[Leica] Jon Honeyball's pix

[Johnny Deadman <john@pinkheadedbug.com>]

on 5/10/01 4:59 AM, Jon Honeyball at jon@jonhoneyball.com wrote:

> Oh, and thanks to the *two* people who bothered to email me and tell me
> they liked the M6 pictures on my website. Over 100Mb of images were
> downloaded, and only two could be bothered to say anything. One wonders
> how many on the LUG actually use their cameras -- it would be
> instructive to have a poll to ask how many put a double-digit number of
> rolls of film through their camera per year. Ensuring it had honest
> answers would be the hard thing, I fear.

I think others have said this, in particular Henry, but consuming pictures
on the web is a very passive business. I just went through the stats for my
new site which logged 2000+ visits in the last 3 days, following its launch
(a record for me!).

From this I think I got about 20-30 emails in total, and most of those from
folks I already know pretty well. And very much appreciated they were too.

So what's that? A response rate of 1-2% maybe? Actually, more like 3-4%
since multiple visits account for about half the hits. That's just a little
bit better than junk mailers count on to pay their mortgages.

Henry's point about TV is an interesting one. When I made films for TV one
of my jobs as producer/director was to respond to all the letters and calls
that came in to the channel and were forwarded to us by the duty office. For
a film that got, say, 5 million viewers we would expect something like
20-100 letters and perhaps 20-50 phone calls. They'd all be responded to
personally, by me or my Assistant Producer.

So actually we're doing a lot better than that, statistically at least.

However, occasionally you would hit a nerve and the figures would leap. One
particularly harrowing investigation (TRUE STORIES: DEADLY EXPERIMENTS, C4,
1995) took us completely by surprise. We knew the subject (human radiation
experiments in the UK and US) would worry and upset viewers so we set up a
helpline, but the response was beyond anything we had prepared for. We
logged a truly mindboggling 100,000 calls to the helpline in the four hours
after the show. I think the viewing figures were around 2.5 million for the
first airing, maybe a little more.

That makes it look like 1 in 25 viewers called in, which sounds beyond
belief, and of course it is. The reason there were so many calls was that
the lines jammed totally and concerned viewers redialled and redialled
trying to get through. So probably the figure is more like 1 in 40 or 1 in
50, which takes us down to that 1-2% figure again.

- -- 
John Brownlow

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com