BlackVoices Diversifies with Domains

Like most of you I primarily use Quantcast and Compete to measure the traffic of other websites.  When someone happens to hook me up I use Comscore as well.  BlackVoices.com looks to have had a huge dip in traffic on sites like Quantcast and compete.  this is largely because they are not classified into a network, Comscore’s equivalent to a media type (M).  being classified this way has it’s benefits especially if you are hard at work serving niches as part of your strategy.  September Comscore numbers show that Black Voices is actually at about 4.9M unique visitors (October numbers aren’t out yet) classified as a media type.  I chatted briefly with Tariq Muhammad today about Black Voices’ new strategy.

How many domains does Black Voices currently use?
A total of 13.

If traffic isn’t coming from the main domain as much how are you all getting so much traffic to the other domains?  SEO?  SEM?
It’s absolutely a mix of partners, SEO, and other forms of marketing and partnerships.  Traffic does come from the main domain as well and we send them to blogs from there.  I do want to note that we are eager and open to partnering with all manner of sites.  It took a while to shake off our walled garden heritage of AOL but that thinking has change throughout the company over the past 2 years or so and has evolved.  It makes a lot more sense for us to be open and partner.  If you can’t come to Black Voice’s to find all types of black voices we are not fulfilling our mission.

Do you have a network or will you be building a network of sites?
Yes and No.  We could be classified as a network however form a positioning stand point we aren’t.  If I were to launch other sites that had a different slant it would roll-up into Black Voices still.  All of our sites now are part of the Black Voices constituency and would not exist had Black Voices not existed.  They are more like spin-offs.  They are an organic network of blogs and sites that have spawned from Black Voices.  In comparison to like a Gawker, they all have distinct audiences.  When we use the term ‘Blogs’ it is more a description of what we use for the CMS than descriptive of being a network of blogs.

What will eventually happen to BlackVoices.com, will it just be a landing page of sorts that collects all content, what role does it play in your new strategy?
We want to serve the niche content spaces and build them up as individual brands as well.  These sites will help feed BlackVoices.com which will showcases the best content across our network of blogs.

AOL has been reported to have hired about 7,000 journalist and is moving in the direction of being a content company, what does this mean for BlackVoices?
It means we will be ramping up even more in terms of content and are working to include as many diverse group of voices as we can.  We want to leave no viewpoint unturned.  We rely on original content while other AOL sites might rely on a different content mix, using content from AP and other services.  We are looking for contributors for additional blogs as well as contributors to the current blogs we have.  The contributors we are looking for don’t necessarily have to have a blog either, it may includes someone with a large social media presence.  We are open to the possibilities however they may present themselves.

What can we look out for from Black Voices in the coming weeks and months?
We will be ramping up in video.  We currently have a video podcast (it is distributed on multiple platforms not just iTunes) that we will be revamping.  We also have BV Daily Drama which is popular and shows the best clips from today’s TV shows.  Our message boards will be relaunching with Facebook, twitter, and MySpace intergration.  We were using a 3rd party service but brought that in-house and tested it in both alpha and beta phases.  That will relaunch next week on Wednesday but you can get a preview if you go to Conversations.BlackVoices.com