The New Daily has reported an excellent result, five years since launch. Founder, Bruce Guthrie, looks back on the five years is a terrific piece those interested in media and, in particular, news media…
Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian actually editorialised against us in those first few hours, saying we shouldn’t be allowed to launch at all. One particularly corrosive columnist tried to kickstart a letter-writing campaign to have us shut down. Apparently it was OK for American billionaires to own media, but not the members of Australian not-for-profit superannuation funds.
Then a high-profile Fairfax columnist pretty much wrote us off on day two. Another one was at it just last week. Some things never change.
We’d expected the attacks, so our editorial staff of a dozen or so just ploughed on. By the end of that first month we had attracted 157,000 unique visitors to the site and we were pretty chuffed. Now we get more than that in a single day and have 2.3 million unique visitors a month.
We also had 30,000 subscribers by the end of that first month. They’d signed up for our five-mornings-a-week newsletter because, they told us repeatedly, Australia needed more news outlets that were, well, new and Australian.
Five years on, we have close to half-a-million subscribers who receive our updates twice a day Monday to Friday and once a day on weekends. We also publish regular newsletters on property, travel and health. Taken together, we send out close to a million emails a day and six million a week. Subscription is free and open to all.
Further on in the piece is this:
In its past two monthly measures of Australian news sites, Nielsen has estimated The New Daily’s digital audience as bigger than that of The Australian.
Kudos to the people at The New Daily. Their role in news coverage in Australia is brave, needed and appreciated.