DVD And Blu-ray Release Report Hit 10,000,000 Google Plus Views

The more content posted from the report to the blog to Google-Plus, the greater the “reader” activity across the board.   More reports downloaded, more hits at the “business blog” and it all seem to stem from the addition of the Google-Plus to the mix.

The DVD & Blu-ray Release Report hit the 10,000,000 mark for Google Plus views this past week.   It’s an interesting milestone.   It’s not like having ten million friends and it doesn’t really tell you how much content has been consumed by these 10,000,000 views, but it is still an impressive number, especially when you track it on a periodic basis and see it how it grows as more and more content is posted.

The DVD & Blu-ray Release Report began 1,012 editions ago — that’s 20 years of publishing — and the first two “views” were printed copies sent to Warren Lieberfarb and Paul Culberg.  They were the first to show an interest in the gathering of release information for the newly-launched DVD format.  

So going from two “views” to 10,000,000 seems like an important milestone.

To put the growth of readership of the report into context, I was working at Orion Pictures and Cabin Fever Entertainment as a consultant and this format was just getting off the ground (this is 1996) and for some odd reason it occurred to me that gathering release information from ground-zero would somehow be useful.   

The analogy being: if you walked up to a merry-go-round while it was stopped it would be easy to get on, find a horse and take a ride … once the ride was started, getting on would be more difficult.

The first “sponsors” of the report were DVD replicators, who saw it as a promotional vehicle to entice VHS holdouts to enter the market — Nimbus, Technicolor, Deluxe and Media Copy were all sponsors at one point or another.

By the time the report had grown to just over 300 industry executives, distributors, manufactures, PR people, etc. (it had no consumer reach back then), it became pretty obvious that a weekly printed version was way too cumbersome to continue on with.   Fortunately, technology caught up and email and the web allowed for the conversion of the report into a pdf file, which was then distributed via email beginning at the end of 2003. 

Industry distribution grew, the different email groups expanded and expanded … and then came the complaints.   “The file is too big, it is jamming my inbox.”   It was only three to four MGs, but a file that large ten years ago was a big deal, so a new solution had to found for the distribution of the report on a weekly basis (you can manage the wave upon wave of new announcements on a monthly basis).

A website was launched whose only purpose was to store copies of the report that could be downloaded.   Each week the report was uploaded to the website in the form of a pdf file and then email alerts were sent out letting everyone know that the report was ready to be downloaded.

This worked like a charm.   Then in 2012, after hearing about such things, the editorial content of the report was gathering up and posted to a “business blog.”  It didn’t cost anything, the work had already been done, so why not.  

At first there was very little activity.   “WOW, we had a hit today for one of the new announcement stories!”  That was another milestone, readership beyond the core industry group.   

The process was repeated over and over again.  Report, upload, content re-posted to the business blog … wash, rinse, repeat.

During the summer of 2013 a Google-Plus link was established.   All content in the weekly pdf version of the report was posted to the “business blog” and then it would immediately appear as a Google-Plus posting.   

Google-Plus Link: Google Plus

That lasted for just about four month and then in October of 2013 the download website literally blew up from the traffic being generated by Google-Plus.   Meltdown!

A new, beefier download website had to be launched.   Problem solved.

Last August (Aug. 7, 2015 to be exact), we took note of the Google-Plus view count since the summer of 2013 launch and it had reached 6.1 million.   One year later we hit the 10 million mark (four million new views in one year).   

Thank you one and all, especially the sponsors for making The DVD & Blu-ray Release Report the only industry publication monitoring new DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD releases that is published on a weekly basis … 20 years, 1,012 editions and ten million consumer views of the editorial content, those are very lovely milestones to have reached.   And the download site is still handling the load!