The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s April “Australian tour” is going to become one of those moments with a larger impact for months and possibly years to come. We watched it play out in real time, as the British media and right-wing Australian press desperately tried to sabotage the tour, only to see their lies and false narratives blow up in their faces once Harry and Meghan touched down in Oz. Two national press cartels tripped over their d–ks in front of the world and it was amazing. The Oz tour was so successful, people are STILL complaining about it and trying to create postmortem “reasons” why the tour was bad, bad, bad. Meanwhile, it absolutely looks like the same Oz tour was the inspiration for the Princess of Wales to get off her ass and travel to Italy, which also has far-reaching implications for the Sussexes’ impact on the left-behinds.
Anyway, here’s another piece of retrofitted, reverse-engineered propaganda for “why the Sussexes’ tour was bad.” Newsweek’s royal guy argues that the Australian tour didn’t accomplish what Meghan wanted because… something something As Ever’s traffic!!
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s four-day tour of Australia aimed to warm the country to their version of royalty, but just weeks later, Newsweek can reveal signs the publicity appears to have had the opposite effect.
Data collected by Newsweek using the digital intelligence platform Similarweb show that website traffic for Meghan’s lifestyle brand, As Ever, dropped both globally and in Australia in April, the same month they embarked on a tour of Sydney and Melbourne.
That is significant because one potential benefit of the visit was an opportunity to promote the couple ahead of As Ever’s global expansion, which Meghan has said is coming down the track.
Meghan sells jams, honey, candles, wine, and other products through her As Ever online shop and currently ships only to the United States, but going global could significantly expand her audience.Data from SimilarWeb, accessed by Newsweek, appears to indicate why Meghan wants to go global: Americans made up just 35 percent of her traffic in April, meaning the other 65 percent of visitors would likely have left empty-handed unless they had an American friend to purchase for them.
Other visitors come primarily from Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia despite the fact that she does not currently ship there. Had Meghan’s Australia visit caused a surge in audience on her As Ever website, that would have set out a clear business case for launching Down Under.
The fact that her Australian audience was down at the exact moment she was on the ground, smiling and shaking hands with Aussies in Melbourne and Sydney, poses questions about whether the news coverage generated by the trip will actually translate into sales once her store launches.
Meghan’s website had 178,143 total visitors in April, a 20 percent drop from March, when she had 226,330 visits. The Australian share also dipped from 6.42 percent to 6.28 percent. That works out at around 11,200 Australian visits in April compared to around 14,500 the month before. Both months, though, were down on February when Australians made up 9.04 percent of 213,030 total visits, giving her around 19,300 Australian visits. Meghan and Harry’s spokesperson announced the tour in early March, meaning Aussie visits to As Ever dipped during both the March build-up and the April tour.
From February, before the tour was announced, to April, when it took place, there was a 42 percent slump in her Australian audience from around 19,300 visits to 11,200. The curve, in other words, has been heading in the wrong direction for a duchess preparing to expand her business abroad, and the visit did nothing to turn the tide.
If you’d like a non-Deranger analysis of why these numbers are actually amazing, go here to Celeb Chai. Basically, it’s stunning for a start-up brand like As Ever, a brand which only ships domestically, to have this kind of international traffic. The argument that “Meghan was in Australia to promote As Ever” falls flat because she literally did nothing to promote As Ever! I actually wanted Meghan to host an As Ever pop-up shop or announce an As Ever expansion to Australia during the tour. She did not.
It’s also funny that Newsweek acts like “As Ever traffic” is the only marker of interest, when Meghan literally announced her investment and participation in OneOff during the tour, and I’m sure OneOff’s traffic and app-downloads skyrocketed that week. Speaking of, that’s another marker of success which is being studiously ignored by Newsweek: Meghan’s Midas Touch when it comes to fashion, where everything she wore in Australia sold out and all of the Aussie designers saw a huge spike in interest and sales.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
[galery]