Fairfax to go digital-only
Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood says the media company will move to a digital-only model.
Hywood doesn’t put a date on it but says the move will be in the future and only if print becomes unprofitable.
This makes perfect sense even if there’s little evidence of other newspaper publishersmaking a successful move to digital. Media companies have little choice, either shrink to a digital core and hope the mastheads continue to carry weight, or hang around for the inevitable day when the presses stop running.
Of course, anyone reading this site will have known that was true a decade ago.
Hywood says Fairfax’s digital strategy is ahead of the company’s competitors and ahead of most traditional media companies around the world. He is only part right. Fairfax’s most serious competition comes from media companies that were born digital.
Speaking of businesses born digital, I wonder about Fairfax’s strategy in the light of its part sale of the TradeMe auction site. If I was in Hywood’s shoes TradeMe would sit at the core of my business. By now there would an Australian TradeMe. And I’d junk those crappy low-value Google ads on Fairfax sites and link to TradeMe auctions instead.