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MessyMedia ceases blog publishing

Posted: 23/07/08 By: Laura Oliver
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MessyMedia has ceased publication of its two blogs and ended the company's digital publishing business.

The company will now concentrate on digital media consultancy work following the closure of political blog Westmonster today and London lifestyle blog Glitterditch, which was closed last month.

Westmonster was launched by MessyMedia in September last year as part of a strategy to match high-end blogging with mass appeal.

However, audience figures for both titles have not been sufficient enough to 'warrant continued investment', said MessyMedia's co-managing directors Lloyd Shepherd and Andrew Levy in a blog post.

"When we launched last year, it was with the belief that there was an unserved niche for stylised reporting and content that fell between what the large media companies were doing, and what independent bloggers were providing," said Shepherd and Levy.

"We're not saying that isn't true, but we are saying it's going to take significant amounts of investment in marketing and audience-building to build a business in there, for all sorts of reasons."

Recruiting writers for the titles and paying them based on audience numbers and post frequency had also been problematic, they added.

“We started with the working assumption that there was a significant tranche of young journalists in the UK willing to take a punt on a small publisher in return for increasing their own profile,”

“What we found was that, at least at this point in time, those writers just don't seem to exist in any significant numbers in this country. While we were able to find some very dedicated and talented writers, the effective advertising CPM we'd have needed to pay them a reasonable wage only existed at an audience size orders of magnitude larger than we were able to achieve.”

Read Journalism.co.uk's interview with the founders of MessyMedia.

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