Using editorial
Woot is hardly the newest thing on the block, but I got to meet Matt Rutledge, the CEO today for the first time, and he got me thinking about differing roles that editorial content can play.
Woot offers one product per day for sale – available for 12 hours or until it sells out, with no pre-announcement of what the product will be. It was the original pioneer of the flash sale model.
The thing about flash sales is that you don’t really need any editorial content; shoppers can see what the product is, they know what it does and how it looks and they make their purchase decision rapidly on viewing the item. In the flash sale world, offering editorial is not going to boost sales, if anything it might hinder them.
But Woot employs 4 writers, who between them create these painfully honest, irreverent reviews of the product they are selling each day. If the product is crap, they say it is crap. History has shown that the rating of the review has next to no impact on the volume of sales.
As Matt explains, the content is all about entertainment, and feeding the ravenous community of avid readers. A good proportion of the millions of daily visitors to Woot come just to read the reviews. On a site that does not pre-announce sales, finding a way to bring users back every day is the about the best volume driver you can have.
Editorial content can serve so many purposes; it’s hard to think of another example quite like Woot.
