AskMen: A Montreal Startup Success Story Told by Ryan Johnson
AskMen is a Montreal startup success story. But it’s one few people really know about. Most people don’t even realize that the super-popular site is based in Montreal. It was started in Montreal and sold to IGN.com (in 2004), which was shortly thereafter acquired by News Corporation. So it’s owned by a powerhouse and doing amazingly well.
I met Ryan Johnson (currently VP Biz Dev & Marketing at AskMen) a few years ago, and we’ve stayed in touch since then. Having recently re-connected with him, I thought it would be worthwhile to learn more about AskMen and their plans for the future. The stories in the interview are great – from how the company started (it was all because of a pair of white socks!) to how AskMen competed against “the big boys” who had tons of venture capital. Enjoy!
NextMontreal: What’s the scoop on AskMen?
Ryan Johnson: AskMen is the world’s largest men’s lifestyle site that provides advice and covers a wide range of different topics of interest to men. Our purpose is to help men become better, through advice and tips and sometimes some tough love. Some of our competitors (Like GQ as an example) tend to glorify an ideal of what a man should be, without much direction on how to get there. At AskMen, we approach it differently: no one is perfect, but every man can get better. If you want to improve some things in your life, come visit, we’ll show you how. If you want to wallow in self pity and envy the unattainable “other” man, don’t bother coming.
NextMontreal: What’s your role at AskMen?
Ryan Johnson: I run marketing and business development at AskMen, which means my team is responsible for traffic generation (SEO, content syndication, link exchanges, etc.), public relations and everything related to social media. On the Business Development side I look for ways to grow traffic, revenue, or to simply make the AskMen product better, so everything from strategic partnerships with portals like Yahoo to deals with location based social networks, like Foursquare.
NextMontreal: How long has AskMen been around? And how did it get started? When was it acquired?
Ryan Johnson: AskMen began in 1999 by three founders straight out of Concordia who were sitting around in a café thinking about how they could take over the Internet world. All of a sudden a good-looking, sharp dressed guy came into the café and sat down with a beautiful girl for what they guessed was a date. When the man sat down, his dark suit pants crept up to reveal (horror) white socks. From this little incident, AskMen was born. Sometimes guys are great at the big picture but need a bit of help with the details, and that’s where we come in.
The site was actually built on a fairly miniscule bit of venture money. It’s really a credit to Ric (Ricardo Poupada, one of the original founders and current GM) and the other founders. There were competitors within the space, most notably, a site called Theman.com (GQ, Esquire and others had not yet embraced online), who received large amounts of venture capital money and were, on paper, supposed to pound little old AskMen in Montreal into submission. But that didn’t happen, because AskMen has never been distracted by the glittery things of the Internet, instead focusing on some of the things that bore CMO’s to tears; fundamentals like Search Engine Optimization.
AskMen was acquired in 2004 by the game site IGN.com, after they kept seeing AskMen ranking right next to them in traffic numbers and in density of 18-34 male readership. IGN Entertainment was acquired by News Corporation several months later.
NextMontreal: What kind of involvement does News Corp have with AskMen? Do you work with other News Corp properties on an active basis?
Ryan Johnson: News Corp tends to let us run our own show, which we appreciate immensely. We do work on content partnerships with Myspace, Fox Sports and Fox News, but since we are part of the IGN Entertainment division, we work with IGN.com mostly. The IGN team is based in San Francisco, and is extremely sharp. We learn a lot working with them on a day to day basis and I think that allows us to keep up to speed with evolution of digital media.
NextMontreal: How much traffic does AskMen have, and how does that rank it against the biggest sites of the world?
Ryan Johnson: AskMen is the largest site in the men’s lifestyle category. During the month of January, according to comScore, our global monthly uniques were more than all of our competitors combined (Maxim, GQ, Asylum, Men’s Health, etc). I haven’t done that same math since, but we get about 15MM uniques a month on average.
NextMontreal: Do any women read AskMen?
Ryan Johnson: Absolutely. 30% of our audience is women, most of them trying to get inside their boyfriends’ heads. From an editorial perspective, we truly focus on making the site a safe place for guys, meaning we always give frank advice that is meant to solve problems that men have. We always talk about being like a trusted uncle… but if some women show up to the party that’s fine too.
NextMontreal: Do any women work at AskMen?
Ryan Johnson: Yes, and by all accounts they like it. There are a lot of “he said she said debates” that rage within the office. We take care of business but we keep it light and fun and the subject matter affords us that luxury. Our female colleagues have gotten used to the cigar smoking, scotch drinking, Mad Men type atmosphere. 
NextMontreal: Why do so few Montrealers know that AskMen is in Montreal?
Ryan Johnson: Everyone assumes we are either from New York or LA, just because Montreal is not really seen as an English language media hub. We have quietly built up a serious global media property, but we are doing some things these days to make sure that fellow Montrealers know that we are here. The Americans we work with know it when we use hockey analogies and when we rave about our hockey team getting to round three. We are proud Montrealers.
NextMontreal: What sorts of projects are you guys actively working on right now?
Ryan Johnson: Our biggest focus right now is a massive redesign of the site. We have a December deadline we are working towards and we are thinking about a lot of creative ways to get folks engaged with our content. It’s a unique challenge to design a site with 11 years of legacy behind it, and the process is taking up a ton of time.
Otherwise, we are continuing to expand our move into local content with our city newsletters. This was a product we launched last August and we have over a million and a half subscribers. You can sign up to our Montreal newsletter here and also follow us on Foursquare to see our Montreal tips (we were one of the first media brands to begin working with them over the winter).
NextMontreal: What’s the future of content-centric sites on the Web? More content? More functionality? Social shopping?
Ryan Johnson: Big question and we have been reading a lot lately about the death of the web site and all that. The web site is definitely not dead, but it’s clear that having just a big fire hose of traffic is not enough. It may sound cliché, but you need to have people believing in what you do, buying into your brand and building communities around you. Look at the early days of popular social networks…look at Foursquare today with spontaneous user-organized Foursquare parties cropping up…this type of brand loyalty is powerful, and it will play a bigger and bigger role in how advertisers spend their dollars.
Pushing out reams of content is not the answer. Some firms do it well, but it is content as commodity, and when content becomes a commodity so does the advertising that appears next to it. We all know how commodity pricing works. It doesn’t end well.
With regards to the social shopping models we are seeing…content sites can play a part by providing context. Getting 40% off of a designer blazer is good, knowing that the blazer is going to be what is in style for fall, a little something about the blazer’s designer or about the celeb that is currently wearing that designer’s clothes is awesome. A 40% discount on a blazer is the what, the context is the why.
NextMontreal: Where have you seen value for AskMen in terms of social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg? Do you leverage those channels? Have you seen specific results on any of them that you can share?
Ryan Johnson: Just being able to engage with our readers is fantastic. All of these platforms have been valuable and we think that any opportunity to get readers interacting with our brand is an opportunity we’ll take.
We get readers to contribute to articles via Facebook and Twitter and publish their contributions on the site. We have hosted global male “rebellions” on Facebook, asking men not to put down the toilet seat for a month. We have a video channel on Youtube where our whiz kids in the video department can upload our latest and greatest. AskMen’s content is on the Digg homepage every other day.
I think that if I just gave the traffic referrals, it would be evidence that we are entirely missing the point. Traffic back to the site is great, but one extra reader that can be convinced that AskMen is a site that they love and must visit every day is worth more to us than people just cruising site to site. Social Media helps us get that one reader.
One thing I will say about social media sites and traffic: Stumbleupon is underrated.
NextMontreal: Why do you say that Stumbleupon is underrated?
Ryan Johnson: In terms of raw traffic, Stumbleupon is very good for us. And from an engagement standpoint (looking at page views) it’s slightly better than Digg. Stumbleupon is so low touch. The addition of a Stumble button in our main share menu is making our Stumbleupon traffic rival our Facebook traffic.
NextMontreal: What’s the #1 metric you obsess over on a daily basis?
Ryan Johnson: Branded traffic, which is the sum of “type-in” traffic and direct bookmark visits. It’s the measure of our brand and our progress towards acquisition of the most valuable reader type: the true fan, the evangelist, the guy who will do far better marketing for the site than we can ever do. All traffic is important, but particularly with the fragmentation of the web and people’s changing surfing patterns, brand loyalty is more and more important.
NextMontreal: What tools do you use internally for tracking success on the site? Are you actively doing A/B testing, analytics, etc.? I’d love to learn more about how a big content site optimizes on a regular basis.
Ryan Johnson: Primarily, we use Omniture and Google Analytics/Webmaster tools to evaluate activity on our site (paths, retention, time on site and so on). We don’t operate like content farms, where valuable keywords are combined with bargain basement writing to spew forth content that is more or less adequate. We carefully consider what we are going to publish and make sure we have the right writers for the job. That said the editors have some performance metrics they look at based on page views, bounce rates and so on, so that we can evaluate the performance of different articles and formats.
We will be doing a lot more A/B testing with the redesign as we have some different layout ideas that we want to evaluate.
NextMontreal: What’s your opinion on manscaping?
Ryan Johnson: Without getting in to too many graphic details…women (generally) leap through hoops to keep themselves presentable for guys, so don’t be a slob. Otherwise this article can help out.
NextMontreal: If there’s 1 thing you’d want people to know about AskMen, what is it?
Ryan Johnson: I’ll cheat, there are two things: 1) you can work for us, we are looking for Engineers, Editors and a Product Manager; and, 2) You will be hard pressed to find a cooler place to work in Montreal.
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