RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Thanks for visiting! This site posts interviews, news, stories and jobs about Canadian advertising, marketing, public relations and technology companies - "the connected community". Go ahead, subscribe to our feed!

Here’s the second interview in the “Online Advertising 2008: Thoughts & Trends from the Top” with Candice Faktor, General Manager of toronto.com and ourfaves.com

Any highlights for Toronto.com last year that really shaped your business?

2007 was a challenging yet successful year for toronto.com.
We were extremely successful in increasing traffic to the site, seeing consistent quarterly unique visitor traffic increases of over 25%, and achieving record breaking traffic of 1MM unique visitors / month in the summer. We also saw solid growth in advertising revenues.

There was a lot of change in 2007 that really shaped the business for 2008 including a new GM (me), significant organizational restructuring, new strategic focus, numerous key hires, repping of toronto.com national sales by Olive Canada Network and the launch and integration of ourfaves.com.
You launched Ourfaves.com last year which has been a play by Torstar Digital to jump into social media, how has that venture been so far?

Ourfaves was launched as an experiment by Torstar Digital to innovate in the web 2.0 space. Ourfaves is a website that allows users to share and discover favorite places in cities. We were the first Canadian large media company to organically create a user generated content / social network site in Canada and as such we have learned a tremendous amount about launching new ventures in the web 2.0 space.

The venture has been very successful to date from a growth and internal learning perspective. The site has grown significantly, achieving record-breaking traffic growth month over month. As of Dec 2007, the site was at 130,000 unique visitors / month, 7,500 faves had been created, and we had over 350,000 pageviews. Our recent “my fave day” promotion, awarding the winner with $2,500 towards their local favourites, has doubled our user base and content on the site. We only recently added advertising on the site, and we have Olive Canada Network repping the site. So far, the advertiser response to the site has been very encouraging, they especially like that Ourfaves content is positive and highly contextual.

Will we see big changes in the social media industry this year?

Great question. The space is quite unpredictable but I think as the space matures, we will see more and more consolidation in the space and the growth begin to slow. I believe the two big growth areas will be in social search and mobile social applications as neither of these areas have been done well yet. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook is able to maintain its stronghold on users and its appeal to the investment community and the advertising community.

What can we expect from the two properties in 2008?

We have very aggressive growth goals for both toronto.com and ourfaves.com. For toronto.com, our main consumer focus is on improving the user experience and stickiness of the site through improved interactive functionality, deeper content and fresher design. From a business perspective, we are investing heavily in building strong local advertising products and having an outstanding local sales organization. For ourfaves.com, our main focus will be on enhancing the recommendation algorithms on the site, monetizing the site through both local and national advertising and expanding geographically.

Categories: Features