Media Cafe closes after failing to win ad dollars
Australian media website Media Cafe has closed its doors.
Owner Chris Muir told Mumbrella: “It’s a pretty straight forward story – it just wasn’t supported by advertisers from a revenue point of view.”
Although the site was not audited, Muir said that towards the end it was reaching 16,000 unique visitors per month and delivering 150,000 page impressions.
Online traffic tool Alexa.com (which does not always have a high degree of accuracy) suggests that the site struggled to attract the reach of other Australian trade titles coverign the media and marketing industry.
Muir said that his best advertising supporter had been Pacific Magazines, which was also a client of his agency Smoke Signals. Other advertisers included Adshel and APN Outdoor.
When Mumbrella reported on Muir’s plans for MediaCafe in late 2009, Muir said the plan was to build a media community. He said today: “The first version where we built it as a community site for the media industry was too big a leap for most people.”
Muir said that the other lesson he had learned was in underpromoting the site. He said: “I was guilty of not following my own advice to clients about (not using) the Field Of Dreams strategy – ‘build it and they will come’. I probably did not do anything near enough legwork to promote it.”
Muir said that there would ne no redundancies because he was the only one working on the site. He had outsourced the technical side which cost him “a lot”, he said.
Muir said that he had already secured $3m funding for his next project which is likely to launch in 2012. He declined to give details but said: “My observation would be that be that the world is about integration across media platforms.”
Other launches for the creative industry at about the same time as Media Cafe that are still going include directory Mediascope, screen network Media i and The Loop, which picked up a gong at the AIMIA Awards in March.
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Too bad Chris.
I thought it was a really good site.
Why don’t you take it up Tim?
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I dont wish to be unkind but the main reason I never visited this site was its bizarre and confusing graphics rendering it virtually unreadable. Please employ a decent graphic designer next time.
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Chris
,
Social Media ?????????
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Sad that the site has gone under but a couple of observations. I visited the site often and it looked to be mainly an aggregator of news that could be found on other sites (ie: AdAge), secondly the layout was confusing and hard to navigate, and finally when they sent out emails the topic of the email was never easily found on the site.
Good luck with the new venture, hopefully it bring more success
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I found Mediacafe to be an excellent roundup of what I’d already read on AdAge the night before.
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Gee, this sounds like it was a pretty good idea. The problem for me is that I had no idea that it existed until now, otherwise I would have been a regular visitor.
What a shame it didnt have a bigger promotional profile
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