While they straddle opposite coasts of North America, DoLA and doNYC share a lot in their success this week - both metros are reaping the dividends of YoY growth from large email lists engaging with solid content. Details on what that looked like for each market:

• DoLA: If you're a market that averages 65K unique opens per week, nailing the content that users see when they open those emails means big results. DoLA did exactly that on Friday of last week when they featured the announce of The Hollywood Bowl's 2017 schedule. Their subject line starting with - "Hollywood Bowl Announces Summer Lineup With Phoenix, Spoon and More" teased the specific artists, a tactic that always works best with lineup announces. While we've noted time and again the importance of promptly featuring fest lineup announces in your email, it's important to remember that extends to large outdoor event series just as much (if not more). In DoLA's case, this enabled them to hit their highest single day of email traffic in 9 months, and was the main contributor to them notching another week of 2X YoY traffic growth.
   
• doNYC: Another market with 2X YoY traffic growth, New York saw email success thanks in part to them surfacing this secretive subway tour (which unfortunately was later cancelled). Staunchly in the "not-cancelled" events bucket was their 3rd most popular email content - a list of all Grammy-nominated artists' upcoming performances in the city. We're interested in testing more of these "in your town" lists beyond just the large festival variations that we regularly make, so if you've got ideas for others, send 'em our way!

Curious about what email content is performing the best across the network at any given time? We've got a doc for that. You'll find that and more on the Audience Hub.

Your weekly dose of stats awaits:

Happy Valentine's! Lots of stuff to love about last week, as total network site traffic was up 65% YoY. For comparison, average YoY site traffic was up 40% for the network over the past year, so things are headed in the right direction. A choice few of the juiciest wins from the network:

• Do250: Victoria continues to produce content with their fest partners and participating artists. Most recently this applied to Song & Surf fest, which already got the Play the Fest treatment, but was now bolstered by Do250's collaboration with a performing artist to produce the official guide (shared by several of the contributors on FB). It was 250's most popular page last week, and helped them hit 4X the traffic of last year.
   
• Do314: Sweet Saint Louee had their second highest week of traffic of all time thanks to their Mardi Gras list and associated ticket giveaways to various related parties, all of which were a hit for their email list. That alone deserves a set of beads.
   
• Do617: Good lawd is Boston on the upswing. Their YoY traffic so far this year is sitting at 127%, and last week was no exception with 260% YoY growth and their highest week of all time. Though the story isn't novel, the results are indisputable. Get big giveaway --> execute effectively in email --> users go on a sharing bonanza. Just wait until they launch their Lowell Folk Fest partnership (often referred to as the "Gaga of Massachusetts folk festivals").
   
• DoLA: A stellar week of email engagement for Los Angeles. Nearly 200K unique opens (20K more than any previous week) and 18K clicks (second most of all time).  In addition to the aforementioned popularity of Gaga, DoLA had 5 other pages w/ more than 1K sessions from their newsletter. Check out the direct links below and you'll notice some cool stuff, like the fact that their most popular content was just a show announce w/ no giveaway or otherwise exclusive access. Just DoLA doin' what they do best - passing along killer events to their audience. The top 5 (in order of engagement):

1. Daft Punk Pop Up Shop Announce
2. Grammy Awards Party Guide
3. Best Pizza in LA
4. Wu Tang Clan
5. ACLU Fundraising Concert

Thanks again to everyone who showed up to the audience growth brainstorm/chat today. We'll be passing around the highlights later this week, but as always, we're here to help in any way to make you guys even better at doing the great things you do.

Love and stats to get your night started right ;)

We've got new festivals, old soul stars, and the first rumblings of SXSW. Check out the many shades of winner below:

• Do512: Austin had their highest week of email traffic since switching to dailies, with a whopping 4X+ increase in YoY email traffic. The biggest chunk of that went to the early SX announcements (showcase announcements, new bands, etc.). Close behind were the ever-popular "dog-friendly list" (if you haven't built it for your market, you should), hiking spots, and new places to drink. Check out their most popular email from the week for inspiration.
   
• Do615: Nashville ain't no dummies. Festivals + email = sure thing. Do615 is shaking up their offerings by keeping a running list of festivals with winnable tickets (featured in the top block of their email) and doubling down on lineup announces for new regional fests. Both were runaway successes and propelled Do615 to 3X+ YoY site traffic.
   
• Do816: Here we are only a week after their launch, and KC was already able to notch 10K site sessions in a week. Was it a big giveaway? Festival lineup announce? Nope, instead it was this event. Don't believe me? Check out the post that started it all. After getting posted to an FB group that has 10K members that then shared the event 50+ times, more than 5K people visited that page. And while sadly, Keith Sweat and Doug E Fresh probably won't announce a show in your market every week, it does demonstrate the value of 1) finding and joining the large active FB groups that focus on things to do 2) identifying their most active members and 3) doing some outreach to those members so you can seed content to the group that aligns with its niche. 

Stay tuned for some more tools coming this week to help you discover other metros' audience wins. In the meantime, stats on stats -  

A fest launch, a metro launch, and a giveaway launch walk into a bar...and well, the rest is Winner of the Week history:

• Do206: Seattle rode the wave of Sasquatch traffic for their first ever week of over 10K sessions.  Half of their entire site traffic last week landed on their Sasquatch lineup announce and giveaway, with 3.5K sessions coming from email, and another 1K coming from Facebook and giveaway referrals respectively. And while not much of a factor to contribute to site traffic, Do206's continued series of Space Needle pics added another remarkable 474 shares to their Facebook engagement.
   
• Do816: KC consummated their launch at a buzzy new distillery with their kickoff party, which by all measures looks to be a success. No surprise they had the highest week of traffic to date and continue to build up their email list to the 100K mark. We couldn't be more excited to see more big things coming out of the 21st DoStuff metro!
   
• DoNYC: NYC hit an astronomical 287% YoY growth thanks in large part to the launch of their locally arranged sweepstakes partnership. The slick page let users enter to win a vinyl + turntable + speakers + concert tickets of their choice. The 8.5K+ sessions that have landed on the sweeps have already yielded an incredibly efficient 6.2K entrants and, most importantly - over 3,000 new users! Nice work, dudes.

A quick note before you freak out that nobody is clicking "ADD" on your site anymore - we discovered a bug that was preventing that event from firing in Google Analytics, which we'll fix soon. All of the other data points are reliable and awaiting your perusal below:

Another week, another pair of metros at the hub of their cities' respective cultural scene. Check it:

• Do512: It's always nice when a good cause drives you to a 10-month traffic high. That's exactly what happened last week, when Do512's Women's March event blew up with 33K organic sessions landing on that page. For context, that's more than a quarter of Do512's entire traffic for the week, and 3X the traffic that came to their homepage. Over the course of the event's life, it racked up a total of 46K+ sessions from people searching a bunch of related queries, and seeing Do512 appear as high as right after the official FB page. All of it demonstrates the importance of being aware of the important events in your city, even if they might not be the standard shows at music venues that you've scraped in. Kudos to the Do512 content team for getting the event page up early and making sure it looked great w/ tons of content, which deserves a hearty all right all right all right. To be fair, it wasn't just Austin, as other metros got in on the action, most notably with the organic traffic to DTB's event propelling them to their highest traffic in 5 months.
   
• DoSD: It's the first year that DoSD has been the exclusive host of voting for the San Diego Music Awards, with the official site linking directly to their voting page. The usual telltale signs of a successful music awards (or voting contest in general) are all there, with several thousand referred sessions coming from the partner, and another few thousand from the dozens of contestants pushing their cause on social. All told, DoSD had their second highest week of traffic since launch, and it's still 2 months until the actual event. For those keeping track, that marks the third metro (along with 312 and 502) to be the exclusive host of a music awards voting, with each proving successful.

Last week's stats to guide this week's action below: