Archive for the 'fairfax' Category

Stuff – remove the TVNZ video on Bridget Saunders

Published May 19, 2009 fairfax 6 Comments
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I’d heard about the Close Up interview with Fairfax’s recently departed Sunday Star Times About Town gossip columnist Bridget Saunders. It looked like it was a bit of a hit-job.

The last place I would have thought to see it was on Fairfax owned Stuff. I found the link to the video from the homepage – just beneath the banner.

The video itself has a one line article attached – leading me to infer that this is just one of many pulled over from TVNZ:

I understand that Bridget has made a few people uncomfortable over the years, and I guess TVNZ relished the chance to do a bit of an ambush on her. Close Up asked her bluntly about plastic surgery (yes botox), whether she had slept with a married politician (no married man ever) and whether she was fired or chose to leave (she called the meeting). To her credit she answered all the questions, though it was clearly a difficult interview for her, and the editing room did her no favours at all.

I think it was a bit over the top by TVNZ, but I guess I can understand that they wanted ratings. However the interview was amateurish – confronting Bridget with unsubstantiated gossip instead of substantiated facts, and thatapproach backfired for me as it looked like TVNZ was trying to smear Bridget, and she came across as very human and open.

It wasn’t journalism though – it was a fishing expedition, and they came home with an empty bucket. For Bridget, well I guess that’s part of the game of being a gossip columnist – you get to take some licks as well as give them. Shame on you TVNZ though – you could have done a lot better.

But I feel strongly that Fairfax, through Stuff, overstepped the mark tonight by placing this online, and by linking to it from the front page.

Bridget is not only a former Fairfax writer, but Stuff itself publishes Bridget’s work in her About Town blog. You can still read the blog – with the last post  on 6 May – yet sadly there was no goodbye from Bridget.

I’m guessing (hoping) that the night editors at Stuff just grabbed the TVNZ videos and placed them on the site.The ‘article’ is just the video description. I’m hoping they didn’t realise that Bridget was in their shoes a week earlier.

The video even ends with a victory salutation to the new Queen of gossip – who works for rival APN’s NZHerald.

I have absolutely no idea about the circumstances surrounding Bridget’s departure and I’m not too clear on how you balance the news-worthiness of an item versus loyalty to your own contributors. I believe that publishing this was unintentional, but this is unacceptable to Bridget, and must raise questions amongst other Fairfax staff and contributors.

Whatever the cause, the effect of seeing this on Stuff must be pretty rough on Bridget, who could feel that Fairfax is disowning her with prejudice. That’s not a nice way to end a seven year relationship.

I feel for her. I did meet Bridget once or twice during my tenure at Fairfax and she was delightful. I wish her luck in her new venture – writing a book on bad sex.

Oh – and I think it would be wise for those with sharp knives to remember that being included in a gossip column is a minor inconvenience compared to a starring role in a book on bad sex.

eBay should buy Trade Me, but they won’t

Published January 29, 2009 NZ Business , Trade Me , fairfax 9 Comments
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Apparently rumours are circulating about Trade Me and eBay – not that I heard about them until just now. Mod has squashed them anyway, but oh what fun. 

The problem is that eBay traditionally purchases auction sites, then brings over the content to their own site and use their own model. They struggle to see the world any other way.

Trade Me outperforms eBay, and so this approach would destroy value. Moving the site over to eBay’s version would sharply reduce listings, lower income and reduce profits  for Trade Me. Listings would drop as members are confronted with eBay’s Byzantine systems, income would drop as sales drop due to the same and gross profit would get eaten as the spend on advertising goes way up.

It gets worse. eBay doesn’t understand the motors and property markets, whereas Trade Me has succeeded, while Jobs is something that they are also nowhere near. Don’t even start me on selling advertising.

So Trade Me was, and is, more valuable to a financial or media purchaser than to eBay.

Fairfax, a media purchaser, kept Trade Me at arms length since purchase – allowing the business to continue to develop along some pretty impressive curves.

The results are obvious – today Trade Me has 1.19m listings in NZ and eBay Australia has just 1.16m items located in Australia. That’s right – there are more items for sale in NZ than Australia, and that’s a country with well over five times NZ’s population.

But wait. If eBay are smart then they would see Trade Me as an opportunity to improve their own businesses around the world. 

While the list of things that I would do if in charge of eBay has been covered before, I have to confess that buying Trade Me was not on the list – and it absolutely should be, and I’d pay a lot for it.

But after the purchase what should eBay do?

They should leave Trade Me alone, and not tell them how to do anything. Instead, I’d help the rest of the eBay organisation learn as much as they can from Trade Me’s success. 

I’d send people from eBay’s senior development team to Trade Me – to work under the direction of Trade Me staff – and to do really entry level stuff. They can learn, and spread the word to the rest of eBay.

I’d send Trade Me senior staff over to the US, to spread their message of simplicity and usability.

Then time for some fun – I’d replace eBay’s Australian site with Trade Me’s platform. This is a massive migration, but the listing numbers alone say that something is seriously sick with eBay Australia. Let’s see how that goes, and it everything goes well, then start hitting other smaller markets.

And so on.

But is eBay smart enough to pay enough for Trade Me?  I think not.

Deliver newspapers only on Thu, Fri & Sun?

Published December 13, 2008 fairfax , media 2 Comments
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Gannett’s Detroit Free Press and Detroit News are apparently thinking of home delivering only on Thursday, Friday and Sundays – the three most lucrative days. On other days readers will be able to buy abbreviated single issues at news-stands, and will be directed to the online offerings. The idea is to get say 70% of the ad revenues with 40% of the costs.

I have to admit this makes sense. Newspapers create an enormous amount of paper waste for the household, and as a committed news junkie I really only enjoy reading the print versions on Saturdays and Sundays. Also, as people switch their media online they have less time for the daily newspaper, and so this gives the newspaper a chance to be there only when it is relevant. Clever.

It’s going to be interesting times for the printing presses though as that lost production is lost economies of scale. That means we may see massive printing consolidation if this becomes a trend.

This is really important as Gannett has been on the forefront of the online news world, and they own about 85 newspapers. If this works then expect the rest to roll over in time.

Gannett itself is losing 2000 (10%) jobs across their organisation, but smartly these are not expected to come from the newsroom. Beleagured Fairfax, APN and WAN will be watching closely. They could start by following the excellent Gannett Blog, here’s the post that seems to have scooped everyone.

TVNZ’s New site – December 08 version

Published December 12, 2008 fairfax , media 4 Comments
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TVNZ launched their new site yesterday. It’s a refreshing change, and a good one.
TVNZ.co.nz

It’s pretty similar to one I look at to get West Australian News
TheWest

Both of those screenshots are the entire height of my little mac portable. You really see very little content, with the focus directed to the main stories of the day which rotate.

TheWest, with the bigger pictures, checks in at 1.6mb, and then keeps grabbing pictures forever. TVNZ is at 1.4mb a bit smaller on the upload, but that is still a lot for the 40% of so on dialups. (Not that Stuff and NZHerald are much better).

I admit I was pretty sceptical of TheWest’s new site last year, but I am informed that their traffic numbers are actually doing really well since, and that is in the face of some new Fairfax competition in WAToday and News corps PerthNow.

The TVNZ and WAToday sites are great if you just want to get the top news – the rotating banners drive traffic to the vital few. They are harder to get deeper news from as they seem a bit tabloidish. That of course is their market.

Geekzone blogger Juha nails the vital difference between TVNZ and the APN/Fairfax sites:

“And please TVNZ… commission more local stories from local journos instead of filling the site with the usual Reuters rootarola wirecopy that everyone else carries. And, I mean good solid news and analysis, and not the usual opinion swamp that passes for journalism these days.”

Rupert Murdoch gets this – he is ramping up content creation at the Wall Street Journal. Fairfax, APN and TVNZ should all remember that while presentation is important, it’s the timely accurate pertinant content – in short news – that matters the most.

Disclosure: I’ve consulted to WA Newspapers recently (unlreated to theWest website) and Fairfax a while back

Trade Me has added at least $3 billion to the NZ economy

Published December 9, 2008 Business , Internet Business , NZ Business , Trade Me , auctions , fairfax 2 Comments

A persistent, err, troll over at Bernard Hickey’s blog post on Trade Me and Australia asks an interesting question: 

“How is Trade Me a productive NZ asset?

The answer requires just a little bit of economics, and it is really quite amazing.

First – Trade Me sold for $750m, and the money was paid to New Zealand shareholders. So you can easily say they created $750m of economic value for those shareholders. Many of those shareholders are now investing their time and wealth in new businesses or charities based in New Zealand, and so the economic value creation goes on.  (1)

Second, Trade Me has build a new marketplace, creating value for new buyers and sellers. Let’s look at the (estimated) 50% of goods that sell on Trade Me that are second hand. 

We have 540,000 more Listings each week  

Trade Me has 1.24 million listings right now, implying that they have about 600,000 2nd hand items for sale. (2) The default action period is 7 days, so let’s assume that there are 600,000 second hand items listed each week. 

Before Trade Me the market was found in the free classified listings newspapers – Trade & Exchange. I’m estimating that the free newspaper classifieds had, in their heyday, about 20,000 listings per big regional paper, and they had say 3 equivalent big regional papers.(3) That’s about 60,000 listings each week. 

We have $5m more sales each week

Let’s assume that the Trade Me and old time newspaper listings sell at the same sell through rate of 25%.(4)  Therefore under the newspaper regime we had 25% x 60,000 = 15,000 items sell each week, and with Trade Me we have 150,000 items selling each week.  That means New Zealanders are now buying and selling 135,000 more items between each other than we used to. If the average sale price is $50 (excluding cars etc.) then that’s $6.75m per week of additional 2nd hand trade.

That second hand trade was not happening before, so where was it in the past? I suggest that the items that are now being sold were then sold in garage sales, or given away or thrown away – either immediately, or eventually. Mostly I suspect they were thrown away or sold for almost nothing at a garage sale. Let’s say $1.75m worth was given away or sold far too cheaply in garage sales (5) each week, leaving $5m per week of items that would otherwise have been thrown away.  

That $5m per week is say $250m (6) each year of revenue that is going to the former owners of those items – money that they would not have received before Trade Me existed. 

Moreover that $250m is an increase in recycling of items in New Zealand. That’s pretty impressive.

$250m a year is about $2 to 3.5 billion of net present value to New Zealand, depending on how you value the future flows. Add that to the $750m (7) from the sale and Trade Me has added $2.75-$4.25 billion to the New Zealand economy – let’s call it “at least $3 billion” in net present value. What’s particularly great is that all of this money has gone to household rather than big businesses.

But there is more.

Third – Trade Me lessens deadweight loss

Trade Me offers a much clear marketplace than the old car magazines (auotrader) and newspapers. We dealt with the newspaper market above, but the car market is a different story.

With Trade Me the number of people viewing each car advertisement has risen significantly versus Autotrader’s magazines, and the quality of those advertisement has also improved. Also viewers of that advertisement are able to compare all other listings for that same model of car (including recent historical listings) and can therefore derive a much better market price.

The market price is much more informed (closer to “perfect”), and so buyers are less likely to over pay, and sellers are more likely to receive a fair price. Thus Trade Me is removing distortion in the marketplace, and that distortion was economic loss. I’m not going to attempt to value that economic loss difference (or that for property), but I suspect it would be a figure on par with the $3 billion above.  

We have also not considered the new goods selling without rental and other overheads, the reduction in advertising costs and the ability for small businesses to form and start selling quickly and profitably.

What do you think? What is missing?  

Notes under the fold Continue reading ‘Trade Me has added at least $3 billion to the NZ economy’

David Kirk leaves Fairfax

Published December 5, 2008 Business , fairfax 2 Comments

Really sad news. David did a great job running Fairfax Media.

The purchase of Trade Me was the highlight for NZ. The Rural Press purchase was at a great price, but probably a bite too far.

New site TheVine shows what really interests “18-29s”

Published April 9, 2008 Internet Business , fairfax , media 4 Comments

thevine

Fairfax Digital Australia and youth publisher LifeLounge have launched a new site: Thevine.com.au, “aimed at 18-29 year olds”.

Now like everyone I’d hate to be in a “target market” and I suspect, like “young adult literature”, the real target is somewhat younger, although the design of the site is pretty placid:

theVine

The surefire killer sign of a young audience is the Top Stories section, which I take to be auto-selected by popularity. I’d go on, but, well – just look at the titles to the top articles:

theVine

Nice, Tight, revealing, Miranda Kerr, Sex Marathon, hedgehog. Yup – that sounds like teenage minds hard at work – and teenage boys at that. Let’s take a sneak peak at that second story ” new revealing figures“

theVine

case closed….

now – did Fairfax and LifeLounge really mean to do that? Well – I’ll leave that to FD MD Pippa Leary:

Asked if Fairfax’s editorial staff was too old for the target market, Ms Leary said “yes”.

Real Estate is falling – what happens next?

Published March 7, 2008 Business , Global Macro Trends , Investing , Trade Me , fairfax 4 Comments

The housing crash is cascading around the world, and the dire predictions are coming true. Here’s the latest chart from The Economist – check out Ireland on the bottom. That’s a crash, not a “balanced slump”.

economist

Meanwhile Trade Me just surpassed 70,000 property listings, on the back of signing up one of the last few major real estate agents holdouts.

Things to look out for in the next few months are:

Trade Me listings volumes to peak as the remaining real estate companies sign up, and then settle as the market slows

Increasing time to sell and lower average prices (duh), especially at the top end

A drop in the newspaper pages dedicated to housing advertisements and articles, lowering the income for the likes of APN and Fairfax

Real estate agents switching careers as they have less commission to share around the industry

and a fair few had luck stories from speculators that got in at the peak and/or didn’t get out in time

a general downturn in optimism & perhaps the internal economy

That sense of déjà vu is the ghost of 1987 creeping back.

Juha Exposed

Published March 2, 2008 Life , fairfax , media 1 Comment

Separated at birth? or just related. We find out a ittle more about who is behind that mask:

stuff

Juha/Bach is blogging over at Stuff…

Fairfax & Trade Me results

Published February 22, 2008 Internet Business , Investing , auctions , fairfax , media Leave a Comment

Not bad – strong profit growth of 40% versus last year, with Trade Me and Digital leading the way.

Trade Me showed $32m in EBIT, which is for the 6 month period to December 2007. That, apparently, puts them at tracking to hit the $60m required to complete the $50m earn out to March 2008. (That from the Dom Post – but if they really know then they have inside info., which they can’t, so they are guessing)

Actually it could be tight, and it all depends on how well Trade Me did in the 3 months to June 2007, and how well they do in the three months to March 2008. Basically revenue and profit in a rapid growth company move up month by month, and, while a mid year snap shot showed the right run rate, it isn’t over.

If the April-June 2007 period was not so good, then the Jan-March 2008 period needs to be extra good to compensate so that the whole year meets target. (It’s so much easier to predict things in the Nickel game)

Now January is a slack month downunder, but then things pick up – so it will be an interesting run to the end for Trade Me folk.

Arcgk. I really cannot comment any more, though I’ve sadly been out of it for a while. Good luck guys.

msn.nzherald.co.nz launches

Published January 11, 2008 Internet Business , NZ Business , fairfax , media 1 Comment

So msn and APN have linked up. But to tell the impact you have to dig a little. The msn.co.nz page is unchanged:

msn.co.nz

The msn news page has better news than before:

msn.co.nz news

But the links give it away – here’s the one beneath the main news picture:

msn.co.nz

Indeed that news page is the NZHerald news page with a differnt brand.  It’s a simple as shoving msn.co.nz at the top of the nzherald page. Here are the two politics pages

nzherald  msn.nzheraldc

So – NZHerald gets more traffic, pure and simple. MSN gets some real news on their rather sparse website. Stuff is still ahead in UB’s, (498k vs 456k last week) but NZHerald with this move has a Page View lead. For now.

It seems to be a great deal by APN.

For a start they increased their saleable page views. Secondly they help msn get revenue (details unknown) by selling ads on a site that otherwise struggles – the front page of msn has sister company Seek ads only right now. Finally they have taken out a potential  (though not so strong) competitor in the news space. Well done chaps.

Fairfax Digital – new head

Published December 6, 2007 Internet Business , NZ Business , fairfax 2 Comments

MEDIA RELEASE

6 December 2007

FAIRFAX MEDIA APPOINTS NEW DIGITAL HEAD

Fairfax Media has appointed Stephen Smith to the position of Group Head of Digital.

Prior to accepting the Fairfax Media position, Stephen headed Vodafone’s media and entertainment operations.

Stephen will be responsible for Fairfax Media’s Online division, which includes stuff.co.nz, rugbyheaven.co.nz, and the online sites of the company’s newspapers and magazines.

He will also liaise closely with Trade Me and Fairfax Digital in Australia.

Mr Smith is a high profile media executive, and was for eight months Acting Chief Executive of Television New Zealand. He spent 16 years with TVNZ in a variety of positions including Assistant Chief Executive and Head of Programmes, Head of Online Operations and General Manager of TV2.

He will report to Fairfax Media’s Chief Executive Joan Withers.

Ms Withers said Fairfax Media’s Online division had enjoyed rapid growth and development over the last two years, and was already the most significant in the country.

“Stephen has a wealth of experience and expertise in online operations, and senior leadership roles and brings to Fairfax the skills to make our business even more successful,” she said.

“He will play a significant role as our newspaper, magazine and online platforms provide even greater integrated news, information and entertainment services to New Zealand audiences, and provide cost effective ways for advertisers to reach those audiences.”  He will also be a key participant in the senior management team.

Mr Smith said “I am looking forward to joining a great company with a proud record of innovation and an appetite for embracing the future of the digital media.”

How to manage your company’s online reputation

Published November 16, 2007 Business , Internet Business , NZ Business , fairfax , media 11 Comments
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Over the months I’ve occasionally said one or two negative things about a few companies.

Did I say occasionally? Sorry – I meant constantly.

Their range of responses has been interesting, and piqued the interest of Bullet PR’s Nicholas O’Flaherty, who used the BNZ series of rants, along with Mauricio’s Slingshot posts as examples, in a speech, of how not to manage online reputation.

Nicholas asked me a few questions for an upcoming article, so I thought I’d cross post the rather long  answer to one of them here:

As a blogger do you have any advice for PR practitioners?

Encourage and facilitate clients and their staff to follow, respond to, and join the online conversation.

Follow
Someone needs to continuously scan the internet, and put blog posts that matter into those daily press clippings for the top management team to see. The traditional media no longer has a monopoly on sound opinion and commentary, and that unsound stuff can also trip you up. A basic first step is to set up a simple Google news/blog search with their company name, while a few people should be following the major blogs along with other media.

Respond
Secondly, respond as quickly as possible to both positive and negative blog posts from reputable or popular blogs. Respond rationally, honestly and credibly. Ferrit (of all companies) responded to several of my negative posts about their troubled times, and the credible  person responding  was the head of Marketing, Peter Wogan. He joined the conversation, and the result was better for everyone. An exemplary example recently was in Perth where an employee of ISP iiNet responded to my complementary post within an hour or two of the original post – that’s proactive, and they’ll have a loyal customer now.  Can we even imagine  Telecom or Vodaphone  doing this?

Join
Thirdly, join the conversation by blogging, but only do so if you can do it right. Doing it right means the voices are genuine and unrestricted. Genuine voices are those of senior and interesting staff. Unrestricted means that they do the writing themselves with no editing before release. Give guidelines, coach in the right tone for blogging, keep it simple and focused and unleash the talent. The blogoshere’s BS detector is stunningly efficient – so tell the truth and tell it often and well. Xero and Google do this well.

Starting a blog is technically easy, but it does require work on the part of the writer along with continuous reinvention. I encourage individuals and companies to give it a go – experience is the best teacher.

Additionally set client staff free – allow staff to blog about their experiences at their work and about anything that isn’t illegal or unethical to disclose. Trade Me and Fairfax have shown huge tolerance for several bloggers, but we see very little from any of the other major companies online or offline in NZ. Let staff’s negative as well as positive comments come out – and think of it as a continuous survey of staff morale. We do care if staff are unhappy don’t we?

Finally, have fun and be human. Blogging is an engaging medium, and while there are serious and light blogs they all have a conversational and personal tone.  But remember -  the blogosphere is increasingly influential and read, and what goes up there stays up there forever.

AFR will not go free, BusinessSpectator launches

Published November 9, 2007 Business , Internet Business , fairfax , media Leave a Comment

Fantastic news – AFR.com.au has redone it’s moronic pricing scheme,  which charged readers (whoever they are) anywhere from $25 to a staggering $150 a MONTH.

Rest assurred – they have now come back to reality and are charging just $109 for non subscribers, and $45 for subscribers.

That compares favorably with the WSJ.com site, which charges me $99 as a non subscriber.

But wait….

The new AFR.com.au figure is still PER MONTH, while that WSJ.com figure is per YEAR.

So for the dubious privilege of using AFR’s unusable flash-based service, I’d have to pay, well, basically 12 times what I pay for the Wall Street Journal.

And as the article in fellow Fairfax publication smh states:

Keeping subscriptions contrasts with a move by The New York Times, which in September decided to scrap its TimesSelect subscription service, which was two years old, in favour of increasing advertising sales. The chairman of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, has indicated he will make access to The Wall Street Journal’s website free

Meanwhile the obvious is happening:

A former AFR editor, Alan Kohler, launched a free finance site, BusinessSpectator, last week.

Actually that Business Spectator site is pretty good. It was the first place that I saw the news about $113 billion giant BHPB (who I am consulting to a tiny part of) bidding for $70 billion rival Rio Tinto. They also already have advertisements.

Stuff Entertainment

Published November 3, 2007 fairfax , media Leave a Comment

The headlines, it’s all about the headlines:

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Disclaimer These opinions are my own, and not that of any of my current or former clients.
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