Although the Gold Coast is not a capital city it is still the 6th largest city in Australia. The Gold Coast Bulletin is a daily News Ltd Newspaper that services the city. The weekend real estate section is the cash cow for the Bulletin and every saturday it dwarfs the rest of the paper combined. At its peak it can be close to an inch thick. This real estate section is cobranded Realestate.com.au in print just like many other News Ltd papers around the country.

Unlike Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne we do not have a network of a regional or community based newspapers who focus on real estate providing pressure on the Gold Coast Bulletin. The southern end of the Gold Coast does have an independent in there providing competition but in the central and Northern parts of the Gold Coast the community newspapers are owned and operated by the Gold Coast Bulletin themselves. As you can imagine they provide virtually no market pressure to their parent company.

The Gold Coast Bulletin use to operate the website www.gcbulletin.com.au but in recent times they acquired the premium domain www.goldcoast.com.au which they have setup as portal. News features heavily on the site as you would imagine but there is also a substantial amount of other content such as locality guides, tourist information, accommodation bookings and much much more. The www.goldcoast.com.au website is clearly labelled “Copyright 2009 News Limited” and branded with the News Digital Media logo.

The portal also features a suburb profile on every Gold Coast suburb complete with suburb description, demographic information and property statistics. Included on the pages is a Google Real Map displaying properties for sale on Google Real Estate. There is absolutley no mention of the RealEstate.com.au connection at all on these pages. In fact links on the page to “All Properties For Sale” are linked to SuburbView.

The lack of Realestate.com.au branding on the site is really confusing considering their alliance and the fact that News Limited is a major shareholder in REA. Google Real Estate Maps on a News Limited website is a perfect example of how Google is making inroads into the industry because the top two portals are stuck in their old ways of doing business.

The web designers naturally wanted to add rich content for their website showing off property for sale in each suburb of the Gold Coast and realestate.com.au (or domain.com.au for that matter) dont offer any tools, widgets or api’s for websites to integrate their data, even sister websites in the same stable. But Google does so rather than have nothing they chose to use Google!

Gold Coast subscribers to Realestate.com.au who dont have their properties on Google Real Estate should be more than dissappointed.

Red faces all round I bet!

This again highlights the necessity for the top 2 portals to stop being so myopic and provide widgets and api’s for other websites to use which is something that we talked about a lot over the years here at Business 2.  Real Estate Agents, community websites and other local businesses would appreciate the opportunity to integrate property information into their website using these sort of tools. As far as I can see everyone is a winner in this sort of relationship which is why it is has been so popular with a range of websites including US real estate portals like Trulia and Zillow.  Apparently some News Ltd web designers would appreciate the opportunity as well!

9 Comments »

A war has erupted and it is being fought across the newspapers of the world and also in senate hearings. It is a war that the commercial newspapers, radio and television networks have a invested a lot of time in debating. But have they got a chance of changing the dynamic of the way we read news and watch television?

I have been spending the last few weeks researching my second article on ‘newspapers and the online world‘ but will not release this until next week now, as this issue deserves an article on its own. Lets have a little look at what this is all about. Read the rest of this article »

4 Comments »

Rupert Murdoch has been throwing off protectionist rants of late to pretty much anybody that will listen. On the one hand I admire the guy for building an empire and embracing the digital era, but on the other hand I wonder if he is losing his marbles.

In case you have not read my some previous articles about current day media moguls, I will repeat it here for you. Having a market share or a semi monopoly is a privilege not a right and this privilege/right is not exclusive, if you cannot adapt simply move on!

Rant One – Public Broadcasting

Rupert rolled out his son James on centre stage to deliver the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival and launched into the BBC with an argument whose motives were was so transparent that the majority of comment outside his own networks were a collective ‘rolling of the eyes’ .

The BBC in the UK and the ABC in Australia are pretty much the only news sources (aside from perhaps SBS) that are free from commercial indulgences and interference, and for the majority of the populations of both countries, an indispensable part of our lives.

James other argument was that the private sector left to their own devices would be more innovative as the BBC. Murdoch added that the BBC stifled innovation as it made it difficult for the private sector to compete.

Would we have seen classics such as Faulty Towers, Black Adder, Top Gear, Chaser, Frontline, Summer Heights High, Kath & Kim without public broadcasting?

I am sure you ca think of dozens more classics that have come from the BBC/ABC over the years. I also consider the news and current affairs on these networks so far above that of the commercial networks that for the past few years on Australia, I rarely ever watched a commercial station – if not for sports!

James also attacked the news reporting of these networks with “Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it,” he said.

State Sponsored? You lost me there James.

In my opinion the attack is the first in a few deliberate stages and is aimed at the public perception of these organisations.

However, Rupert and James are seriously deluded if they think this attack will have any effect on public perception. The BBC in the UK costs the taxpayer around $140 pound per annum and I am sure the Australian taxpayer is slugged even less per person. Now if you look at local content in bothy countries, it is almost exclusively provided by these networks.

Rant Two – News Aggregators

Rupert has come out and continued his attack on the search engines and news aggregators, telling them the time has come to pay for News Ltd’s content. This shows a complete lack of understanding of how actual search engines and news aggregator sites work. Here is a little primer for Rupert.

Lesson- Search Engine/News Aggregator Primer

Rupert, please sit down and listen to me, no not in my chair, on the little one to the right of you. That’s right the one that is the same color as the Fire Engines.

Once upon a time there was a web page, and on that web page there were little snippets of code called ‘meta-tags’. These ‘meta-tags’ carried snippets of content to make it easier for search engines to find a page. Most programmers gave the page a ‘title’ and a ‘description’ and clever software like www.wordpress.org actually automate that process.

The really clever people with coke bottle glasses at search engines and news aggregator websites created little things that we called ‘crawler bots’ that crawled around and around the Interweb to grab the billions of new or updated articles/pages and indexed them on their sites and allows this content to be found by the millions of users each day.

If your content got selected by the user they clicked on the link and they got to your website and read that article or page. Your website had advertising on it and you made lots of money from those advertisers. The more popular your website got, the more money you made. It was like magic!

What if I don’t want to play?

Now Rupert, this is where all the incredibly gifted programmers out there on the Interweb came in. If you did not want your content indexed in search engines or on news aggregator companies like Google had a standard method by which you could prevent the ‘crawler bots’ from indexing your sites content. This way of you were not happy, you didn’t have to have your content indexed.

Now go out and play with all of the other media moguls in the pay tv tent.

Overarching Strategy

Rupert and friends perfect world would see no free public news, all bloggers discredited and everyone forced into paying for everything we read. Again after more than a digital decade we have a leader of one of the most successful companies in the world bereft of any idea on how to make the same kind of money in an almost exclusive online world.

Rupert, I like you mate, you have built one of the most successful organisations of the 20th century and for that you are in an elite minority, you have success and wealth beyond any of our wildest dreams but if bullying and protectionism is the only answer you have, then please step aside and let the next generation of digital companies take over.

Later this week I have the first of a two part series on Newspapers and how they can be saved.

10 Comments »

When Telstra paid AUD $636 million for he Trading Post in 2004 many questioned yet another wasted acquisition for the Telco giant (the list is long). Today those questions have been vindicated as Telstra has now shut down the 22 print versions of the Trading Post to concentrate on the online edition. Another hit will come as many visitors to the website would have come from the print versions and the final blow maybe the poor structure of the Trading Post website – as only last year I attempted unsuccessfully to post a product (a free trial offer – that wasn’t actually free) and gave up after I could not work out how to post (it kept directing me to pay).  So I missed out on saying the phrase ‘tell him he’s dreaming’ all because a special offer I clicked on didn’t turn out out be that special after all.

As for another ‘dreamer’ Ron Walker is trying to paint his tenure at Fairfax as a savior telling ABC PM, “If we had continued to rely on the cash flows from the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Financial Review, the company wouldn’t have existed today, so, it’s paid off for us”. Yes Ron, paying $700 plus million for a ‘New Zealand only’ classifieds site saved Fairfax! Fairfax has some great opportunities but the window is closing very fast and buying up expensive digital assets that do not even cover the interest on the loan to buy that same asset is not the answer. I have no idea what Ron Walker has done in his time on the Fairfax board, but I can assure you he will not be remembered as a savior!

It truly dumbfounds me how large organisations such as Telstra, Fairfax, PBL or News Limited rarely ever create a unique product from scratch. They are all very good at buying assets at the height of the market and selling or getting out at the bottom of the market. These companies already have huge traffic to their major sites and massive databases in the classifieds arena, be it in cars, jobs, houses or general classifieds., so it should be relatively easy for them to create successful new products and increase shareholder value.

They need to get out of the habit of buying up websites for 100′s of millions of dollars and invest a few million each year in a ‘Black Ops’ style tech team to come up with new and exciting products from existing databases/systems they have.

This team should be able to tap into (read) any database and should be able to create new products from scratch without someone telling them ‘no you cannot do that, this will affect this or that’. The idea is that you create new products and test them in markets across your digital assets. This team should be able to go and meet with any division of the organisation and be granted access to any data. Yes, you must have some oversight, but that is at the end of the process, not at the beginning – if a product doesn’t fit – or is too risky – it gets shelved.

The alternative is to continue dying a slow death and live in denial. There does come a time when banks will abandon these companies or their money will run  out and for some of them the only way to survive will be to do what Telstra is doing and selling off or closing down assets.

This is the digital era and web/mobile based products will be everything to these companies in less than 10 years.

27 Comments »

As a part of connecting with real estate agents the Gold Coast Bulletin recently invited Gold Coast agents from different real estate groups for a Seminar with Tom Panos, the Real Estate Advertising Director for News Limited.

Now these seminars were a little different. They were held in a boardroom atmosphere and each real estate group had their own session with Tom and other Bully representatives. For reasons that I wont get into we did not get the rah rah seminar that was probably on the agenda. Instead we had a more open discussion of how Print fits into our offices and I for one got a lot more out of it that way.

As you would expect they were justifying Print’s as a major partner in the Real Estate industry and the agents on the other side were pointing out that Print is playing a lesser role than it ever has.

Now this is where it gets interesting. I asked Tom Panos when News would be rolling out the ability to charge sellers for real estate print advertising direct rather than charging the real estate offices for the advertising.

A part industry owned real estate print publication on the Sunshine Coast called MyPropertyReview has rolled out a seller direct payment system and had used it as the cornerstone to capture a massive market share in very short time. They really use real estate salespeople as booking agents for the newspaper rather than as the client.

The system is a really a win win for everyone concerned.  The property sellers enter into a payment system that spreads the marketing over many payments and for a lot of owners they only need to pay when the property settles. Real Estate agents can get on with the job for marketing, promoting, selling  and negotiating the sale without having to be a debt collector, a job that is notoriously hard if the property has not sold.

MyPropertyReview has decimated the real estate sections in the local newspapers. In typical style the established players responded very slowly but once they lost a large slice of their business they have had to slash their price trying to entice clients back and introduce similar billing systems.

Tom Panos confirmed that News is trialling such a system in at least one marketplace and it is up for review and consideration for a much wider release.  I got the feeling that Tom himself was not too keen on the whole concept  and he quickly offered problems with the system. His main objection was the fact that the newspapers were not geared to collect thousands of payments that this sort of system would create.  This really seemed a bit of cop out  as the classified departments would take far more credit card payments than any real estate section would create.

The biggest problem I see with implementing such a system is the mates rates deals being offered for certain real estate groups would cause even more problems in the marketplace than they do now.  If some agents are on a higher print rate they can effectively mask their higher cost by only providing a total figure for all marketing costs.  But if two agents provide a booking sheet with the same ad size in the same publication on the same dates and one is nearly half the price of the other, its not that easy to hide, or to explain away.   The huge differences most newspapers have in their tiered charge system would be working against  this sort of model.  the need to have a flat rate, or something close to a flat rate to really get the most of it.

However… I think the real problem with this concept rolling out everywhere lies with the fact that for many markets they simply don’t have to… Sadly it has been a long long time since an old media company has come up with anything even close to being innovative for the Real Estate industry.

I know in our market place this sort of billing system would be very welcome by many agents.

I would like to think News is trialling this for serious consideration for a national roll out but I fear that its a very localised response to a competitor. Maybe I am wrong but I reckon the major newspapers will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to release this without a competitor doing so but if your local newspaper were to introduce such a billing scheme would you welcome it? Would this cause your yearly investment in print advertising to increase? and would you offer newspaper advertising as an option to owner when previously you might have held back?

27 Comments »