Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Is this man the smartest guy in AU digital media?


Former Text Media owner and Sydney Morning Herald editor Eric Beecher is building up a pretty impressive web business.

With Crikey established, Business Spectator growing rapidly, Eureka Report and Smart Company - Beecher has 4 publications that are hard not to notice.

Plus he has a team of people who are well respected - Kohler, Gottleibsen, Mayne, Amanda Gome, Jonathan Green and many more - who are delivering engaging content.

And he is making very strong in roads on an extremely valuable audience and showing that there will always be demand for strong, intelligent content.

So whilst the groups that used to dominate eyeball share of this lucrative audience focus on singles sites and trying to nail youth, Beecher has put together web assets that would be pound for pound, page for page probably the most valuable in the country. Advertisers want to reach a quality audience in quality surrounds - the Beecher sites achieve this.

Sure, the audiences aren't super massive - but they are strong and they are loyal to quality content. And right now, quality is the key differentiator as it is relatively easy to reach most audiences online ... but difficult to reach them in quality environments.

According to Nielsen Market Intelligence, to 22 September they had achieved the following user figures this month.

Business Spectator - 152,000 users
Crikey - 118,000 users
Smart Company - 65,000 users
Eureka Report - 39,000 users
.

These four are sites to watch - because I feel they haven't even started to scratch the surface on what they could do.

1 comment:

Rowan Wilde said...

We're all having a lot of fun at Business Spectator - it's a great time to be producing an innovative high quality, niched, business media resource.

We've got our first birthday coming up soon - don't miss what we have planned.

Cheers,

Rowan Wilde
Marketing Manager