The numbers they scored from the social media approach are pretty impressive:
• Traffic to the Knight News Challenge site increased 47% compared to the same time the previous year. average of 2,930 visitors a day, during application timeframe.
• 17,000 visitors on contest day. Both these metrics were 50% higher than the previous year.
• 2,323 projects were submitted. 258 were invited to submit a full proposal, 70 became finalists for the funding are going through final review. Staff considers the quality extremely high.
• 224 independent blog posts about the Knight News Challenge, compared to 24 the previous year. Blog posts appeared in blogs published in European countries, the UK, Korea, China, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Canada and Latin America as well as the US
.
• Written up in Valleywag, Freakonomics.
• 1,600 people registered for the News Challenge Garage site (required to comment). 800 posted projects. 466 applied for a grant. Discussion of the Garage generated 10,000 links that Google indexed, 6,000 of which did not originate from the Garage site.
• The 8 meet ups had 400 attendees, many of whom blogged, shot video and pictures and shared about the program. Roughly 50% of the meet up attendees applied to the program. There are 700 links to mentions of the events indexed in Google, 30 photos on Flickr tagged Knight News Challenge meet up, and 4 videos).
• Google reported over 60,000 mentions of "Knight News Challenge" on non-Knight sites in 2008; this was a 110% increase from 2007.
That said, there's no note about how the number of applications compared to last year. is it safe to assume they had fewer then? That would seem unlikely considering all these other metrics went up.
Assuming there were fewer applicants, was it because they added the garage onto the process, raising the barrier for entry? Did that lead to better applications?
The numbers they scored from the social media approach are pretty impressive:
• Traffic to the Knight News Challenge site increased 47% compared to the same time the previous year. average of 2,930 visitors a day, during application timeframe.
• 17,000 visitors on contest day. Both these metrics were 50% higher than the previous year.
• 2,323 projects were submitted. 258 were invited to submit a full proposal, 70 became finalists for the funding are going through final review. Staff considers the quality extremely high.
• 224 independent blog posts about the Knight News Challenge, compared to 24 the previous year. Blog posts appeared in blogs published in European countries, the UK, Korea, China, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Canada and Latin America as well as the US
.
• Written up in Valleywag, Freakonomics.
• 1,600 people registered for the News Challenge Garage site (required to comment). 800 posted projects. 466 applied for a grant. Discussion of the Garage generated 10,000 links that Google indexed, 6,000 of which did not originate from the Garage site.
• The 8 meet ups had 400 attendees, many of whom blogged, shot video and pictures and shared about the program. Roughly 50% of the meet up attendees applied to the program. There are 700 links to mentions of the events indexed in Google, 30 photos on Flickr tagged Knight News Challenge meet up, and 4 videos).
• Google reported over 60,000 mentions of "Knight News Challenge" on non-Knight sites in 2008; this was a 110% increase from 2007.
That said, there's no note about how the number of applications compared to last year. is it safe to assume they had fewer then? That would seem unlikely considering all these other metrics went up.
Assuming there were fewer applicants, was it because they added the garage onto the process, raising the barrier for entry? Did that lead to better applications?