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BUSINESS ANALYSIS : : Competitor Profile
Competitors
citysearch.com
Bayguardian
FREE magazine
FLYER magazine
sfgate.com
sfstation.com
nitevibe.com
sf-nite.com
la2nite.com
bardog.com
Partners
djcentral.com
thedjlist.com
liveonthenet.com
Competitors
As an local information portal, cityseach.com list all sorts of local information like restaurants, bars/nightclubs, movies, theatre shows, etc. On March 2001, cityseach acquired evite.com, and as a result, ticketmaster, citysearch, evite are actually owned and operated by one company, and this combination can be competitive in terms of providing integrated services.
In our experimental testings on nightlife information comparison, cityseach ranked high in most categories. We have considered cityseach as our biggest competitors.
Bayguardian is a local free weekly newspaper that cover all local information. In its venue listings and club listings, Bayguardian lists some venues at San Francisco and some events categoried by music types. Before Internet, Bayguardian used to be information resource when people look for nightlife information.
However, we believe Bayguardian is not a desirable nightlife resource anymore, since its information is not updated and its content is more like a yellow page.
The advantage of Bayguardian is its brand and its readibility.
Our survey also shows that newspaper has become a less popular nightlife information source, compared to newsletter, websites.
FREE magazine is a palm-size monthly magazine which is distributed on stores, clubs at San Francisco. The magazine mainly focus on detailed event information while providing addresses and phone number on venues.
FREE magazine is free available for the public, and it distribute 20,000 copies every month and claims they have 40,000 - 100,000 readership (every copy is read by 2-5 people).
We happen to know the advertising price on FREE magazine and the cheapest one is one page ad inside managine for $1,750.
FLYER magazine is the closest compeitor for FREE magazine and they have very similar model. It distribute 30,000 copies every month.
sfgate is another information portal, and is the online version of San Francisco Chronicle. Their venue information mostly come from their archives and does not get updated frequently. Their venue listing is very limited and only list about 100 venues in San Francisco.
Sfgate also list event information happening in bars/nightclubs. However, search results are very likely to be empty and event information usually only contain name and date.
View sfgate.com website
local entertainment website. They have roughly extensive bar listings.
This is a nightlife speciliazed website focusing on 11 cities worldwide. We didn't find this website until late April 2001 and we were in such a surprise that they have personalized area, as well as event calendar.
The CEO is one of the owners of a dancing club at San Francisco, and her team has extensive San Francisco nightlife experience. nitevibe.com doesn't focus on players but on consumer market, it can be our closest competitor in the future.
View nitevibe.com website
A website owned by a fashion company and list dancing clubs information. Their navigation is horrible and getting worse and worse. Now it is working anymore.
A website created by three graduate students in UCLA and well-funded. Since early 2000 they completely changed their site twice and deviate from their original idea of being a nightlife specialized website further and further. They list very extensive venues and events information on LA, and claimed creating sf2nite.com very soon but never did.
A nightlife website with Java-applet based search engine (10 search criteria). The search engine was working but they have almost zero content because they charge for more than 100$ for being listed. Ever since late 1999, they postponed their lauching date every three month and now even they are tired of doing that. The site become very simple now: one page only.
Parnters
djcentral hosts a huge amount of DJs around the world. The DJs is categoried by music genres and for each DJ, detailed information is included, from bio, releases, to booking info, performances, etc.
Teh another DJ website. It lists 18998 DJs around the world.
liveonthenet.com offer solutions for streamline content through the web. It coudl be our partner in providing live parties online.