Member distribution

[roger]

This hardly belongs on the Suggestions board but there is no other obvious place to put it so here we go...

Copied from one of the WSS threads:

martindn said:

Can I ask a stupid question? Why are there so few NZ members on this forum compared to the number of UK members, who seem to dominate.

belinda said:

There are a few other posters Rodders,Dori Ross,
But i guess it comes down to this,
We rarely hear of Hayley unless there is a album coming out or a tour then the interest in creases.As there is more media about her..
Alot of people remember Hayley from Way back but when this audience passes on ,im not sure enough is being done to Ensure continued knowledge of her over here.
and I guess interest is lost in the two years between concerts .
i'll always be here ,but to let you in on a secret it hurts like hell to watch the fun you have.

graemek said:

NZ has 4.45 Million people (very roughly) & lots of musicians, and so Its not hard to see Hayley under utilized in her own country.

UK has ~ 60 Million & a smaller land mass than NZ & also lots of musicians but more major cities than NZ so it makes more sense to transport Hayley around to her audiences & be based near them.

Hi Martin,

Actually, it's not a stupid question at all. It is one which has baffled me for ages.

We currently have six NZ members (if you include Hayley even though she is usually based in the UK). According to Graeme's figures, that represents approximately 0.0001263% of the population of New Zealand. For the UK to have its population similarly represented, there would need to be 76 UK members. In fact, there are currently only 65. Therefore, New Zealand could be seen to be doing rather well!

Interestingly, it is generally agreed that Hayley's career has not exactly taken of in the US. However, we currently have 68 US members - more than from any other country.

Just for the record, the current membership distribution looks like this:

US: 68
UK: 65
Canada: 13
Australia: 10
Germany: 10
All other countries: 38

(In the case of members who have not disclosed their location, the above countries have been determined by IP addresses only.)

Roger

[scoobedoo]

Hi everyone,thats an interesting point re members from NZ. I have often wondered just how many members there are from Hayley's home country. It doesn't look as though there are many of us There was a member from up in Hamilton at one time,but I haven't heard from them for sometime.

Roger can you see who the guests that drop by are actually from? perhaps there are more from NZ dropping by but are not members?

They don't know what there missing

PS I like the list at the bottom of the main page showing members that have been online over a given time, thats interesting eh?

take care out there,
cheers,

Rodders CH CH NZ

[roger]

scoobedoo said:

Roger can you see who the guests that drop by are actually from? perhaps there are more from NZ dropping by but are not members?

Hi Rodders,

Well, yes, it can be done but it is a very time consuming and laborious exercise. As an example, the Info Centre is telling us that there are three guests looking in right now. If I click on "3 guests", it reveals their IP Addresses. By looking each one up, their location (at least the country) can be determined.

Of the three mentioned above, one is in the UK and the other two are in the US.

In rare moments of enthusiasm(!), I have been known to look a few up but I don't ever recall seeing one from NZ. However, that might not be the case if I did so during your evening but I am generally busy with other mundane exercises at that time of day.

Roger

[Stephany]

Thanks Roger for providing us with such figures and interesting information.

roger said:

Interestingly, it is generally agreed that Hayley's career has not exactly taken of in the US. However, we currently have 68 US members - more than from any other country.

Could it be the 'Celtic Woman effect'? I know that some of our US members have been here for a while, long before Hayley's association with the girls, but I have the impression that this group brought a lot of new members and fans (including me! ).

Stephany

[roger]

Hi Stephany,

The 'Celtic Woman effect' doesn't really explain why we have more members from the US than anywhere else because it has always been that way! However, it may have helped the US to stay ahead despite an influx of UK members during recent months.

Roger

[milewalker]

Hi Roger and all,

I am not sure that I understand the perception of a discrepancy in her US membership here. It seems likely to me that the only reason there are more US members is that it happens that we have a vastly larger population than any of the other countries you listed. If you take the population of the country and simply divide it by the number of members from each county you get a somewhat different picture.

New Zealand .......1 member per 686,000 people
United Kingdom....1 member per 935,000 people
Australia................1 member per 2.043,000 people
Canada.................1 member per 3,339,000 people
United States.........1 member per 4,429,000 people
Germany................1 member per 8,240,000 people

As you can see there are no real surprises there - more people per cap from NZ, followed closely by the UK.

Jon

[howard]

Hello Everyone,

I have been thinking about the membership, as of now HWI has 233 members, while the new Celticwomanforum as of now has 684...Let's see HWI, been around what 6 years or can I be wrong but much longer than CWF which has only been around for about 6-8 months.

I don't know the exact statistics but the CWF which started up in the US, the majority of members I can safely say are from the US...

Now I don't understand why membership is so low from fans of the UK & especially NZ....

but I know why it is low from the US....

LACK OF PUBLICITY!!!

It really occured to me at the time Hayley did the "West Side Story"..
It was announced that Hayley was going to perform this live before the night the CD was going on sale, it was going to be played on classical radio stations.

Now I called all my local classical radio stations & my PBS station & noone knew anything about it, PBS said it was not offered to them (the president of the station emailed me back about it when I sent him the web site to look it up)...I did find on the internet "Classicfm" & they let me know that they were going to play a tape of it the following day.

The Celtic Woman are getting more & more popular in the US, because of CONSTANT publicity, alot of exposure on PBS.

Who is Hayley Westenra? I know when her DVD came out I believe it aired on our PBS stations, I am not sure but I did not see it. Just like I never saw the Celtic Woman when they first appeared on PBS around 2004-2005 (that I have been told).

But because of CONSTANT publicity, Nov 2006 was the first time I heard of the Celtic Woman & the same time of course, Hayley Westenra....and I know there are CW fans even though they have been fans of CW since 2004 it was their first time also that they heard of Hayley Westenra, thanks to "A New Journey".

I don't know why this is, maybe it is her managements decision or even Hayleys' herself that it is this way.

I am not in the entertainment industry so it is something that I don't understand, maybe there is a big plan on the horizon...I REALLY HOPE SO...I would like to see Hayleys' name as a household name and become more famous than anywhere else in the world.

So I do understand why US membership is low but UK & NZ, I don't understand.

Thank You,
Wishing All the Best,
Howard
USA

[Belinda]

Hi Howard ,
this has been covered before but i'm not sure where
As i remember saying before we don't hear about Hayley Here nearly enough a concert every two years isn't enough
A very sad but true fact,
i expect the membership will increase after Hayley's NZ concerts.
I'm sure us Kiwi's/Aussies will convert a few people at the venues
I'm sure roger has explained why our membership is low. Do all 800 or so CWF people post we have a active membership
where you will probably find 600 of their members have never posted.

Belinda

[milewalker]

Howard,

On page 5 of the Miscellaneous board you will find an in-depth discussion of this very issue. See "Sure fire ways for Hayley to Succeed in the USA"

Jon

[roger]

Hi Howard,

Belinda's reply has indicated the reason why our membership appears relatively low but I will go into a little more detail.

I suspect the stats on the CW forum, and certainly those on the vast majority of forums are completely misleading. All they tell you is how many people have registered since the forum was launched. As Belinda suggests, the great majority of those members never post, and many don't even log in again. Inevitably, there are often many account which are never activated and duplicate membeships occur. Our forum is run rather differently.

The account of any member who has not logged in for a significant time would eventually be closed. I see no reason for them to remain open when they are clearly not required. To allow them to remain open indefinitely, *could* be a security risk (if an unwanted account was hacked, for example - the owner would never know), closing them simplifies forum administration - and it results in the stats being a fairly accurate indicator of the current level of activity. I will also quote the words of the previous forum owner (with which I agree):

"I would rather have a small and active forum, than a large one filled with ghosts from the past".

Publicity is a major issue which could be dbated here ad infinitum but basically, it costs huge amounts of money. This has to be balanced against the likelihood of that money being recouped. If it is not, it ultimately has to be paid for by Hayley. Consequently, any artists management, record company or whatever, must be prudent about the sum of money invested in promotion for the protection of themselves and the artist. Sales figures of Hayley's albums (regularly published by Dave) seem to imply that she is, on the whole, doing okay. No doubt, other members would like to pick up on that.

Roger

[milewalker]

Hi Roger and Howard,

Roger is absolutely correct about the relative costs and risks of marketing/publicity. When you hear that an artist received x million dollars to do y albums it doesnt mean that this is what they were paid. Most of that is the promotion budget, and if the artist doesnt break even they have to pay back the loss

In Hayley's case, I think there are two problems stemming from this. First, as has been noted many times on this forum in the past, they spent a whole lot of money promoting Pure in the UK. (To be fair, it did establish Hayley as a solid performer in the Uk market, but the downside of this is that none of her promotion budgets since Pure have been anything close.) My personal speculation is that she doesnt receive more US promotion now simply because her budget is tight.

Second, they did do a reasonable amount of promotion in the US for Pure. There were several morning talk show appearances, a number of appearances on local television, and a high profile appearance in New York. Unfortunately, to put it bluntly, the album simply did not perform well here. One measure of this is that they actually shipped close to a quarter million copies of Pure here, and only directly sold about one fifth of them. This means that a lot of mainstream retailers like Target got burned. And it means that those same mainstream retailers are understandably reluctant to stock her now.

Howard - my understanding is that generally a concert special is offered to the PBS network who make the decision on what to feature on that level. In turn if a concert is picked up it is then offered it to the local affiliates for a fee. I suspect that the reason your local station never heard of the show is that it wasnt picked up by the PBS network to begin with. As PBS is pledge driven, the most likely explanation for this was that the Live in New Zealand concert simply didnt bring in enough money for the PBS network to be very interested in her later work.

Jon

[howard]

Hello, Belinda, Jon, & Roger,

Thank you for getting me straight about membership...
and Jon, I don't know whether I should thank you about gearing me to the Misc. thread about Hayley/USA, I read through it twice and it got me kind of depressed...
Because this is a big issue with me, I am going to reserve my commits to that thread after I read through everything again & put some more thought on that subject.

Thank you all again,
Best Wishes,
Howard

[Nordly]

make that 14 from Canada

[Tin]

Curious in the activeness of our member, I brush up this old thread.

Do we actually keep count of the activeness of our members? Now we have about 270 members, and I feel interested in knowing how many of us are active speakers, occasional visitors or rare comers. Is it possible to tell a vague percentage about that?

Tin

[roger]

Aug 19, 2008 16:12:34 GMT Tin said:

Now we have about 270 members, and I feel interested in knowing how many of us are active speakers, occasional visitors or rare comers. Is it possible to tell a vague percentage about that?

Hi Tin,

Yes, I believe I can provide a few figures that would give a good indication of recent activity levels.

During the month of July, 108 members posted to the forum. This is the highest number ever to post during any one calendar month and represented just over 40 per cent of the members.

The number of members who logged in during July (but did not necessarily post) was 160 or 56.18% of the average number of members during that month.

The number of members and the proportion of them who log in fairly regularly is steadily increasing yet the number of posts per day is significantly less than it was at the beginning of the year. I cannot explain why that should be.

Roger