TexasGigs “Best Website” in its annual Music Awards; and a month after the site shattered the million-pageview mark for the first time, clocking in at 1.3 million pageviews and 222,000 visits for April, 2006.

“We’re ecstatic to be getting so much positive feedback so quickly,” said Mike Orren, Pegasus News’ president and co-founder. “Considering that all of the other finalists in the EPpy Awards are affiliated with traditional media companies and that we’re a startup fueled by a volunteer staff along with user-generated content, I was shocked that we were even nominated.”

Pegasus News is an angel-funded hyperlocal multimedia company that will launch its full product offering focused on the Dallas / Fort Worth area later this year. “That product,” Orren said, “will provide each user individualized local content that we call ‘The Daily You™.’ Imagine your child’s youth soccer score on the same page with the Dallas Mavericks’ score; your neighborhood crime report on the same page as the city council meeting; and your teenager’s school play reviewed right alongside the national touring concert. And then imagine that the advertising is equally targeted.”

Once Pegasus News launches, TexasGigs will become its entertainment section.

“Relaunching TexasGigs was a classic example of a startup calling an audible,” Orren said. “We had much of our technology and key staff in place, but lacked the resources to launch Pegasus News as a regional news product that we felt had enough depth to take significant market share. In late November, we met Cindy Chaffin, who had an award-winning local music blog that she wanted to take to the next level. We pooled our resources and produced the new site in five weeks, from conception to launch.”

TexasGigs features profiles on over 1,000 local bands and 4,000 local musicians; more than 1,000 songs by local bands (both mp3s and streaming radio); more than 300 podcast episodes; more than 100 videos; and more than 700 weekly interactive event listings, most complete with links to band profiles, maps, and audio. All of this content was gathered and created by a volunteer staff (6 full-time and 12 part-time). Users post comments, submit band profiles, write reviews and post photos that supplement staff contributions.

“This is ‘long tail’ content that drives a passionate audience,” Orren said. “We had 850 different local band pages with more than 75 views each last month. Users have left more than two thousand comments, and more than two thousand topical photos have been posted to the site via a Flickr tag.”

In April, TexasGigs teamed up with the Dallas Mavericks to host a competition to create a playoff theme song for the team. On a week’s notice, 19 bands entered original songs. After 24,000 fan votes and a celebrity panel vote were cast, local hip-hop act PPT’s song “Rowdy, Loud and Proud” was declared the winner. Although the contest was a significant traffic driver, Orren says that the site would have broken the million-pageview barrier even without that boost, and that the site has retained more than one-third of the fans who voted as regular users.

"The playoff song contest was a great way to rally our fans and the local music community,” said Matt Fitzgerald, Mavericks Senior Vice President for Marketing and Communications. “We were amazed by the quality of the songs TexasGigs brought in and the amount of local buzz that was built online in a very short time."

According to data from Alexa.com, TexasGigs is already outpacing all DFW-area entertainment sites in terms of pageviews. It is also seeing far more pageviews than other, more heavily-funded hyperlocal media companies.

The company currently offers web, email and cell phone advertising on a pay-per-pageview basis, and runs campaigns that change on a daily basis for many advertisers. “Some local clubs run a different ad for every day of the week and focus on specific genres, and we’re the only ones accommodating that kind of targeting,” Orren said. The site is currently running a promotion in which one early-adopter of advertising will win free advertising on Pegasus News sites – forever.

Once Pegasus News launches, the company plans to migrate to a pay-for-performance model, leveraging registered card technology to monetize sales whether they take place online or in a local bricks-and-mortar store. “There is a lot of excitement in the market from the businesses we’ve talked to about this,” Orren said. “The prospect of getting highly-targeted local advertising that is free unless and until a sale occurs is very attractive.”

The company plans to expand TexasGigs in June, adding other non-musical entertainment content. The launch of Pegasus News is slated for later this year. Orren said, “The only thing keeping us from setting a firm date at this point is the need for more hours in the day and more hands at the wheel.”

--30--

Contact:

Mike Orren, President

mikeorren (AT) pegasusnews.com

214.514.4710

Related links:

TexasGigs: http://texasgigs.com

Pegasus News: http://pegasusnews.com

EPpy Awards: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002539691

Dallas Observer Music Awards: http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2006-05-11/music/music_9.html

Dallas Mavericks Contest: http://www.texasgigs.com/news/2006/apr/04/vote-dallas-mavericks-playoff-song-contest/

Traffic comparison with local sites: http://www.alexaholic.com/texasgigs.com+guidelive.com+dallasobserver.com+quickdfw.com+dmagazine.com?y=p&r=6m&z=6

Traffic comparison with other hyperlocals: http://www.alexaholic.com/texasgigs.com+yourhub.com+backfence.com+bayosphere.com+newwest.net?y=p&r=6m&z=6

Advertising information: http://www.texasgigs.com/about/advertising/

Free advertising forever promotion: http://www.texasgigs.com/blogs/notmusic/2006/may/08/freead/

Crowing

Popping in to say hi to those of you still subscribed by RSS.

Thought you might find this interesting:

Lots of talk about YourHub's results after ten months.

Average of 309,000 page views and more than 45,000 unique visitors per month. More than $5 million in annual revenues.

I know that we're not there on revenues yet, and our site has a different focus, but in its third month,the new TexasGigs did:

• 157,019 visits
• 977,928 pageviews

We're on pace to double those numbers in April, largely thanks to our Dallas Mavericks promotion, which launched this week. Will be interesting to see how many stick around.

We have about 7 FTE's. (Although we are all doing a lot of work on things other than the existing site.) Our monthly operating expenses are around $7,000. If we were actually paying salaries, that would be more like $50k.

I'll give more details next week on my other blog.

Bonus graph #1

Bonus graph #2

Bounus graph #3

A reminder:

I have a new blog.

Here's the latest:

Wanna see my office?

When I'm out (and sometimes when I'm in), it now doubles as a music studio. Check out this performance yesterday from Cowboys and Indians. They're playing in between my desk and couch.

I wonder when was the last time Bob Decherd had a concert in his office?

Peeking in

Ran into some webfriends at BarCamp Dallas yesterday, and heard a common theme that folks didn't realize I had a new blog.

I do. I talk about a lot of the same things I did here, but with a little more localized focus, and a little less mediasnark. My reasons for the shift are detailed here.

We're learning a lot on the TexasGigs relaunch. First full month out, we're hitting around 3,000 visitors a day, and will hit about a half-million pageviews. We have 165 non-staff registered users. (The only features currently requiring registration are comments and custom playlists.) We had 115 user comments last week.

Early lessons:

• There are way more active local bands than we ever thought about imagining. We currently have full profiles on 602 bands-- all local. We'll have over 800 before we're done.
     
• The more we create, the more user interaction we get (via story submissions, Flickr-posted photos, comments, music submissions, etc.)
   
• People are really impressed by video. Even if they don't actually watch it.
     
• The local hip-hop community rocks. They've supported us like crazy, partly because other local media doesn't cover them very well. Long tail.
   
• Speaking of life in the long tail, our referring search phrases are nearly meaningless. After the first couple obvious ones, it's lots of 3's and 4's for many of those 602 bands.
   
• Lazer is the next U2.
     
• This has become very clear to us: As we've said all along, there is no user interaction and community growth in news without a critical mass of staff-generated content. The way to have that and still be "scalable" is this: Create a mass of "evergreen" content-- Band and venue information, for instance. Supplement that with easily updatable data-- show information for instance. (Note that names, URLs, and addresses aren't enough.) That sort of info-transactional data is what brings people back day after day. Then, the rest is icing. (No one wants cake without icing, mind you.) The whole trick is getting that core of data built and getting shifted into maintenence mode ASAP. We're six weeks in and the site currently requires is taking up roughly 250 manhours/week. Once all the bands/venues are in, we think we can get that number down around 40. Then, we can attack the next local niche. And the next. And the next...

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Oh, and while I'm here, another shill: We need some 3G Ipods and are willing to pay $100 for 'em.