mX could have stayed relevant if it dropped the ‘commuter paper’ mentality
When mX was challenged to innovate or die by the rise of digital, Ben Lilley asks why death was chosen over innovation.
Launching mX in 2001 was a career highlight for me. Just eight months prior, I’d taken the leap from senior creative at George Patts to Creative Director of my own agency, SMART, with CD and co-founder Paul Findlay.
Our idea was for a creative boutique with a focus on dot com brands. It didn’t take long to work out what a bad idea that was. The need for some ‘proper’ bricks and mortar clients became rapidly evident.
News already has news.com.au, the No. 1 news website in the country, targeting a similar demographic. Why would it push yet another free digital property to compete against its paywall mastheads? News.com.au is already controversial among the metro titles for hoovering up audience. mX existed only because of its distribution method – smartphones killed that, and it lost its reason to live.
Fair question @shaun. But why does the number 1 in any market bother to have a brand portfolio? Like most large corporations, News has multiple ‘offline’ and online products, to target different consumer and advertiser demographics, needs and niches. And to lock out competitors. A digital mX property like the one outlined here would be significantly different from any other News digital property I know of. It would be revenue accretive.
You know you can actually advertise inside the trains these days….. so really mX is redundant.
Agree in concept, but to be honest, any effort to move from printed press to app or web only is only ever seen as a downsize and a step on the path to inevitable closure.
Without seeing the numbers its hard to make this call – but I’d have liked to have seen News stick with it, potentially re-invest in it, revitalise, and try to compete with mobile devices. Ordinarily its not a strategy you’d ever contemplate, but in the stuck-in-your-seat-with-no-other-option environment of a train carriage or bus, maybe thats a time where consumers may just maintain interest in a printed paper as well as their devices.
Social and device channels could always have been used to maintain engagement with the mX brand, but playing a secondary role to the hero printed product.
As Tim says elsewhere – its sad to see it go.
Well said. Shifting mx to a full digital platform seems kind of obvious when spelt out like this. But i doubt it would have ever occurred to news. Once a paper business always a paper business. Would love to have seen how this strategy might have played out though. Could have been a gamechanger.
@Shaun Yes news.com.au already has similar content to mX. Even if a digital only mX was successful (in a very crowded digital space), all it would do is cannibalise news.com.au’s audience, and thus lose the number one spot for online news. I don’t see how a digital mX would be significantly different from other News digital offerings. News also shut down a number of free community titles a couple of years ago and these barely rated a mention, yet these were once absolute cash cows and probably impacted more people both in the communities they served and the staff who worked for them, than mX ever did.
I guess you didn’t know, mX tried all this.
It was pretty bad timing when the first attempt at mobile content was actually too soon. The short-lived m-site was launched long before the first iPhone and decent data packages so it was clunky and “free” downloads were unfriendly to data costs for users. Its failure sent mX’s focus back to its print-only roots.
Then came the mX app which launched nearly three years ago and won a PANPA for best news site or app, beating much bigger and better-staffed competition. It was slso very popular and was upgraded earlier this year.
Now the app will be taken over by another team in News and kept alive, although I suspect will be quite different.
Exactly what I was about to write Mo, it seems that the key suggestion in this article had been (mostly) attempted by MX. They were pushing their app heavily for quite some time.
As someone who used to read MX on the train, I would never have bothered to move to the web version of the paper. Once you move into that platform suddenly you’re up against thousands of better choices from actual newspapers to face book etc. The content in MX was never so fantastic I would seek it out online – it was just the convienience of walking past and picking up a free paper worked.