Political website New Matilda to close, hit by tight ad market
New Matilda, the website that launched in 2004 positioned to provide Australians with intelligent coverage of news, analysis and satire, has announced that it will shut down on June 25.
In a letter published on the website by editor Marni Cordell, readers were told “we’ve run out of money”.
She blamed a large part of its failure to break even by this year, to the “difficulty of selling online advertising in the current media environment”.
In February 2007 Duncan Turpie bought the site which was operating at a significant loss. It was that year they made the decision to scrap subscriptions to boost readership in a bid to increase its advertising revenue.
But Cordell said that while traffic to the site has grown over the past three years, the ad dollars haven’t followed.
She said:
Moreover, as the site has increased in popularity, so have our running costs.
Ironically, it’s at the time of newmatilda.com’s greatest success that we are making this sad announcement.”
The site was established by John Menadue, a former private secretary to Gough Whitlam, in August 2004.
Update: According to Nielsen Market Intelligence, in April New Matilda averaged just over 1500 domestic daily unique browsers, and just over 120,000 monthly page impressions.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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lol ‘tight ad market’ … online has grown 15% YOY.
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According to Nielsen, the site was becoming more successful in terms of UBs & Page Impressions than ever before, but this still only amounted to YOY readership growth of about 35%, and only about 1/15 the traffic of a close competitor.
Seems like a case of a quality but too-niche property that couldn’t bring in the traffic to get beyond selling inventory to ad networks.
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I’m unsure political environments are particularly compelling for advertisers targeting joe schmoe personally, regardless of reach.
Plenty of sites succeed with low audiences, context can be a differentiator.
if tight ad market is another way of saying they couldn’t live with in their means, then I agree.
Commenter 1 hits in on the head 🙂
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hey there,
just for the record: nielsen ratings for NM are inaccurate. we actually get almost double what they say we do.
Marni (NM editor)
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Hi Marni,
Could that be because you’re counting overseas traffic too, and Nielsen’s headline numbers include only domestic?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
no much more than half our traffic is from Oz
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crikey!
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Marni – are you talking monthly UBs, average daily UBs, UAs … which?
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I hate to see any business have to close, but at the end of the day their traffic wasn’t producing revenue for advertisers, or they weren’t effectively selling. I haven’t seen their media kit, but suspecting that ad rates were flat charged based on high quality exposure.
In this day and age if a website isn’t selling on a pay-per-performance model, they need to be producing the goods each and every day, or advertisers will simply go to someone who is …. or to Adwords.
Tommy
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Hang on… double the traffic shown by NNR e.g. 240k PIs and not able to break even?
You’re doing it wrong.
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Sorry to see happen; but this is the reality for ad supported businesses in Australia. Brutally tough.
the ad market is generally only brutal for average media businesses with no real point of difference or bad commercial ops … it’s nothing new, it’s always been like this.
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Life is a boomerang.Good Riddance.Maybe just maybe you can fool some people some of the time but not all of the people all off the time.
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Sorry to hear that is the case for New Matilda.
I think it must also be the case that they are competing in a rather crowded market of opinion following the launch of titles like Fairfax’s National Times and News Ltd’s The Punch. Add to this Online Opinion, Crikey and the magazine The Week and it starts to fill up…. and you haven’t even taken into account the plethora of Blogs and opinion pages of mainstream news websites.
I also don’t think it’s fair to be analyzing their ad revenue based on speculative figures. The editor seems to be contesting those, and there is little information in the article to understand what rates they were achieving. They wouldn’t close for no reason and I think it’s true to say the ad market has hit hard for some.
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Agree with L above. Sad to see anything close but New Matilda was just too much more of the same. And even then its competitors were better. It’s information overload and unless you’re markedly good or markedly different you’ll soon be in the also-rans category.
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