Is There An Online Future For Old Media?
The two big Finnish “old media” companies, Sanoma and Alma Media, published their 2009 results yesterday and today, respectively. However, as seems to be the common policy, neither of them was too open about the state of their online business. But luckily Alma still offered some nuggets of information for constructing a picture of what’s going on.
The two online legs of an old media company are typically classifieds and editorially driven news sites. Alma’s classifieds segment, which includes such assets as the housing site Etuovi.com and jobs site Monster.fi, posted a loss of €0.7m with an €27m revenue. Sanoma doesn’t give out any information on its online classifieds.
On the online news side, Alma publishes Iltalehti.fi, the biggest website in Finland by unique visitors. Although the full year figures for the asset were not disclosed today, the Q1/09 report from April states a revenue of €1.2m, so the annual income is likely to be around the €5m mark. Given that Iltalehti.fi relies mainly on journalistic content, the site is – after full allocation of editorial costs – most likely loss-making or, if they’re lucky, posting a very small profit.
Finnish Blog Platform Vuodatus.net Scores An Exit
Finnish blog platform vuodatus.net (in Finnish) has scored an exit. Large Finnish media house Alma Media bought vuodatus.net for an undisclosed sum from its founder Tuomas Rinta. Just back in July, Finnish blog Vierityspalkki.fi reported (site in Finnish) that Rinta had stated the site is not up for sale and he was only going to develop it a bit further. Vuodatus.net has around 55,000 blogs on its platform and claims to have around 1,500 new blog posts every day.
The part of the Alma Media that acquired the blog platform, Iltalehti, is the publisher for the third largest printed newspaper in Finland as well as one of the most popular online media in Finland. Clearly Iltalehti has the synergies in mind here and probably aims to cross direct the readers to find new content in Iltalehti and in Vuodatus.net respectively. Iltalehti also bought Telkku.com that we covered previously as well.
There is some clear gathering of web properties here to be seen from the large media houses in Finland. Another big player especially in the Finnish markets, Sanoma, has been buying up web services at an increased pace. Their latest acquisition was the Igglo.fi property, which promised to change the housing business forever.
Edit: Fixed the surname - it's Rinta and not Rintala, like we falsely quoted.
Alma Media acquires Telkku.com
Alma Media, or more precisely Iltalehti has bought the Finnish online TV-guide Telkku.com.
Telkku.com gathers over 500 000 unique visitors each week and is growing. Our guesses are that Alma Media is growing Iltalehti to be the biggest online "portal" in Finland. Many of the media sites are still lacking in innovative revenue models apart from the traditional display advertising and thus the more unique visitors you gather the better media you are when the advertiser considers her options.
It remains to be seen, whether Telkku.com will remain independent under the Iltalehti brand or not.
(via HS)
