A new Melbourne focused lifestyle site has just had a soft launch this week.

http://www.broadsheet.com.au

Lots of great content to come.

As well as 2influence media we have some other ventures that I will take the opportunity to blatantly plug:
http://www.2threads.com
http://www.thiswayin.com.au
http://www.estile.com
http://www.2threadslive.com

I would also note hobogestapo.com for the list, along with Nathan Ruff from Urban Geek and Nick Holmes A Court from Buzz numbers and Shifted Pixels.

Great post Nick. Your analysis is very interesting. I certainly agree that the first step in any great enterprise is an idea. But perhaps just idea’s and great content while extremely important are not enough alone. A business model and a firm plan for sustained revenue generation is key.

I spent 6 months in the US last year and the main difference between here and there, and perhaps a reason why there is more investment there (along with the obvious population and ad revenue differences) is a more developed business community around digital media. A community that has a greater focus on revenue generation through diversified revenue streams. Achieved by a mixture of creative ideas people for the content, digital marketing experts for traffic generation and experienced sales gurus to commercialize every last visit and impression.

In my experience investors, and in particular VC firms, invest in companies that have business models that tick a number of boxes- A good idea, eyeballs, revenue (current and projected), profit and perhaps most importantly management teams and their ability to generate a return on their investment by effectively running a good business model.

There is no doubt that the low-mid level sector of Australian digital media industry has the ideas and the quality content. With a greater continued focus on strong diversified business models to maximize revenue (instead of a pure content and eyeballs focus while waiting for google’s M&A department to call your mobile) this sector can begin to build up revenue and profits (which in my view are enough to allow small-mid players to grow and scale without investment) and finally pose a real threat to breaking the dominance of the top 5 cartel. If this is achieved, then the large investment $$ will follow into this end of town further paving the way for the end of the cartels dominance.

The “mutual support” you also mention Nick is very true. Putting immediate competitiveness aside and collaborating for the longer term greater good will go along way to achieving the end goal of attracting investment and greater shares of the ever growing digital revenue pies.

I agree with Neil that you have achieved a huge amount with We Are Hunted and Native. Great to read your thoughts on this.

In terms of the question posed, there’s not much investment right now because it’s hard to get a return when the business model for publishers is advertising focused.

Australia’s a pretty tough place to be a small online publisher right now.

The portals command so much of the media spend, and many media planners have a myopic focus on unique visitors over site engagement and audience fit (even when a campaign will typically reach only a tiny fraction of these numbers).

This needs to change in order for smaller sites to reach the scale they do in the US.

It’s a good list you provide. I’d add Riley Batchelor with the stuff he’s doing with http://www.2influencemedia.com and also Dan Walsh at http://www.kwoff.com.au

“Why is there not enough investment or is there?”

I guess I wanted to see if there was enough digital media talent to justify investment.

The next question is – if the talent is there, why isn’t there more being generated from it?

I don’t know the answer, but I’m fascinated by the question.

I love Campaign Monitor – it’s amazing, we use it for all our ventures. As for Envato, today’s the first time I’ve seen it and it looks really impressive.

Campaign Monitor didn’t make the list because I didn’t seem them as a media company. If I was going to talk about talented startups, the list would have been thousands of words longer. Atlassian, Wotnews, Adioso, Stateless Systems – Silicon Beach people – there are lots of examples.

Dion – Claims of Vine supremacy aside, Lifelounge should have made the original list. It’s a media/content focussed business with a diversified business model.

Interesting to see you are still making that false claim publicly. I’ll repeat what I said in my blog post about The Vine:

I challenge The Vine to tell the market how they substantiate their Number one youth audience claims.

http://blog.thesoundalliance.net/2009/08/19/%E2%80%9Cwe%E2%80%99re-number-1-cause-we-said-so%E2%80%9D/

Looking forward to a response, finally.

Neil

There’s a lot of other innovate companies in Australia in digital media like Campaign Monitor and Envato who have been able to grow and sustain a good business model.

I think that you could add the guys at Allure Media to this list, they own the Australian rights to 4 of the top 10 Australian blogs (Defamer, Kotaku, Lifehacker and Gizmodo) and have localised the content with Australian editors!

Also well worth a mention in the Pop Culture realm of digital media is the relatively new UHH and The Blackmail.

http://uhh.com.au/
http://www.theblackmail.com.au/

I also think non traditional media outlets such as Ksubi and Kirin’s “Big In Japan” blog and Modular Ideas and V Energy Drink’s “V Raw” page are good examples of creativity in the digital space. They’ve both engaged their existing communities with great branded content.

Nice work on the list Nick!

Ash

cheers