Eric Beecher at The Domain this Thursday

Looking forward to this interview between Brad Howarth and Private Media head Eric Beecher this Thursday.

The interview is based around the following premise.

Survivor 2.0: In 2008 a group of media companies found themselves stranded on the world's largest island, washed ashore after the sinking of the global financial markets. With a population of only 21 million to feed on, slow-moving traditional media companies struggled to reinvent themselves in time to fight off the challenge of new media upstarts. Who will survive...?

Rest assured Beecher will pull no punches, and I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

Register here - http://www.the-domain.org/ - but get in quick as it's this Thursday

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.

LinkedIn and NY Times distro alliance

I like this - makes sense and gives Linked In a good way to generate distribution but in a relevant, valuable way.

A deal like this locally could be done with a Crikey/Business Spectator - or a Plugger - or even Fairfax. Makes total sense

Techcrunch post - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/nytimes-to-customize-headlines-for-linkedin-users/

Could work for a Last FM with Music content too.