WebRidesTV (WRTV) is the brainchild of entrepreneurs, whose earlier work includes GameTrailers.com which garnered a tremendous following and chocked up more than 800 million video downloads a year, and was later acquired by MTV in 2005. The online automobile market at that time was dominated by contextual based websites supplemented with phone-quality amateur videos. The vision of WRTV was to develop the ‘Premier Online Destination for Car Enthusiasts’ with highly produced short format episodic video content.
Famous Interactive worked closely with WebRidesTV to build a product that would then serve as the benchmark for automobile community sites. The site launched in 2006 with original content produced, shot, and edited by WRTV. Within its first year, WRTV received almost 2 million page views and averaged over 5 page views per visit. For the time period between the first and second year, the total number of page views jumped to over 59 million.
Famous developed a multi-level Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan for WRTV. SEO is implemented at an application and content level. The site is coded to use standard fonts with proper use of Meta, H1, H2 tags to allow Crawlers to identify and index as much content as possible. All images include text tags and all URLs are SEO friendly and contain proper keywords. Secondly, each description or text blurb that goes on the site is carefully thought-out, ensuring the use of certain keywords and properly ‘tagged’ video content. Thirdly, at launch a properly formatted Google SiteMap was submitted to the popular search engine via Google WebMaster Tools and would automatically update as new content appeared on the site. As a result, traffic from Search Engines has doubled and WRTV ranks in the top 10 for competitive keywords.
To further get the word out, WRTV has used several syndication avenues. First, WRTV launched in an era where viewing videos on your iPod had just emerged, which Famous implemented by creating each video with iPod compatibility. Famous Interactive debuted an iPhone compatible video feed as the iPhone grew in popularity. In addition, RSS feeds through FeedBurner gives users an easy way to subscribe and review a large amount of online content in a very short time. Secondly, WRTV leverages the user-base of YouTube by uploading video content to its very own YouTube channel, driving traffic back to www.webridestv.com. WRTV works closely with several popular car blogs and car forums to build credibility and to seed content and links in as many places a car enthusiast would visit. Famous Interactive continues to create embedded videos that could be easily added to any site.
WebRidesTV started out with only original produced video as content. But as site activity and membership has increased, Famous Interactive continually ads key features that allow the community to contribute content to the site in a variety of ways. This includes user-generated video uploads, photo galleries, car profiles, member profiles, and forums. Members can ‘friend’ each other and join online Car Clubs. In 2008, WRTV launched the ‘SchwagMart’ section which allows members to gain points/credits by interacting with the site and then redeeming their points for merchandise such as video games, hardware, WRTV apparel and more.
"Famous Interactive built an online system that would track and award points for user activity, an Order Management System, and a Point Auditor System to ensure that members earned their points within the site rules."
After the ‘SchwagMart’ launched, traffic on WRTV spiked, average time on the site doubled, and 300-500 new daily members joined in the first 30 days of its debut.
As WebRidesTV’s mission statement puts it, “[Its] goal is to be the web’s premier provider of original auto media,” and it has certainly become that. The website won a 2008 Communicator Award in the Auto LifeStyle Category. It now receives 500,000 unique visitors each month with a combined audience, through content distribution, of 280 million.