I think it’s just relentless. You’ve got a deadline every day with your daily email, so you have to keep delivering content. We’re a small enough company: we’re new enough that there are no big profit margins built into anything that we do. So every new event we do or every new project we do, you don’t have quite enough resources to do. What you end up with is working under pressure and working quite long hours. So much of it is just keeping up the momentum and the energy levels.
We launched a big conference last year, which was about 800 people at the Hilton for two days, Mumbrella 360. That was just a massive undertaking and it was commercially for the business really successful, but it was also really important for us because it took us away from a pure advertising model. Obviously there was sponsorship involved, but also people paying to be there. A lot of it is a safety mechanism so you’re not relying on any one kind of income stream. We’re launching awards later this year and, again, it’s a way of just giving us another revenue stream. Again, it will be a massive slog, but I don’t think we could safely take our feet off the gas and say, “Okay, yeah we’ll grow slowly now”.
We are pretty keen to do something else. But my sense is probably to launch, rather than acquire. The big question for us is: Do we launch another domestic publication or do we take the market that we’ve created in Australia and take it to the UK or the US or the Middle East? We are not sure which route to take, but if we want to carry on growing those two seem the most obvious choices. We will probably either do Mumbrella in the US or UK; do Mumbrella, but for mining or medical or some other industry in Australia. There are all sorts of pros and cons to both.
We’ve just launched an iPad app for Encore and I’m really kind of proud of it. We’ve learnt so much as we’ve gone along on this one. The obvious thing is how much stuff doesn’t actually lend itself to magazines without the internet. So, for instance, in the print edition of Encore, you’ve got these two guys giving their review of six ads of the week and of course the reader’s saying, “Oh yeah, I really like the Coles ad blah, blah” – so it makes such a difference to be able to click on the ads there.
This has been an experiment now, certainly based on the first one – I’m not sure yet if there’s a commercial model – we’re charging $4.99 for an edition of the app version or $19.99 for six months. And we’ve had 120 subscriptions so far or something like that. If that’s 120 and it starts going up by 10 a month, then it’s going to be a long slog to make it worthwhile, so we’re still learning as we go and all that kind of stuff.
Our print price is $9.95 an edition for Encore, so the iPad app edition is about half price. Obviously the cost of us producing it is a lot less. So our margin on each one is probably higher.
No, that’s too much I think. I really wish they were, but I don’t think we’ve cracked it yet.
The problem is we’ve got iPads and Androids coming along. If you’re going to do an app for iPad, soon enough you’re going to have to do an app for Android; and if you have to multiple produce your content for each different platform, and there’s a good two or three days a month of production time that goes into this, then I’m not sure it is justified.
But it doesn’t make sense just to build it on HTML5 just yet, because then, of course, you haven’t necessarily got a paid content model. Some of the attraction of the iTunes model is that it is very easy to take subscriptions. This might be a failure in commercial terms, but I think you’ve got to go through it in order to learn how to make it a success next time around.
Well, we’ve failed the whole way we’ve gone, and each time we’ve learned something from it and stepped forward. So I think it is kind of important to just experiment with some things.
Cara Waters is the editor of SmartCompany. Cara was previously a senior reporter at the Financial Times website FT Adviser in London and has also worked for The Sunday Times.
