This was Tested’s first foray into CES, the site having launched just after the show last year. And what an undertaking it was! Take a quick look at our CES by the Numbers:

• Minutes of raw footage shot: 398
• Hours spent driving: 21
• Number of videos posted in Vegas: 20
• Total Red Bull consumed by Will: 12
• Days in Vegas: 4
• Average Red Bulls/day consumed by Will: 3
• Will’s normal daily Red Bull consumption: 0
• Total miles driven in the Damn Van: 1,353
• Minutes of live video broadcast from the sweet suite: 511
• iPhone data used during the show: 763.2 MB
• Number of videos produced: 26

The entire drive to Vegas was live streamed on Tested.com, providing viewers with 11 hours of road trip entertainment! Each day the team also posted a daily wrap-up video of announcements and products from the show, and produced a nightly 2-hour Live Show to discuss the day’s events in more detail.

CES Day 0 Wrap-Up: http://www.tested.com/ces-2011-day-0-wrapup/47-235/
CES Day 1 Wrap-Up: http://www.tested.com/ces-2011-day-1-wrapup/47-240/
CES Day 2 Wrap Up: http://www.tested.com/ces-2011-day-2-wrapup/47-246/
CES Day 3 Wrap-Up: http://www.tested.com/ces-2011-day-3-wrapup/47-249/

The hours were grueling and feet were very sore from walking the convention center all day, but everyone’s hard work and efforts paid off in some of the best coverage of CES 2011. Check out some of the comments from our Tested community:

fetchfox: Awesome work guys, I love how you cover CES. Keep it up.
isles: sweet! my favourite ces coverage on the internet.
lethalki11ler: Best CES coverage of the internett! Good job on the great content!
chogi: Only CES coverage I cared enough to check. Thanks and good job!
sideburn: The best coverage I’ve seen of CES – really great job guys
artso: Thanks to everyone at Tested for covering CES and making such a good job doing it! Tested is easily my favorite site and videos like these are the reason I keep coming back for more. I live in Sweden so watching your live shows can be hard but last night I stayed up until five in the morning. Yes it was totally worth it. Thanks!
jagenheim: I’ll chime in with the rest of the choir and say that this has not only been my single CES coverage site, but the best…
epow: Without a doubt my favorite coverage from CES this year, and from any other recent year too actually. And yes I loved the daily live shows, going to miss those!
ryshie: Congrats guys, you all won CES
edfromred: Awesome job everyone involved. Yours was the only CES reports I bothered to watch.

We saw an awesome bump to traffic numbers during the show, with pageviews increasing nearly 40% and average time spent on the site doubling by Day 2.

I had a great time at the show and appreciated the opportunity to work alongside such great talent. The amazing amount of coverage that was produced by such a small team in such a short time period is astounding to me. Kudos to Will, Norm, Ana and Joey for an incredible effort. I look forward to next year’s CES and and an even bigger presence in 2012!

Going back in time Huey Lewis style...

It has been another fantastic year for Whiskey Media and all of our brands in 2010. We continue to grow our audience and memberships. We’re proud to say that we did that and still maintained our integrity and pride in building “real web sites” (as Dave Snider says). We have hired some great new people, and made a lot of new friends and partnerships throughout the year.

There have been so many good things that have happened, let’s just go back in time for a moment to look back over what we have done…

We raised a bit of money. It was one year ago today that we announced that we raised a little money from some close friends and family. After spending the first two years in development, we decided that we needed to add a little fuel to the fire and get some additional guidance and capital to help us grow. And we did just that. Here’s where that money went:

March 9th, Tested.com is born. It’s hard to believe we haven’t always had Will Smith and Norm Chan with us, isn’t it? With a mission to “buy smarter, tweak better, hack harder and destroy bad gear”, Tested launched a consumer technology blog when no one in the world thought we needed yet another one.  Despite any naysayers, Will and Norm have created a great site and community that’s incredibly rich and relevant in information and good times. They have been aided and assisted by a great group of writers like Matt Braga, Sam Cook, Ryan Whitwam, Wesley Fenlon, and more who have made Tested a really great brand.

Funny thing about Tested is that it hasn’t officially launched! Well, at least in Whiskey terms. What we realized very early on is that the technology space was really lacking in interesting community features and data catalog creation. Having grown up at CNET, we’re also a little bias on how technology databases should be built. So in typical whiskey fashion, we decided to throw out how we normally build databases and communities to do something completely different. The fruit of this work will be available for you to sample very soon. We think this new platform will not only increase the user experience and content value Tested already creates, but might even change an industry. More on that later.

Screened.com launches on May 13th. When old friends Alex Navarro and Matt Rorie decided to leave really cushy jobs with big companies to help us start a new movie and TV site, we were ecstatic! From the first moment when Shelby said “we should build a movie site”, Dave mentioned Alex and Rorie. And we have had a really good year together. We started with only 5,000 barebone movie profiles in May, and now we’re over 53,000 titles. We launched the TV database in September, and we already have over 5,800 TV franchises (Seinfeld, for example) with tons of shows filled out as well. Over time, we think we can create a really special community and one the best databases in the business around visual content.

Last month, Ted Nyman did an alpha launch of our Netflix integration. Already this feature is adding value to the Screened community and individual member experience. We plan to add more features and services over the year to Screened, including adding some new faces and voices to help the site grow. We’re really proud of what Rorie and Alex were able to accomplish this year, and we are so very glad to have them with us. And I’ll just add, you haven’t lived until you’ve done karaoke with Rorie doing Build me up Buttercup!

We moved into some bad ass offices in July. While we said so long Sausalito in June, we didn’t miss it too much since our new offices were so great! An old friend and former landlord had some space in one of San Francisco’s oldest buildings, so we got a great new office in the city for less than we were paying to lease in Sausalito. More important, we got a bar in the back of our office! You have probably seen most of the office and bar in the videos, but both are even more impressive in person. We’re talking about having more live events in the office/bar next year, including having our paid members have access to shows and presentations. Stay tuned to this blog for more information on those member events.

Then on September 9th, all hell broke loose. Well, at least a freakin’ 7-hour live show marathon on the internet! The goal was to have a live event where we could tell members about our new Whiskey Pass Paid Membership Program. Not only were the inital sign ups a success, but we created one helluva live show (if we can brag on ourselves a minute). Since then we’ve upped the ante by doing multiple live shows a week. Honestly, I don’t know how Vinny, Drew, Joey and Ana do it. I am absolutely blown away by their work effort and the quality of their work. It is a real honor getting to work with a team that creative and that hard working, but that’s kind of the gig here- hard working people who produce great art.

The membership program is a massive success. We have been literally blown away by the support of our audience. We’re closing in on 9,000 paid members who help us keep the lights on and hopefully entertain them a few hours a day. That support has helped us to buy new video equipment, do longer videos and hire more people. We honestly can’t thank each and every one of them enough. Over the next year we are going to add more content, more features and more t-shirts to the membership program. Our goal is to make you feel like you are underpaying us each year!

We hired more awesome people. If you live in San Francisco, then you know what the job market is like now- absolutely nuts. When you’re surrounded by Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Google, etc., getting good people can be tough. However, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to add some great new people. I’ve already mentioned Ted and Honza in engineering- not only talented engineers but great guys to be around.  And  we’ve mentioned Will, Norm, Alex and Rorie on the editorial side. We love having all of them in the office.We also added some business folks like Melissa Durkin (we mind as well call her “Mom” from here on out, as we couldn’t live without her now if we tried); Trixie Tsuji is doing customer service, bar-tending and other assorted duties as they arise. We’re really picky about who we hire as we want someone who is crazy talented, and fun to hang with after work. Really hard to find that combination, but we have been lucky to do just that.

"Tiny" Internet Steve on the live show

We would be remiss without thanking some writers for Comicvine and Animevice like Tom Pinchuck and Mat Elfring who continue to keep the sites lively and interesting. And we also had interns like “Internet Steve” Ramirez and Matt “Bodega” Kessler who we already miss.

We’ve recently hired quite a few new engineering and design people who we will announce on their start dates. You’ll be blown away at who we’ve been able to bring in, and the amount of talent and experience they will bring to the products. Each one will have an immediate impact on our company and products.

Finally, it goes without saying what the Giant Bomb crew continues to do. Jeff, Ryan, Vinny and Brad are literally creating the future of media right in front of your eyes. What it means to be a video game website has changed since they started Giant Bomb, and it has been a great pleasure to be able to watch people do something with so much passion and integrity- and be successful. I can’t thank them enough for what they’ve done. The Bomb is primed to go off next year and I think you’re going to see some amazing international stuff like this more and more.

Tony and Sara keep making Comicvine the most authoritative and interesting comic book community in the world.  We had another great year at the Cons, and Comicvine continues to grow and get better each and every year. We’re very proud of what we have been able to accomplish with that site and community. Also, Animevice continues to chug along with a smart community and lots of conversation. We’re going to try some new things with Animevice next year, so be on the look out for that. Big thank you’s to Ethan and Daniel who have been keeping the data and the community humming across all the sites, when not producing their own content or working with the merchandise vendors. They are literally the silent get ‘er done types, and their work has been greatly appreciated.

And as always, big thanks to our top men, (i.e. Andy McCurdy, Dave Snider, Sean Coonce, and Mike Horn) who blow us away each and everyday. It is amazing how many features these guys develop each year while maintaing huge databases being edited by millions of people – all while also making sure day-to-day operations still keep going. As we mentioned in the Tested section above, we’re working on a new rev of the platform. As usual, Andy, Dave and the guys have been cooking up a new way to think about community and data creation that should literally change the way we consume and participate in media. Can you tell we’re enthusiastic about it? Seriously though, we’re really looking forward to some new products we’re going to be bringing you soon.  You’re going to see Whiskey go into mach warp speed this year, and we have some more updates with lots of big news early this year.

Finally, big thanks to our boss, Shelby Bonnie. He has really set the tone for building this business the better way- slowly with integrity and relationships intact. For that and much more, we all thank you.

Here’s to hoping all of you have a happy and healthful 2011!

Tomorrow is a big day for us. First, we’re doing a live 7-hour variety show. Second, we’re launching our Paid Memberships. Dave and I have already made previous posts about why we are offering premium memberships. Now here’s the details:

• 99% of what we offered prior to Paid Memberships will still be available. The 1% concerns the Giant Bomb “Bombcast“, which will offer an extra hour of programming for paid members a week earlier. And the extra hour will be available for free a week after it is available to paid members.
• HD video downloads.
• Premium Profile Features & Content. More on those tomorrow, but our hard core members should really enjoy the extra feature and access we have planned.
• Exclusive Friday Show- Imagine member-only TV. What we have planned for this show blows me away.
• If you go for the yearly subscription, you get a $10 discount, a member-only t-shirt and no-ads!
• Ability to pay by PayPal, and other new content and features will be added in over time.

We can’t thank those people who choose to support us with their hard earned cash enough. Your contribution helps keep doing what we love without having to cater to advertising practices we don’t support.

If you need a more visual expression of how awesome being a Paid Member will feel, see the promotion video below:

Above is a chart from Quantcast showing Whiskey Media’s geographic breakdown. We love our international audience. They are some of our most active contributors- and that’s not even counting the awesome regional food and drinks they have shipped to us over the years. Without a doubt the international audience makes our content and community experience better in every way.

Yet in every business conversation we inevitably run into the “let’s exclude international users from this <fill in the blank opportunity>” . Whether it is the restrictions on delivering content or difficulties on shipping product outside the U.S., you always feel like you are giving a good half of you audience the shaft. It’s a bummer.

Another reason we are rolling out our paid membership program is to give our international members a way to finance our efforts to make our sites as good for them as it is for our U.S. audience. We thought about signing an international ad representation agreement to service our international audience, but we worried that unless we had a really tight relationship with a rep and the ads they sell, we might be making the international experience even worse. We may still go that route after paid memberships launch, but we’re going to try to build a direct support relationship first and go from there.

Here’s the funny thing on our international paid memberships… we’ll actually make less money on the yearly memberships than we will from the U.S. memberships. That’s because we are going to eat some of the shipping costs on the member-only t-shirts. That’s ok with us as we want to find a way to make some of our best customers as happy as possible- instead of acting like they are not valuable.

So here’s to you, our international audience and friends. We love you.

Side Note: I couldn’t get Prince’s “International Lover” out of my head as I was writing this post.  That’s why I included the embed above so you could also get in the mood. This whole post was written listening to 1999 in its entirety, so apologies in advance if the tone is a little funkier than normal. Ooooowaaah!

So this week we unveiled our Big Live LIVE Show: Live that will be live on September 9th. We absolutely love LIVE. Can you tell? We actually think live programming is the future and you will see us continue to develop new live programs like Giantbomb’s Thursday Night Throwdown and Tested’s Build Something Awesome series. But what we plan to do with live programming and the awesomeness it brings to our sites deserves its own post.

This post is about a crazy idea Dave Snider had to do an all day variety show and telethon. Everyone laughed, and then there was a moment when I think we all had the “this is so stupid it might be worth doing” moment. So over the last few months the whole company has rallied to make this show happen. It has been a blast working on the show and we are pretty sure we can pull off 7 hours of entertaining live programming.

The show will have segments from each of our brands. We will have special guests from the gaming, comic, tech and entertainment industries. There will be a live HEAVY METAL band. All of this hosted by Conan O’brien (if he’ll return our calls. Isn’t that dude looking for work? Ridiculous…) If Conan doesn’t come through, we’ve got an adequate back up in our very own regaling host, Ryan Davis.

Oh, and we’re throwing a block party with our ad partner Six Apart , Grumpy’s and Cask. Details of that part of the day in another post next week.

Great, so why are you fools doing a 7-hour Big Live LIVE Show: Live?

September 9th is also the kick off of our Paid Membership program and we are using the event to announce it to our audience. I cannot write up any better description of what our paid memberships will be or why we are doing them than Dave Snider wrote here. I really like this quote from Dave’s post that nails why we want to build a paid membership product:

It’s easier for us to build towards what our users want, than what random visitors off Google require. We can either build a better product than our competitors and rely on our small, hardcore userbase to partially support us (that’s right, you’re now a pie slice!), or we can go for quantity as a content farm and build everybody-eats-it-but-nobody-likes-it web sites like our competitors. We like being able to be proud of our work, so door number one it is!

As a company we’ve always tried to program our editorial or new features to the group that comes back the most. They are the people that care. They are our customers. Everyone else is a sampler. To be clear, we want the passerby group to have a good time too. We hope they will join in and contribute to the community experience as well. But if not, we hope they got some useful information from the wiki, our reviews or a video. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind seeing an ad or two while they stopped by to get some information.

But for the people who come back a lot, like the 23% who come back to our sites more than 200 times a month, they care deeply about the site experience. So if we sacrifice the site experience (generic features, content, etc) to get more samplers, isn’t that a back-asswards way to build a business? But oddly, most of us in media focus on “growth” over building a sustainable audience. Here’s why:

Your best customers are the hardest to “monetize” under the CPM-based ad model (which is why we should kill it).

This is what that statement means specifically.  You do not want to show a person the same ad 5 times a day. We don’t want to do that because it annoys the hell out of the person who came to have a good time at our site. It is bad for the marketer as they don’t want you to go from “hey, there’s new Volkswagen out that’s pretty bitchin’!'” to “alright, enough already with your flashy car ad on my comic book site!”

So what do we do? We use a “frequency cap” to limit the number of ads per visit. You might be saying, that sounds great..what’s the downside again? The downside is that you have to make money somehow to stay in business. If you’re not able to make money from your best customers, you’re in a pickle. In the end, the publisher has to make some choices to create enough revenue to keep the site going. The options are:

• Pound the users with more irrelevant ads (Hello mortgage ads!)
• Become more disruptive or ruin the site experience (Yep, we’re talking about those flashy push down ads and multi-page photo galleries and lists)
• Delve into the netherworld of behavioral targeting (Wait, how does this anime site know I just looked for an athlete’s foot spray?)
• Get big as fast as possible so you can jam as many of the above products down the throat of samplers who came to your site from aggressive SEO or SEM programs (Thanks for coming potential new friend! We’re a really cool place to spend your time. But first, LET ME HIT YOU WITH THIS TAKE OVER AD! AND WHILE YOU WERE DEALING WITH THAT CRAP, WE JUST COOKIED YOUR ASS AND SOLD IT TO SOMEONE YOU DON’T KNOW! )
• Charge our best customers a reasonable membership fee to build more of the content and features they love without selling out.

We chose the last option for what should be obvious reasons. We also don’t plan to put stuff behind a wall that we already deliver. What we are doing is building new content and features for those folks who support us through a paid membership. You can have cable without HBO. But if you pay for HBO, you get some great original programming that makes cable better. Or the NFL package, etc. You get the drift.

So that’s why we are doing a live 7-hour variety show on the web. To promote a better way to finance making our audience happy. We’ll update you on how it goes.

Also, it should be mentioned that we love doing ads the right way. Ads don’t have to suck. Our partner Six Apart is doing some great things to engage (not disrupt) and audience for a marketer. See the Best Buy campaign we did with them a few weeks ago. We love ads and will continue to support and build them if they are done the right way for our audience. Paid memberships really enable us to do just that.

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts!

We just launched a new ad campaign with Best Buy today that we think is really interesting. For those that don’t know, Quests is a game our members play to “level up” within the community.

What excites us about this new ad product is that its a great way to bring a marketer’s message into the content and community unobtrusively. If the audience doesn’t want to play, it just looks like an ad. If they do play, we hope we have created a fun way for the audience to experience the marketer’s message and brand. So far, there has been a tremendous amount of positive response from our audience.

Aslo, the numbers are pretty impressive for a first day campaign. Here are the numbers from the first 10 hours across the network:

• 7,129 people have completed at least one of the Quests
• 22,849 Quests have been completed
• 2,778 have finished all five Quests to complete the set (which means they also visited the Best Buy promotional website)
• The average engagement with the ad has been 3 minutes.

What’s impressive about that last statistic is that we have a young, discerning media savvy audience. They aren’t being “duped” into interacting with the ad. They are doing it because its fun.

So if you’re a fan of any of Whiskey Media’s brands, be sure to tweet at “thank you” to them @BestBuy. It was impressive for them to support a small network with a new way of advertising. We also thank Chris Harding at SixApart who sold the campaign.

Check out a screen capture I did today of the Best Buy “Next Class” Quest Ad below. It will give you an good indication of what this is all about.  We are really excited about this new way to partner with marketers without ruining our audience experience. Would love to know what you think about the campaign, so please leave any comments below.

Early on at Smitty's in Sausalito

Today we are officially moving out of Sausalito and into our new offices in San Francisco.  It is with mixed feelings that we move on from our home for the first two and a half years of Whiskey Media. When we first moved to Sausalito, we were purposely looking for a place where could find our own legs. We were a little group of internet veterans trying to find some place that would allow us to grow into our own skin. I’ve often referred to our office in Sausalito as “hiding out in the open”. The entrepreneurs we got to know in Sausalito were hairdressers and clothing retailers, and I don’t know if they’ve heard of Techcrunch. I personally loved it. Even if the office did have fleas for awhile… (see episode #3 of “How to Build a Bomb” from Giantbomb.com below to understand that reference).

The Old Sausalito Office in action

But as Jeff said this morning, Phase Two Is Go. The two plus years hiding away in Sausalito trying to quietly build a social publishing platform is over. We have an audience almost 4 million strong worldwide now,  and we are gearing up to really expand over the rest of the year- therefore the new office.

Some really great things have happened the first half of the year. We’ve signed an advertising representation deal with Six Apart, and we launched two new brands: Tested and Screened. We have also picked up some great new people who are already making a big impact on the company and our products. We could not be more excited to be in the publishing and advertising business, as we think now is the best time to be innovating in this market.

The Old Giant Bomb set

Our new space will not only allow us to keep growing, but we now have multiple studio spaces for video as well as a dedicated Podcast room. We are also making an investment in live video production, so we can add more “Thursday Night Throwdown” live shows across the network. We are really excited about the new space, including one new feature that Jeff mentioned: our own private Whiskey Bar call “Birmingham’s La Fortuna”. More on that name soon.

So to say farewell to Sausalito, I’ve put together a small playlist of some of the songs that will always remind me of our two years in Sausalito. I hope you enjoy. See you in San Francisco.

“Also last week, Whiskey officially unveiled “Quests” — social gaming experiences that give users incentives to create more content and engage with brands.”

“A lot of people view simple commenting systems as a way for readers to participate. But three or four years from now, I think that will be viewed as a very superficial feature in engaging a community.”