Goodbye to Australia's largest media company

Aug 04, 2025

Welcome to a Monday update from Unmade.

Today: A media milestone as shareholders vote to sell Australia’s biggest locally listed media company Domain, in a move which also brings down the curtain on the heavyweight career of Nick Falloon.

We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub, end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, please hold the date for your city:

A panel discussion in a pub as part of the Compass event series

November 3 – Compass Sydney
November 5 – Compass Brisbane
November 10 – Compass Adelaide
November 11 – Compass Perth
November 17 – Compass Melbourne
November 18 – Compass Hobart

Unmade’s paying members get a free ticket to Compass. Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.

And you also get access to our paywalled archive.

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Domain’s last days

End of a 50 year media road for Nick Falloon

In the end, it was all wrapped up before lunch.

By 11.45am this morning, Domain had updated the ASX. Of the 485m votes cast at today’s shareholder vote, 484m were in favour of selling to the US-based Costar.

Needing a minimum 75% yes vote, the majority was actually 99.88%.

A huge majority of shareholders voted to take the deal

While the result was not in doubt - Nine had committed to voting its 60.1% stake in favour of the deal - today’s vote is a landmark moment.

It means that the largest local media stock on the ASX, with a market capitalisation of $2.8bn, will vanish from the market in just over three weeks’ time when CoStar completes the deal on August 27. Domain will vanish even sooner from the ASX - trading will be suspended from close of business this Thursday.

With the value of its Domain stake off the books, Nine’s own market capitalisation will shrink from its current $2.7bn to what is likely to be around $1bn. Depending on market sentiment, Nine could even fall below Ooh Media’s current $957m.

Domain was only on the ASX for eight years. It was floated late in 2017 when owner Fairfax Media needed to demonstrate to a sceptical market that its assets went beyond printed newspapers.

It was one of the assets that a few months later persuaded Nine’s shareholders that Fairfax was worth buying.

The decision exasperated Domain’s then boss, the flamboyant Antony Catalano who memorably parted ways with Domain’s chairman Nick Falloon two months later with the words: “See that square thing in front of you? It’s a computer. See the round thing at the side? It’s the on switch. You should learn how to use it.”

In the end, Nine’s management never made the most of having Domain in the portfolio. It did not help that the new Nine board remained divided on company lines. With Peter Costello as Nine chair from the TV camp, and Falloon as deputy from the Fairfax side, there was always a perception that Falloon had expected a turn as Nine chair. Instead, retaining the Domain chairmanship was his consolation prize.

And the end of Domain as a locally listed business also represents another landmark - the end of Falloon’s career after almost half a century in media. That included working for the Packer family from 1982 to 2001 during which he rose to CEO of PBL enterprises. He then went on to run Network Ten.

There were no surprises today, but it was still a significant moment.

Unmade Index up as Domain sale gets the nod

ARN Media was the top mover on the Unmade Index today, with the audio company’s share price rising by 2.2%. It came on the same day that the company announced it was networking The Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show nationally out of Melbourne.

Rival broadcast company Southern Cross Austereo fell by 1.7%, while radio minnow SEG rose by 1.9%.