Buzz Networker - Social Networking

Doin’ the Math on Dooce’s Wii Giveaway

by Colleen on July 24th, 2008

Oh, to have the traffic Dooce generates. I was reading her the other day and saw she was giving away five Nintendo Wiis along with five Wii Fits. Kind of a cool idea, and very cool for a blogger to have the kind of power to generate enough interest to be able to give away five systems.

I saw the pictures of the Wii Fit party Nintendo threw a Wii Fit party at Heather’s house. It made me wish I’d been there.

Heather is really good about being uber-transparent on her site. She blogged about her agreement with Nintendo and explained that she wasn’t being paid to promote the company, the Wii or the Wii Fit.

Mack Collier from the Viral Garden did the math on Dooce’s giveaway and the ROI for Nintendo. I was stunned. Check out Mack’s math here:

Heather received a staggering 42,232 comments for her post offering the five Nintedo systems to random commentors. Every Wii set costs Nintendo roughly $160.00. That means those five Wiis that Nintendo gave away, cost the company about $800.00. Add in 5 Wii Fits (which retail for around $80), and the likely cost to Nintendo for this promotion (5 Wiis plus 5 Wii Fits), is approximately $1,000.00.

Based on this data, Nintendo makes $90.00 per Wii system it sells. At that rate, Nintendo would have to sell only 11 Wiis from this promotion, to break even.

For reference, that’s 0.025% of the comments. So if 11 out of the 42,232 comments resulted in sales, Nintendo broke even.

If just 1% of the 42,232 comments translated into sales, then the ROI for this promotion is 3,700%.

Eleven. Nintendo would have to sell 11 systems just to break even from a promotion that reached more than 42,000 people. This doesn’t count any of the additional posts that this promotion reached, the number of blogs who linked to Dooce’s post about the Wii, and all of the marketing and social media blogs who are posting about this rather massive success.

Now, granted, Dooce has killer traffic stats to begin with, and marketers are beating down her door. Not every company will have access to the kind  of traffic Dooce commands, and not every marketer will be able to woo someone like Dooce, but, scale this back a bit.

Start talking to a blogger who has good traffic, even if it’s not Dooce levels. Your ROI with a well trafficked blog can be pretty damn good as well, even if you need to sell more than eleven units in order to break even.

Share This

Related Stories

No related posts

POSTED IN: Uncategorized