The Guardian’s parent company cuts losses
The parent company of The Guardian Australia has narrowed its losses to $55.8m and boosted digital revenues by 24 per cent for the year ended 2014, and claims it now has more than five million unique browsers in Australia.
The results are the first to include revenues from Guardian News Media’s Australian operation which launched in May 2013, although they do not break out exactly what the each division has made.
Parent company Guardian Media Group (GMG) posted a profit of $1bn driven by its sale of its 50 per cent stake in Trader Media.
Andrew Miller, GMG CEO, said: “In the current year, we must focus relentlessly on reducing underlying operating losses at Guardian News & Media, which continues to be impacted by the volatile trading conditions and structural changes sweeping the newspaper industry.”
Digital revenues rose to $126.7m for the year, compared to $101.9m for the 2013 results, whilst the loss was down from $61.6m for that year.
In its results release the company said the Australian site reached 5.6m unique users in May, making it the “third most read quality news website”.
Nielsen’s numbers for the month put the Guardian on a unique audience of 1.864m and the ninth most popular news site in the country, showing a disparity between the company’s own internal metrics and the Nielsen data claimed by managing director Ian McClelland in an interview with Mumbrella in May.
However, the company said if one-off costs, which included the set-up funds for the Australian operation, were stripped out the underlying loss would be $35.3m for Guardian News Media.
Alex Hayes
I always remember a workmate in London once calling The Guardian a “student rag for spoilt 40 year olds.” When reading the Oz site I’d tend to agree.
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Those numbers are disappointing, local australian players are generating that sort of revenue without global footprint.
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I always remember a colleague of mine saying how any publication produced by the Murdoch press is extremely right leaning and it’s readers (flock) are scared, vulnerable, angry pitch forkers…
(Sorry guys I had to counter…)
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@Shane: Oh no, it’s the Great Satan, evil Murdoch666 himself and his conspiracy to put Tony “Fuck Abbott” Hitler in power by dumbing down the nation to a level well below your towering intellect. If only the rest of the country was as enlightened as yourself, maybe Labor and the Greens would still be in power. Such a shame the rest of the country is so scared and vulnerable they can’t think for themselves anymore and need the Daily Terror to tell them what to think. Such a shame.
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@ Dave…. love it!
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So The Guardian has about 15 years to go, give or take a bit of fiduciary duty on the part of its board. What are remarkably mindless, indulgent unexciting and fundamentally self indulgent bunch of twats.
Someone has gifted them $1 billion and all they can think to do with it is produce a fairly feeble web site and plan for a slow death.
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@Facts are helpful
This fairly feeble web site that will die a slow painful death is currently the 7th biggest news site in the world http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/News
After equally feeble Reddit, Yahoo, CNN, Huffington, NYT & Weather.com
Couldn’t see any local sites there
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So it lost $55 million – well thank god it’s popular then
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@just Saying: take a billion and divide by 80 million and let me know what that looks like to you.
Traffic is a cost measure.
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So who decided to hold the grumpy, scared old man conference in the comments thread of this article? I mean, if they do a good job of reinvesting that large amount of one-off money into something to continue improving revenue in growth areas, this could be positive news.
But let’s not get in the way of a bit of snark, huh?
Hope these guys do well, and push incumbent local players to lift their game.
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@le sigh: grumpy that these folk get a free pass and all they do is replicate the bilge we get elsewhere. FFS how many billion dollar opportunities are there and do you seriously think the guardian is innovative or important????
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And yet…
Here you grumpy gits are passionately debating a UK news site which is over here and eating some of your lunch, screwing your paywall plans, and has another 15 years to eat the rest.
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Innovative enough that WPP owned Kanter just bought Guardians in house data visualisation, site dev and interactive arm and important enough that it broke the NSA story amongst others…
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I love newspapers, it doesn’t matter whether they are print form or digital….and whether they are UK, US or Australian owned. A well laid out newspaper is a work of art but it’s s shame that due to changing attitudes to paying for things like quality journalism that newspapers are dying in the arse.
Signed
A journalism punter who is not at all looking forward to the last rites of Newspapers……
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