Here’s an interesting insight into the Fairfax Media group’s strategy at a time when the news for media, and Fairfax in particular, is not good.
The key words have to be: “its not so much a newspaper strategy as a digital strategy”.
Some Fairfax shareholders have drawn Crikey’s attention to an announcement last October that Fairfax had become a strategic partner in the group OMG, which owns “generic” domain names and needs content to “build out” its sites.
Fairfax Digital Director of Corporate Development, Dale McCarthy, said OMG will leverage Fairfax’s assets and knowledge to achieve its goal of building the “largest network of response ad (pay per click) sites and niche directories” in Australia.
Ms McCarthy indicated the move into online search and directories is ”not so much a newspaper strategy as a digital strategy”. She said Fairfax would be a minority shareholder in OMG, who would source content from Fairfax as well as other parties to populate the sites.
The OMG website contains a timeline that has Fairfax coming in as a “strategic partner”, and says:
Fairfax will leverage their extensive content library, technology platform and online advertising expertise to help OMG build out their portfolio of websites.
Some indication of what OMG is looking for in a partner is here.
Basically, its all about getting noticed in advertising land, with domain names that are search engine friendly, and light-on pleasing to advertisers content of the kind you might find in filling up the space between the ads in the real estate or travel sections.
Not so much a newspaper strategy as a digital strategy.
Hmmm.
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