SneakerBarDetroit website analysis with information regarding collectible-sneaker industry.

1. Brandon Dinh
Intro to Web Publishing
Jacqueline Lamer
14 September 2020
Sneaker Bar Detroit Content & Traffic Analysis
Industry Overview:
The collectible-sneaker industry is an industry that many of us delved into when we were
teenagers. This involves the purchase, sale and collection of exclusive and signature shoes, the
knowledge and history of the different brands and social interactions with similar people in the
community. The sneaker industry has been around roughly 35-40 years. Around this time is
when Michael Jordan was taking the world by storm with his basketball skills and athleticism.
1984 is also when Nike and Jordan collaborated to create the Air Jordan 1 exclusively for Jordan
but were released to the public later that year. The growth of hip-hop music in the 80’s with
performers such as the NWA. Run DMC, LL Cool J, etc.,
sneakers became a status of street credibility. Sneaker
collecting was inevitable as signature basketball shoes for
Michael Jordan or any star NBA player were very sought
after by fans and fashion individuals. These two things
blended for the perfect storm to become what the sneaker industry is today. It has evolved from
just signature basketball shoes to collaborations between brands, musician or artists also. The

2. sneaker collecting industry today has gone even further than the US and has turned into a global
phenomenon. Cities across the world such as Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Seoul have
some of the most exclusive sneaker stores where vintage shoes such as the Eminem 4’s, which
are a collaboration between Air Jordan and Eminem (only 50 pairs made for friends and family
to celebrate Encore album), can sell for around
$45,000.00, or the DJ Khaled x Air Jordan 3
‘Grateful’ collab, which is set at $25,000.00.
Sneaker collecting itself has a lot of important
aspects. From the different brands to the different
types of sneakers to even the different types of people,
there are a lot of important characteristics in this industry. Some sneaker collectors have very
specific collections that include only top tier brands such as Nike, Adidas, Air Jordan or Reebok.
Others like to explore and be more unique choosing brands such as Asics, New Balance or Vans.
Another big aspect of collecting shoes is collecting vs. wearing (Bryant). There are a handful of
sneakerheads that buy these signature shoes and sneakers but never wear them, while some
always prefer showing them off rather than just saying they bought it just to have it. Having an
opinion is also good when it comes to sneaker collecting. What I mean when I say that is as a
fellow sneakerhead myself, What you choose to collect, buy or sell is a decision you make on
your own and is a basis of what you yourself like in terms of the color, style, brand or comfort.
The most important aspect to me when talking about the collectible-sneaker industry is the
community trading buying and selling. The sneakerhead community doesn’t just go to stores to
try and find what they want, what if it’s a 10-year-old shoe that you used to have that you would
like to own again? You go on sneaker trading websites such as Stock X or Sole Supremacy,

3. where sneakerheads from around the world post all the different types of shoes they have for sale
or for trade. Trading sneakers happens when one person is willing to give a pair of shoes from
there collection for a pair of someone else’s shoes that they might want. That is exactly how
Stock X got its run, with sneaker connoisseur Nik Wilkins, who after two years of selling his
shoes online to pay for school, made about 25% of his 1 million in sales in 2019 (Griffith). His
business is worth about 1 billion after hiring a new chief executive and receiving 110 million in
financing. In May and June 2020, Stock X made about $25 million in merchandise value
(Dunne). Even with Covid-19 going on right now, these sites are getting used a lot since sneaker
conventions and meetups can’t happen as frequently. I think this is the biggest aspect of shoe
collecting because you gain so much knowledge about the different types of shoes, why they cost
as much as they do and you get to socialize with people that have a common passion that you
have.
Trends in the collectible shoe industry are far and wide, a variety of releases can gain
notoriety just because of the brand name associated with it or if it’s a re-release, which is called a
‘retro’, that hasn’t been out for years, such as the Jordan 11, which came out in 1995, and the
‘retro’ coming out in 2000. When Kanye partnered with Nike in 2009, sneakerheads were very
ready to get a hand on these shoes as they were for one, Nike’s first full non-athlete collab and
second, Kanye West during this time was one of the leading pioneers for hip hop in the 2010’s.
When the shoe came out, it was released with 3 colorways: Black/Pink, Zen, and Net, with each
color getting 5,000 pairs. With such a limited amount and such a big collaboration, the original
resale price of $245.00 turned to a resale price of about $4,000.00. In 2014, when the ‘Red

4. October’ Air Yeezy 2 came out, it sold out in 11
minutes (Taylor). Nike had released the shoe on
Sunday in a surprise announcement on Twitter,
saying the shoe was available on its website.
Crazy isn’t it? How a shoe can go from that value
to an inflated value like that. That’s just how it is in the sneaker collecting industry, certain
collabs and releases just trend higher than others because of the people behind it and what it
brings out in the shoe. Supply and demand are another reason for these big trends. Going back to
the Air Yeezy 2 release, since only about 50 pairs were made and they were released exclusively
on the website, the demand for them went through the roof and on Monday there was a pair
selling on eBay for about 10 million pounds (16.4 million USD). Since Covid-19 has shut down
a lot of stores and places that aren’t essential, it’s been hard for companies to release shoes that
have been scheduled to release this year, causing delays in release and a community that is upset
of waiting and waiting. Since closing physical doors, some of the sneaker tycoons like Stock X
and Supreme have said that their online websites still have strong-solid ratings (Moin).
The difference between collectible sneakers and athletic shoes used be far less than it is
now. Back when basketball players like Larry Bird and Michael
Jordan were in the NBA, there weren’t athletic shoes to help them
with grip, comfortability and safety as there are now. Larry bird
used to wear Converse Pro Leathers which are not worn at all in
today’s professional basketball leagues because it just isn’t as
convenient as say the UA Curry 1, which are NBA player Stephen
Curry’s signature shoe. As you can see one shoe has a lifestyle look

5. while the other looks like a legit basketball shoe. They have just changed what an athletic shoe
should be vs. something that was made to be stylish. Just like the Air Jordan series, where the
shoes were created as basketball shoes, they later became known as lifestyle shoes. Years and
years later Air Jordan finally started to incorporate athletic details to make their shoes better for
playing basketball. Look at the Jordan 29 for example, compared to the Jordan 1. These shoes
are completely different in every way and that’s just what happens as you release new shoes with
new ideas on how to make it better and more appealing to a certain group of people. When
talking about the sales regarding Covid-19 and between athletic and collectibles, athletic shoes
took a -40% to -50% hit around March to April. Sales improved by 25% around June but it
wasn’t enough to get it back on track. Sport lifestyle also didn’t do well but was helped by more
releases. Most of the top selling sneakers of this year are Nike with some being from Adidas and
Jordan (Powell).
Company Information:
Continuing the topic of the collectible sneaker industry, we’ll be looking at sneaker blog
site SneakerBarDetroit. SneakerBarDetroit was founded May 2011 by current editor-in-chief,
Mario Briguglio and his longtime friend and co-owner/managing editor, Alin Tiniuc, to share his

6. passion of sneakers to the world. They then added Rashone Bryant otherwise known as ‘Afrikan
Caesar’ to the roster for their podcast and editor position. This blog site for sneakerheads
provides daily up to date news on normal releases, exclusive collabs
and more from Nike, Jordan, Adidas and all your favorite brands. Its
services include as said already, releases from a variety of brands,
links to different sneaker selling websites like Stock X and eBay, and
a popular tag section where you can see what signature shoes are
being released in different colorways.
Something that makes SneakerBarDetroit different than
other sites of its kind is that it’s a locally run site with about 3
employees running it, something I learned while looking at the about page. While
SneakerBarDetroit isn’t a new site, I found out about it while doing this paper. It’s fast paced
updates and easy to maneuver site make it simple to navigate to where you want to go and see.
Whereas in other sites like Sneakernews, which have a lot of different tabs and sections to
choose and look at, could make it distracting and difficult to find things that you need to look at.
That could also be a con of SneakerBarDetroit though, as Sneakernews and other sites like Kicks
on Fire have more content and curiosity such as editors picks, where to buy and even their own
mobile apps. Something that Sneaker Bar Detroit does that is very interesting is that they show
you how many monthly visitors they have, the percentage of male and female visitors, number of
social followers and more. That shows the visitor that the site is a popular site used by many in
the same community and because of that they will come back for that fresh information. After
talking to Afrikan Caesar, its understandable that the reason why people come back to the site so
much monthly is because of the constant updates throughout the day while other sites will post

7. once or twice a day. It is also understandable why other sites would be more prominent for users
because of the different content and entertainment they offer. SBD’s privacy policy is also very
thorough and makes the user feel safe if anything were to happen. They also use third party
advertising companies that will use information that doesn’t include your name or address, to
advertise products you’d be interested in.
Brand Trust and Authority:
As SneakerBarDetroit, they have an active job of being experts of their field of work. As
I go through the website, I can tell that the contributors know what they are talking about and
what they are doing. I say that because when clicking on certain posts, you see that they have
updates, from certain figures, saying when the shoes will be released, how much they will be and
they even have the style code for the shoe on the post, which
is very in depth. They also show their sources at the bottom
of the posts.
After my professor brought Caesar in for a zoom
call, I remember him talking about when he got friends and
sneakerheads in the community to send him pictures of how
and why the Black History Month collection wasn’t the best
it could have been. He sent them to the CEO of Nike, who then apologized to him. This to me
made him a real expert in his field because before anything, he said that he was a representative
of the people, of this culture and he used his voice to be heard on an issue a lot of people thought
similar. Another thing that leads me to know Caesar is an expert is that he has his own podcast
called The Sneaker Box, where he and guests talk about nothing but shoes and shoes. Looking
through the website today, all the posts from September 14th have been by founder Mario

8. Briguglio. Being in love with sneakers since age 6 and making this monster of a website that is
ranked 19th in the world for sneaker blog sites, he is an expert in this field by his consistency and
love for the industry.
If we were to look at social media metrics, SBD has about 5.5k subscribers on YouTube
compared to Sneakernews’ 231k YouTube subscribers. Instagram is SBD’s most followed social
media, with 321k followers but is still trumped by Sneakernews’ 9 million followers. The total
social media followers for SBD are around 386,000+ with follows from @end_clothing, while
Sneakernews has over 11 million+, with followers including @sneakercon, @freshnessmag,
@nitro_licious and more. Out of 6 major new sources talking about the top sneaker blog sites,
SBD were on three of them, placing 19th on Complex, 10th on Hiconsumption and 9th on
Feedspot. Not high and not low but the main thing said on each of these sites were that SBD is
growing to become one of the top sneaker sources in the future, with postings going up to 16
times a day, a site that you can count on will have the information you need. Again, the main
reason why people come back to visit the site is because information is always constant and easy
to obtain, no more and no less than that, avoiding all the unnecessary elements that a site can
have. Also going back to brand trust, the privacy policy on SBD is very in depth while
Sneakernews’ privacy page doesn’t show anything, showing the website is always on par.

9. Competing Site:
Competing sites are always going to be around when in such a big industry. Even though
Sneakernews bigger than our site SBD, it still is a competing site since both are known and both
have a good amount of following. The general content for these sites is about the same if not
identical when going down to the core. Both blog sites are sneaker news sites that give updates
on sneaker news and releases for the top brands around the world. Looking over both sites,
Sneakernews has a more complex website than SBD does. While SneakerBarDetroit has a simple
side menu you can look at, Sneakernews’ side menu has a variety of different things to look at
and click on. That is a big problem for SBD as Caesar said that getting the information out to the
public is not the problem, but the lack of content could prevent them from being up there with
the other sites. One thing that Sneakernews has that makes it a competing site with SBD is that
they have a where to buy page that shows visitors where to go to buy the shoes they want, online
or at stores, something that SBD doesn’t do. When it comes to what both the sites post, I saw a
similarity in posts but with SBD, they try to stay more towards the big brands on the home page
while Sneakernews likes to put more of the underrated brands on the home page instead while

10. still being able to scroll down to see the big releases. Overall, the only thing that could make
SBD attract more attention is to broaden their content, something that Caesar was talking about
on the zoom meeting.
Quality Content Assessment:
Content Overview:
In terms of content, SBD has as much content that should be on a sneaker blog
site as any other one. The type of content most used on the site are text and images as no video
could be found on the site. The text is used to tell you when the shoe is coming out and to also
tell you the background, colorway and style of the shoe. The image is of course used to give you
a preview of what you’re getting or thinking about
getting. The picture also gives you and others in the
community a chance to converse and talk about the
releases coming out. I observed the main page the dates
of which the posts were put onto the blog and for Sept.
14th., there were 21 different posts for sneaker news
and releases. That’s almost an average of 1 every hour
or a couple every few hours. According to Feedspot,
SBD has an average of 16 posts a day, that’s about 112 posts per week and 480 per month. That
equals to about 5,800 posts per year in sneaker news and releases. When looking at what days
posted the most, I saw that the beginning of weekdays (Sunday & Monday) and start of
weekends (Thursday & Friday) are when posts are most frequent. Looking at the different
sections SBD has for visitors to look at, there is a plethora of content no matter where you click.
If you click on any of the brands, you will go down and see there are pages and pages of content

11. relating to sneaker releases and news regarding that specific brand which is amazing. All these
brands have 40+ pages of content that you’d never be able to read through it all. It is the same
when you go to the Jordan, Sneaker or Yeezy release date tabs, you scroll down and you can go
all the way to 2021 sneaker releases, which tells you again that the contributors to this site know
exactly what they are doing and how to do it! Even clicking the popular tags tab, though there
aren’t as many pages, still has a lot of content you can look through. For me, the best part of the
site with the best content must be the Sneaker Release Date tab. When you see the different kinds
of brands, styles and color, you can’t help but to keep scrolling down this page and explore for
more.
Credible/Unique Content:
When looking for unique content on SBD and other sites like Sneakernews, I
found that some articles posted were very similar if not identical to each other. This could mean
that most of the popular sneaker blog sites are using press releases and that it is common for
them to be used even now. While this could be plagiarism in some sense, sites using press
releases aren’t doing it because they are lazy, as a lot of posts were unique content, most sneaker
websites do this as a SEO. SEO or search engine optimization is the process of increasing
website traffic in order to rank higher on search engine sites by using keywords that would make
it easy for them to be searched (Patel). SEO helps websites like SBD, who aren’t as prominent as
say Sneakernews, so they use SEO to try and generate more traffic authentically rather than
using bots. This could be a big reason as to why SBD hasn’t gotten a lot of recognition as
according Neil Patel, 75% or more of searchers use Google as the first search engine, with the
first 5 sites that appear get 67% of the clicks, meaning that less than 30% even click the last 5 or
6 let alone continue to the next page. This is often why a lot of these sneaker blog sites use press

12. releases as SEO to help boost the site more for more
people to see and click on, making them want to come
back since it was a top search and a site they would
want to see again. For example, when I put in Air
Jordan Releases in the search bar, it shows
Solecollector, Nicekicks and then SBD as the third
site, meaning the traffic running through the site is
very good right now.
Traffic Analysis:
Visit Analysis:
SneakerBarDetroit.com SneakerNews.com
Avg. Monthly Visits 2.689m 5.680m
Monthly Unique Visitors 1.346m 2.438m
Visits Per Unique Visitor 2.00 2.33
 Definitions: As you can see in the table, we are comparing the average monthly
visits, which means how many times is the site visited in a month. We are also
comparing unique monthly visitors, which is the number of individuals that come
to the site in a month. Lastly, we are comparing the difference in visits per unique
visitor.
 Comparisons: When looking at the table, you can see that Sneakernews leads in
all three categories. It’s no surprise here that Sneakernews has higher numbers in

13. all three categories because when you search up anything related to shoes, they
are almost always first. The reason for this is as said before, Sneakernews has a
lot more content to offer than SBD does so it makes sense that a lot of users go
there first instead. Another thing could be SEO again, Sneakernews might use
SEO to increase their traffic and rank the site higher.
 Returning Visitors: SBD has a visits per unique visitor of 2. From what I already
know about these sites any why people visit them, yes people want to see what
other releases are out but, most visitors returning are probably coming back for a
certain shoe release or news about a collab coming out. Afrikan Caesar also stated
that a lack of original content for the site is a problem, which could be why the
returning visitors are smaller than Sneakernews, since Sneakernews has original
content and more. Returning visitors are important for sites like this that are easy
to come by, since SEO is a prominent way of getting your site up, SBD could be
lost in the cluster if not for SEO and unique visitors returning to the site.
Engagement Analysis:
SneakerBarDetroit.com SneakerNews.com Web Averages
Bounce Rate % 73.63% 61.60% 40.5
Pages Per Visit 1.76 2.90 4.6
Visit Duration 00:11:02 00:06:50 00:03:10

14.  Bounce Rate:
o The bounce rate is a term used in website tracking analysis. This term
represents the percentage of visitors that leave the site after visiting rather
than clicking on other pages to view.
o Some sites would look at SBD’s bounce rate number and say that it’s to
high when in fact it’s not that bad at all. As a blog site, for the bounce rate
to be 73% isn’t bad, as the average bounce rate for a blog site such as this
70% already, which makes Sneakernews just a bit ahead of us. While the
average bounce rate for sites in general is 40.5. Around this area is where
retailers should stay. A reason that SBD’s bounce rate is so high is that
again they are specifically only a blog site with barely any original
content, whereas Sneakernews has Editors Pick and Where to Buy tabs
that could make it more interesting to click. Some content that might
contribute to the bounce could just be posts that aren’t interesting to most,
as a lot of sneakerheads are what you call “hype beasts”, which are people
who buy things solely based off how big the brand is, regardless of style
and color, even if they are ugly.
 Pages Per Visit:
o Pages per visit means the number of pages that were visited for each
individual visit. Again, Sneakernews is has a higher pages per visit than
SBD, which is expected. What I didn’t expect is that it would be so low
compared to web averages of about 4.6 pages per visit.

15. o For a sneaker blog site to have an average of 1.76 pages and not even 2
pages could be very bad. The site could be lacking in some area of
content, or it could just be that everything is on the front page, so you
don’t really have to go anywhere to get what you’re looking for. In terms
of content that would increase or decrease the average, tabs like the
Jordan, Sneaker or Yeezy tab could gain a lot of page visits if there is a
shoe release announced. Also, as said before, a lack of content could be a
big reason as to why the pages per visit average is smaller than
Sneakernews’, who are known to have some of their own original content.
 Average Visit Duration:
o Average visit duration is the overall amount of time an individual spent on
a site, regardless of how many pages he/she scrolled through. When
looking at the table, you can see that SBD has the highest visit duration of
about 11 minutes. This is surprising as Sneakernews’ visit duration was
almost 7 minutes and the web average being only 3 minutes.
o This average visit duration is a very good number for SBD. This average
indicates that the content on the blog site is appealing to a lot of new
visitors, so they spend a lot of time reading content and seeing what the
website has to offer. Covid-19 could also be a reason for the high number,
as the stores aren’t open anymore, visitors might have more time to read
things over and explore different parts of the site. Whereas the content
such as the underrated or lower tier brands are taking up most of the posts,
which again doesn’t enthuse a lot of people.

16.  Value Content & Engagement Improvement Recommendation:
o After looking over and learning SBD’s sneaker blog site, there is one big
recommendation I can give when it comes to content. Other sites like
Nicekicks or Sneakernews has some sort of link to their YouTube channel,
but instead of having a link or a tab dedicated for it, why not do something
I call “The Daily Dose of Detroit”, which would be a sneaker review of
any choice, that would showcase the background of the shoe, style, color
and comfort. There would be a different review up everyday and it would
give visitors a reason to come back! I think this could be a great addition
to the website as this could increase a couple of categories that SBD were
lacking in such as pages per visit and monthly visitors but could also
decrease bounce rate. The big thing is the monthly unique visitors will be
more frequent and it could give the employees at SBD a chance to target
their audience more. “The Daily Dose of Detroit” could star right at the

17. front page when you click on the site, making it the easiest to access and
look at. To add more to the recommendation, you could do visitor picks,
where a visitor on the website could enter in a shoe of their choice for
review if they have trouble deciding on what to review. After the video
has been up for the day then SBD can post it on their YouTube channel for
the people that still want to see it after its gone.
Popularity Analysis:
Total Backlinks No. of Referring
Domains
Average No. of
Backlinks per
Domain
SneakerBarDetroit.com 3,986 16 249.12
SneakerNews.com 2,577 25 103.08
 Definitions: A lot of people could get confused as to what backlinks and referring
domains are. I’ll try to put it in simple words. Backlinks are the links on a site that
lead back to your site. While the referring domain is a domain where the
backlinks are coming from if that makes sense. It’s important to know how many
backlinks there are per domain because it shows how credible the site is.
 Analysis of Link Quality: Going back to what was said about the zoom meeting
with Afrikan Caesar, he said that the best thing about SBD was that they were
always able to get information out there, which could be a main factor as to why
SBD has a higher total of backlinks and referring domains. Since again, the

18. number of backlinks per domain is so high, with a ranking of 60-100 being the
best, this means that SBD is a trusted source among the sneaker collecting
community.
 Analysis of Link Quality: When looking at the top 5 referring domains
(screenshots below), you can see that SBD doesn’t rank on any of them except for
Feedly and Niketalk. When searching up the other three sites, the quality might I
say was not as good as Niketalk or Feedly was. One of the sites, which was
links.ac, didn’t show any kind of site to begin with. This could probably be
because of restricted domains. A restricted domain is a domain that operates with
a specific function. According to Guestpost, a restricted domain won’t be good for
your site as a backlink because they aren’t real numbers, since you cannot divide
by 0 and you can’t take the square root of any negative number since again it
won’t be a real number. If we’re talking about a trustable site that has legit
backlinks and domains, then SBD is a top tier site and the site to choose when
thinking about sneaker collecting and releases.

19. Sources
Bryant, Rashone. "Event Recap: Michigan Sneaker XChange (MSXC) 2014." Sneaker Bar
Detroit, Aug. 12, 2014, https://sneakerbardetroit.com/event-recap-michigan-sneaker-xchange-
msxc-2014/
Dunne, Brendan, et. al. "The Best Sneakers of 2020 (So Far)." Complex, July 7,
2020, https://www.complex.com/sneakers/best-sneakers-2020-so-far/
Dunne,Brendan."StockXJustHad ItsBiggestMonthsEver." Complex,July13,
2020, https://www.complex.com/sneakers/2020/07/stockx-biggest-months-ever-may-june-2020
Moin, David. "COVID-19 Response: Sneakers Hit High Note Online." Yahoo!Life, August 6,
2020,https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/covid-19-response-sneakers-hit-191738680.html
Griffith, Erin. "Buy Low-Tops, Sell High-Tops: StockX Sneaker Exchange is Worth $1
Billion." The New York Times, June 26, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/technology/trading-sneakers-stockx.html
Patel, Neil. “SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2020.” Neil Patel, 20 Dec.
2019, neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/.

20. Powell, Matt. "Sneakernomics: First Half 2020 Athletic Footwear and Activewear Sales Results."
The NPD Group, https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/blog/2020/sneakernomics-first-half-
2020-athletic-footwear-and-activewear-sales-results/#.XyRaw2NrB1k.twitter
Taylor, Victoria. Kanye West's New Nike Sneakers Going for More than $16 Million on eBay,
10 Jan. 2019, www.nydailynews.com/life-style/fashion/kanye-west-red-october-nikes-16m-ebay-
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Link to