Building a Digital Media Business

While catching up on industry news this morning I saw a display ad from News Corp Australia, promoting their food media network, the #1 largest audience for the category in AU. There's a short back story worth sharing here on how large media businesses get built, and my origin role in this particular business.

1. In 2005 I was CEO of FPC Interactive, the newly-created digital division of the Federal Publishing Company, owned by IPMG, which published magazines and community newspapers, including Vogue Australia and the Wentworth Courier. With the support and encouragement of the Board, I built a digital media business as an “intrepreneur” within a large traditional media company, and was very fortunate to work with a highly talented executive team, and even more fortunate to be able to recruit an equally talented digital team.

We created taste.com.au from scratch, using recipe content from the extensive magazine archive from the various food magazines FPC Magazines published, including Delicious, Vogue Living and Super Food Ideas. This was a mammoth task, converting an archive of over 15,000 recipes that were only available digitally back then from the high-res PDFs used for printing the magazines. The team spent three months scraping the PDFs and converting them into a digital database with a structured and searchable taxonomy and consistent nomenclature. 

We negotiated usage with rights owners, developed brand positioning and a user experience strategy based on the then emerging Web 2.0 environment, with the ability to include UGC - user generated content, which nows seems such an archaic phrase, given the overwhelming bulk of all content today is generated by users!

Once launched, taste.com.au quickly rose to be the #1 food website in AU, easily surpassing the incumbent leader published by nineMSN, and both audience metrics and ad revenue in the first year surpassed all expectations. Of note, our engineering team had a good understanding of search engine optimisation, so Taste ranked at the top of organic search results for user searches for everything from obscure, narrow searches for recipe ingredients through to generic searches such as ‘omelette recipe’.

2. In 2007 FPC was sold to News Corp, and all of the media assets, including the websites, magazines and newspapers went to News. I remained with IPMG and subsequently built the Independent Digital Media business, an adventure story for another day.

3. Some years later, having left IDM to start my own tech advisory and investment firm, I represented the owner of bestrecipes.com.au, the #3 independent AU recipe website, and in a competitive M&A transaction process with the large media companies in AU, News Corp emerged as the successful acquirer of Best Recipes.

Through these acquisitions and other organic content and digital properties they have developed, News Corp has subsequently built a large and successful digital media business in the food and lifestyle space, for which I congratulate them on their success.

These back stories are important for founders building digital businesses today, as the path to success is rarely a linear journey and navigating the challenges can be made easier when there are learnings from past successes and failures. 

Strategically combining your strong organic growth with sensible bolt-on acquisitions to scale faster is a well established routine for corporates building leadership positions in sectors, and in the current Southeast Asia tech landscape there are many opportunities to consolidate sub-scale businesses through M&A to access new markets, build capability and add customer relationships, driving faster scaling towards market leadership and growth in profitability.

If you are a founder building a digital media or consumer internet business today and have questions on how to grow faster, who to partner with, how to navigate funding and acquiring or selling tech businesses, I’m available to talk to you on a confidential, no-obligation basis.