September 2002 Editorial

Web popularity vs real life popularity (there's Life after hits)

During these last, say, 7 years of web activity, we've always tried to increase our popularity OUTSIDE of the World Wide Web. This means that we've always tried to get attention from print mags, newspapers, radio's, TVs etc. Needless to say, this has been a very hard task, since there's no direct link between our "virtual" Internet World and the "real" World.
When newspapers and TVs talk about Internet web sites they always try to focus their attention on the wildest, ugliest and silliest aspects of the WWW.
This attitude is going to change, of course, but don't expect this will happen anytime soon. In some way, the "traditional" media try to protect themselves by the attacks of possible "virtual" competitors.

There are several notable exceptions to this rule and I'd like to draw your attention on some of these (and one in particular). In the past we got very good coverage from leading international newspapers such as the London Times, the leading UK newspaper, with a 3 columns article and an interview with yours truly.
Other Italian newspapers did the same (interviews, articles etc.). If you are familiar with our They say about us... section...this should sound as old news to your ears. Now there's more.

I'm talking of the leading Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore and the national WWW contest it organizes. Every year the Il Sole 24 Ore official website organizes a contest to elect the best Italian site, by category (E-commerce, Media, Sport, Arts and so on).

This is the way this contest works: visitors VOTE the website they prefer, one for each category. Among the Top Ten finishers (i.e. Top voted sites) a team of experts in Information Technology picks up a website as the best one for each category.
To cut a long story short, in July we decided to enter the contest and asked our readers (Italian residents only!!!) to vote for us into the category "Leisure and Hobbies" (that's my best translation for "Tempo Libero" :-)).
We thought this category was the best one for a site devoted to Music and HiFi. As a result, we've received the Nomination (see flag on the right) for "Best Italian Website", being one of the Top Ten finishers.
Considering the company we're in (extremely popular websites with millions of visitors), we can only dream of being selected and judged as overall winners so...let me say we're simply amazed by this partial and somehow unexpected result.
If you want to see the Top Ten list just follow this link for the Il Sole 24 Ore WWW Contest. Consider the list is into alphabethical order, so we don't know our real position. This doesn't really matters, as the judges will not take into account the number of votes for their final decision.

I'd like to point out that the whole voting procedure was certified by AC Nielsen - NetRatings (leading International web popularity authority, see site for details), by means of a password-protected cookies-controlled IP-scanned procedure. So, no bluffs, no multiple votes, just plain REAL UNIQUE visitors who voted our website.
I think this is the best answer we can give to those who have something to say about our access statistics. Certified FACTS, not vapourware.

So, while we await for the final decision (at the end of October), let me invite you to support TNT-Audio on two audio-related web contest (AudioWorld.com and Ecoustics.com). Oh yes, we already know we are the most voted site there.... ;-)
Keep your fingers crossed, dudes.