Given your experience across those different interests at the moment, what’s driving the mood of advertisers, what do they want to get out of advertising?
We’re seeing a lot more that they want to know how their advertisements are performing.
I think just as a generalisation across all media, both old and new media, people want to be able to measure performance and both old and new media are getting better at it.
Is it one area though where new media has a clear advantage?
It has some advantage but on the other hand, advertisers are still quite comfortable placing their advertising on television on the basis of the surveys that are available. And they’re happy to place their advertising in newspapers on the basis of Roy Morgan readership which is highly credible.
What have you made of the paying for content debate that’s raging at the moment?
I think that’s just got a long way to play out at the moment. I think there will be some niche publications and some of the larger media brands that might be able to get away with it where they have highly specialised content which is of a real consumer benefit but I think if you’ve got a website that’s more mainstream, I think it’s going to quite difficult. And clearly those people are going to have to rely on the advertising model.
Is it a question of who moves first?
No, it’s going to be a question of who provides the best content in terms of the pay for content. I don’t think there is frankly much first mover advantage in it. It’s just if you’ve got content that is really of interest to specialist communities, for example like Crikey, then you can charge for it. In some other communities, even in specialist communities, you can obviously make good money out of advertising, which is the Business Spectator model and of course SmartCompany as well.
A lot of the pay-for-content argument is around the idea of quality content. How easy will it be to market that concept?
I don’t think it’s around the issue of what people might deem to be quality content. It’s around specialist content that has a consumer benefit to the reader.
So it’s really got to be news you can use, I guess.
Or information or services or whatever.
But a strong point of difference is the key, I guess.
No, it’s not a question about the strong point of difference, it’s information that is of value to people, of real value in their eyes.
There’s going to be a bit of competition I gather in filling The Trading Post gap. Is that a surprise to you?
I’m very relaxed about that.
There’s plenty of space for everybody?
No, I just don’t want to comment on it, but we are standalone buy and sell newspaper. We’re not another newspaper with some buy and sell stuff in the middle of it.
Just finally, how easy is it to get a newspaper in that sort of time?
To build a publishing company in two weeks?
And find a printer and all that goes with it.
I mean it’s very challenging. You’ve just got to try and pull every trick you can in the book, get a small team of very good people around you. Work all the issues and all the requirements in parallel. You don’t have time to literally take one step at a time, you have to work across printing, production, distribution, telesales and advertising sales, circulation, promotion, stakeholder relationships with newsagents, infrastructure. You have to do everything contemporaneously and it’s an enormous challenge but at this point we’re still looking good.
I better let you go on that note and we wish you all the best.
Thanks James.
James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
