Marine audiences demand specialised news NOW

1:07 AM Wed 11 Mar 2009 GMT

'Circulations are decreasing as is ad revenue, forcing publishers to scale back their print titles and move online.' . Click Here to view large photo

As consumers spend more time on the Internet than in front of television, online marine news have long passed boating magazines as a marine news and information source.

While there are still more than 70 marine print magazines published across the Asia Pacific, their influence continues to wane.

While some of them are just quietly closing their doors, as did Yaffa's Powerboat magazine last year, others are reducing their yearly issues. Modern Boating, now owned by News Limited once published eleven times yearly has now dropped back to a bi-annual publication - that's just two issue a year!

Monthly subscriptions numbers for many well known marine print magazines are less than half of what they were before the Internet arrived.

Now the big audiences - the global readers - are online.

Nowadays TetraMedia's online marine news sites in the Asia Pacific, www.Sail-World.com, www.Powerboat-World.comand www.MarineBusinessNews.combetween them handle more than 90% of the entire Asia Pacific Marine news traffic

The online news industry only goes back a little more than a decade.

In 1997, Queensland web developer Aaron Goldwater started the pioneer sailing site Sailing-online. It was his first venture in publishing.

Sydney sailor, Rob Kothe came to the internet publishing world in 1998 from a strong newspaper background as well as an IT background.

His family owned TetraMedia group had a string of rural newspapers, each focused around their own communities.

TetraMedia started Sail-World in 2000 with a much stronger emphasis on local news and within 18 months, the faltering market leader Sailing-online was taken over by its rapidly growing rival.

There have been from time to time fifteen marine news sites on the scene in Australasia, they all failed to recognise the need for strong local news resources, blended with the best international news and they have either closed their sites, or failed to grow audiences beyond their small traffic of early years.

Kothe says' Rural newspapers run local news above all else, so we came to the Internet, which many thought of as a global media, knowing that the audience is really local, special interest media.

'We knew from Day One that one website could never justify the news resources needed to satisfy the marine news reader, who wanted a blend of local news and key international stories. To do that requires an international network of regional sites.

'TetraMedia now operates the largest online marine news network in the world. It now has regional sites around the world, with Sail-World UK, Sail-World Europe, Sail-World Asia, Sail-World NZ, Sail-World USA, Sail-World Australia Racing, Sail-World Cruising International, Sail-World Australia/NZ Cruising, Powerboat-World and MarineBusiness-World. Each week, more than 150,000 newsletters are sent to Sail-World, Powerboat-World and MarineBusiness-World subscribers, by its eight editors.

'While we starting with racing sailing, our Cruising audience world-wide is now huge and our Powerboat-world.com audience has grown rapidly over the last two years, busting through 30,000 newsletter readers per week in February 2009.

'Our Marine Business News online site has more than 18,000 trade readers each week, as businesses know they need serious marine news immediately not in a month or three.'

TetraMedia invested heavily in geo-location technology which allows advertisers to advertise in just one city, or around the world.

TetraMedia publishes up to 800 stories each month across the group and now delivers local and international news to 120,000 readers in the Asia Pacific

With marine industry advertisers looking closely at their budgets, the rapid trend from print to interactive (Internet) media continues.

Email us or call for details of our popular advertising packages.

Head Office - TetraMedia Brendan Maxwell
advertising@marinebusinessnews.comTel: +612 (0) 4977 2116

New Zealand - Colin Preston
nzsales@sail-world.comTel: 021 2674842

Asia - Guy Nowell
asiamedia@sail-world.comTel: + (852) 2792 6234

by Brendan Maxwell

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