What does it take for a business publication to succeed in Australia?
Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly analysis for Unmade’s paying members.
Below, we examine why it’s so difficult for business media publications to survive, let alone thrive in Australia.
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The factors that drive so many business publications to failure - and how they can succeed
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
The Australian media environment has a tendency to be inhospitable to new business and finance publications.
The landscape is littered with niche publications that have struggled to find audience, while legacy behemoths continue to command most of the market share. According to several media bosses who are currently attempting to scale business titles of their own, the struggle to monetise a business news publication is largely due to the relatively small size of the market and the unwillingness of marketers to switch spend to smaller titles.
The latest online ranking of financial news from Ipsos sees the financial sections of general news sites dominate the top ten. More than 11 million Australians aged 14 and over consumed finance news related content on websites and apps in September.
Despite many new entrants in this competitive arena, the finance section of News Corp’s news.com.au comes top for business and financial news readership with a monthly audience of nearly 3.9m.
Next comes the Forbes global site with an audience of 2.6m and the Australian Financial Review which reaches 2.2m. Other paywall-free titles in the top ten include 7news.com.au, MSN Money and Yahoo Finance.
Business publications have an especially hard time surviving in the Australian media landscape.
Titles that have shuttered in recent years include business magazine BRW (which was partly folded into the AFR), Business Spectator and Eureka Report (after they were acquired by News Corp). Nine’s Chainsaw has had a shaky start with top editorial talent leaving shortly after launch. The Market Herald has faced farcical levels of internal turmoil and David Koch’s Pinstripe Media has just laid off its sales and partnerships team.
Global publications rarely make it down under, and they don’t have a history of faring well when they do.
One example of a recently shuttered business media import was