Ken Davenport - Opinions from a Broadway Producer: The battle of the Broadway websites just got real, yo.
Playbill.com could sit back and stay fat on its yellow striped cover and trademarked font and still have more traffic than the 405 in LA.
But no . . . ever since young Turk-ish Blake Ross took the reins years ago, Playbill has been operatin' like a startup, adding new features left and right and all the way 'round.
3 comments:
I'm so glad that Playbill has made a resource like this. In the past when I've been researching a show, designer, or acter, I've spent some time looking on Wikipedia and IBDB, but neither have covered everything I've wanted to look up. Having all the information synthesized into one searchable website is fantastic. In fact, I may or may not have just done some Playbill Vault stalking of a few CMU SOD professors.
I'm not sure why or how this service could be turned into a payed subscription service, (Playbill Professional) but the company needs to make money. If having a more specified website allows them to run Playbill Vault free to the public, then I support it.
Playbill Vault looks like a much better searchable database than IBDB, so that improvement is great to hear about. It's great to have a really nice searchable database when looking up designers and their work, which actor you saw in which show, etc. While I'm not a fan of playbill Pro being a subscriber/paid service, it sounds like a really nice idea in development. Glad to see playbill stepping up its game when less official websites like broadway.com and broadwayworld.com are starting to take over (and compared to playbill, i find both those sites to be really poorly designed)
I was researching some designers last month and found myself on Playbill Vault and was duly impressed with how comprehensive and useful it was compared to IBDB, and how clean and simple it was compared to broadwayworld.com and the like. The most useful feature was that it contains the Playbill bios for each person for each show, which other sites can't offer.
Playbill is also a great place to read about upcoming shows, and it even has job listings for people in our line of work.
Mostly, though, I'm just amused that Ken uses the word "Boffo".
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