Ellen Visits Australia

US TV personality Ellen DeGeneres has just completed her whirlwind tour of Australia. Whilst no one is confirming how much she was paid, tourism groups who sponsored the trip are claiming big benefits.

Source: Robert Upe, The Age

“The Ellen DeGeneres show has a global audience of more than 16 million people in 23 countries. Based on this audience the advertising value of Ellen’s visit to Australia is estimated at $147 million.”

This compares favourably to Oprah Winfrey’s tour down under 12 months ago.

“Oprah’s visit to Australia generated more than 86,000 news articles around the world with an estimated equivalent advertising value of $368 million”.

Content Creates Audience

Oprah and Ellen are the ultimate content marketing case study. They create content to attract an audience – they produce video content that is translated into a TV show. From this they attract and audience which is the gateway to other deals and other income streams.

Whilst Oprah and Ellen have both built their success on the mass media platform, the great opportunity of social media is for you to build your own platform and your own audience.

Yes, they are both internationally known celebrities this simply adds extra zeros and boosts the scale of the deals they can do. And the principal remains the same: build an audience and you can leverage this to generate sales.

The big opportunity here is the extra income streams.

Oprah and Ellen both make their first sale to the TV networks funded by advertising.

This second sale in this case is to tourism authorities in Australia who have paid handsomely for their trip.

Smaller Scale

This can also work for you no matter what scale you operate at.

For instance for me with Book Rapper I receive around one book a month from someone wishing me to review their book. Unfortunately I don’t receive millions for this. I only get the free book. And this is a reflection of the scale and size and value of my audience.

If I can boost my audience from a couple of thousand people to a couple of million people then I’m sure the size my deals will grow significantly too.

Blogger Chris Brogan has an audience probably ten times bigger than mine. He is often offered cameras and other equipment to review. Not millions of dollars and still lucrative.

Your Audience

Now it’s your turn…

• What’s your audience worth?
• How much is your audience worth in direct sales?
• And how much is your audience worth in third-party deals or indirect sales?

And finally, how much do you want your audience to be worth? This will determine the scale and strategy you need for your content marketing.

PS: We’ll discuss how to grow your audience in future posts.