Goodness me, it’s going around like the town bicycle:
Paul Clitheroe’s Australasian Wealth Investments has purchased News Corp Australia’s investor advice newsletter and website Eureka Report.
AWI will add the Alan Kohler-founded Eureka Report to its stable which includes InvestSMART and Intelligent Investor. The sale price was not disclosed.
“I’ve always admired Eureka Report for its exceptional ability to connect with private investors across Australia; we know the publication will thrive afresh under this new structure”, Mr Clitheroe, who is chairman of AWI, said.
Mr Clitheroe, a financial analyst and TV presenter, best known for hosting former Nine Network program Money, says the takeover of the investment newsletter is part of his plan to ride the wave of a tech-driven consumer revolution in investor choice.
“Whereas Intelligent Investor subscribers are very passionate about in-depth stock information, Eureka subscribers are very passionate about the philosophy of what is going on and the bigger picture,” Mr Clitheroe told The Australian.
Hmm, sounds dubious to me. Eureka Report has never been good at the big picture. What it does have, though, is a very big database and that will be of value to AWI’s various products.
Alan Kohler chimed in:
Three years and nine months after it was sold to News Corporation along with Business Spectator, the investment newsletter has a new home inside the listed financial services group chaired by Paul Clitheroe, AWI.
Meanwhile Business Spectator is in the process of being fully integrated into The Australian, ending its separate existence.
…these events, along with last week’s announcement of more redundancies at Fairfax, inevitably prompt some reflections about the changes in the media landscape since we launched Eureka Report 10 years ago and Business Spectator eight years ago.
In 2005, social media was in its infancy. News Corporation bought MySpace, which was then bigger and more successful than the one-year old Facebook. In late 2007, when Business Spectator began, Microsoft bought 1.6 per cent of Facebook for a valuation of $US15 billion. It’s now worth $US318bn.
Programmatic trading of digital advertising did not exist at all then. Now, according to Stuart Simson, chairman of Switch Digital, it represents more than 50 per cent of all online advertising, on its way to 100 per cent.
This is where computers buy and sell online display ads on exchanges using sophisticated algorithms.
The rise of programmatic trading is what forced MB to go paywall. But this is an over-exaggeration. The advertising market is already pushing back against programmatic. It is one useful tool not the be all and end all given it has no quantitative nor lead generation capability.
Nonetheless, Kohler is right that the shift has forced paywalls up everywhere and they will not be coming down!
