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Mashable to keep Australia site open after Ziff Davis sale

Online media company Mashable is to keep its Australian site open despite shuttering its Singapore based Asian operations after completing its sale to Ziff Davis.

Mumbrella Asia understands that Mashable Australia will remain open for the present due to Ziff Davis’ commercial relationships in the market. Currently, the Sydney-based office operates on a skeleton staff of three people: one editor, a reporter and a salesperson.

Connellan was appointed as editor of Mashable Australia in September

In September this year, Mashable appointed Shannon Connellan as its new Australian editor.

Following her appointment, Mashable Australia’s audience climbed by 8.8% to a unique audience of 284,000.

But the three remaining staff at Mashable Asia – editor Victoria Ho, reporter Yvette Tan and head of sales Meng Lye Liu – were sent emails at 3am Singapore time today confirming the end of the two-and-a-half-year operation.

Speaking to Mumbrella Asia, Ho said: “I’m pretty disappointed, but I accept that’s how business is. The team was small and made up of self-starters and we will all miss each other.” 

Originally founded in 2005 by Pete Cashmore as a blog about social media, Mashable was once the fastest growing publication in the world, with traffic peaking at 27 million monthly unique users in December 2015, according to comScore.

The company opened its APAC operations in July 2015 with Ho at the helm in Singapore.

However, since then, Mashable has struggled to maintain its readership owing to the algorithm correction by Facebook from which it drew the bulk of its traffic.

By 2016, the company recorded a net loss of $10 million despite its revenue rising by 36 per cent to US$42 million. 

Last month, it was reported that Mashable would be sold to low-cost publishing specialist Ziff Davis for US$50 million – one-fifth of its one-time value.

After the deal was closed, it was announced that Ziff Davis would lay off 50 of the site’s employees, offering remaining Mashable employees jobs at its other publications.

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