The Daily Aus's Zara Seidler on how they built a modern news business for young people on Instagram

We're rounding up some of the best sessions we've had at Splice Beta 2022. This episode features Zara Seidler, the co-founder of The Daily Aus, which is a media startup based in Sydney. Zara talks about how TDA has built a modern news business for young people on Instagram, where they have more than 425,000 followers.

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The transcript

[00:00:00] Alan: You're listening to a recorded session from Spice Beta 2022 in Chi Mai. We've edited this but only slightly

[00:00:11] Zara: a couple of years ago, my now best friend and business partner. Uh, Sam and I, we created the Daily Aus, so we took the name on Instagram, had absolutely no idea what we were doing with it, and then basically just started to create this thing that we thought our friends would want. I'm 25. At the time, I think I was 20, and I was looking around at my friends who had never opened a newspaper in their life.

And that was not because they weren't intelligent, it wasn't because they were uneducated. It was because when they did open the newspaper, There was so much assumed knowledge that it was so difficult for them to really engage with what they were reading. If they didn't come from a family that spoke about politics at home, how were they to know what a spill was or what, you know, any of these political terms were.

And so that was the basis on which the Daily Aus started, and for a very long time it was. Our friends who were reading it, it was people that we forced to read it. Our mums, they were very supportive, but then something happened, and that's something like everyone else here really affected what we did. Um, and that was of course, the pandemic.

While we were doing the Daily Aus all these years ago, we were both in different jobs. I am not a journalist. I have never been a journalist. Sam studied journalism, but was working as a lawyer. And we were doing the daily odds every single day before and after work. So it might be at 4:00 AM before we start a shift.

It might. 11:00 PM after Sam finishes some legal, something that I don't understand. But we did it every day and we were really trying to build habit with our audience. And if I can say one thing that is so fundamental to building an audience on social media, it is building habit and consistency so that people know why they are coming to you every single.

What value are you providing to them? And so even though we had no resources, it was two very stressed out 20 year olds trying to figure out how they could create news. We still did it every single day so that people would know. Hey, I need to go check the daily OZ today. So now TDA is read by Ozzies who are looking to get into the habit of reading the news, but you know, they don't know where to start and we are their starting point.

We call ourselves the entree to the news diet. So if you know you're a bit hungry, but you're not ready for the main course, you come to us, come to us to start really getting into the systems and kind of the routine of reading the news and. Now we have over 400,000 followers on Instagram, which we come from a tiny place with not many people.

So I mean, big place, not many people. Um, so that is quite sizable given our market, and we have since launched many other verticals, which I'll go into shortly. But that is the origin story, and here it just really sets out the problem and the solution that we were trying to fix. And even though the Dalios started as a passion project, we always identified a problem because there is so much information out there.

There is such a saturation in the market. So if we weren't going to be providing value, there was no reason for us to be doing what we were doing. And so from day dot we always had a problem and we always had a solution. And like we've heard from so many other speakers, having that mission and that value drive is fundamental to creating a sustainable business because it is not easy.

It, there are ups and downs, but if you have that to drive you, it's a pretty good starting. We started this thing, we started this thing called Daily Aus. It had a couple of followers and then Covid hit, and we suddenly had all of this information about what we could do, what we couldn't do, how many cases there were in Australia, you know, we got lockdown.

Melbourne was, I think, the longest lockdown city in the world. Um, and so everybody was hungry for news and for information. And the thing that I always say as to why I think the Daily Aus took off in the way that it did is because, With some news, very privileged people have no reason to read it. You know, politics doesn't directly touch them in the way that it does.

Other people who rely on the government for money or who rely on the government for housing, and so suddenly we had this equalizer that was covid that meant every single person. Had to care about what was happening in politics and what their leaders were saying and what the news was saying. And so we saw this very big surge in our followers during Covid and so much so that we.

uh, attracted the attention of some investors and I know that we've all been through, uh, some of those wonderful sessions about investment and for me it was a much easier experience. And that's of course recognizing the privilege of living in Australia, of there being a very diverse ecosystem in Australia of funding.

And so in February of 2021, Sam and I both quit our. Because we had secured funding for the Daily Aus to just grow. And at that point we had not a scent of revenue. Uh, we had no idea how we were going to grow the revenue. Crazy investors, dunno why they did it, but thanks to them for doing it. And it was at that time that we had to come up with our values as a company if we were going to be taking.

Other people's investment. That is a serious responsibility and we needed to guide this company forward with values that would drive us. And so we developed this. It was the quality, accountability, innovation, curiosity, and integrity, and all of that was based on what we understood about our youth audience.

And so I guess I'll just stop here to explain a bit about our audience. , we know that 80% of our audience is under the age of 35, and we also know that the majority of those are. . Dunno why we haven't done it on purpose. Everyone always asks if our thing is feminine. I find that insulting, dunno what feminine news looks like, but I think news can be both feminine and masculine.

Um, and so it is none of those things. But we started growing and what I attribute to our growth among women is that we had influencers who started sharing a lot of our work. And when we talk about engaging young people in the. influencers must not be forgotten. They are so significant. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I follow them a lot.

I follow what they say. I am influenced by them. They're doing a good job. Um, and so we had influencers who during covid, during Black Lives Matter, um, during the US election, whatever it might be, they were getting a lot of pressure from their followers to say something about these political things that were happening, but.

One of them was Miss Universe and one of them was somebody else. And she said, uh, I don't know. Like why am I being asked to speak about this? And so what we saw was because we delivered objective digestible news, we had a lot of influences suddenly sharing our news on Instagram. And so we started to see this growth really pick up because.

Influencers were sharing with their platforms and then we were getting all of their followers coming to us. And this might be lost on a non-a Australian audience, but we had one influencer who has a skincare brand in Australia. Um, she's fabulous. And she shared us and we got 36,000 followers overnight.

And that is just, I mean, the power of somebody to do that is absolutely insane and blows my mind. And she's now an. So that's a nice little full circle. We knew what we wanted to do. We knew we wanted to create digestible news. We know we wanted to speak to young people. We saw that gap in the market, but how the hell were we gonna make money?

Um, still an answer I am looking for, but we, we created the Instagram first, then came the podcast, and um, then a week after we started the Daily Aus full-time. So I had quit my very stable. In government relations, Sam had quit his very stable job, uh, as a lawyer. And this might be nice for the, the meta people among us, but um, in Australia there was a bit of a situation with the government and with big tech, which meant that suddenly overnight, News was taken off meta and so just, just gone.

It had been a long process, but it was gone. And so we're sitting in our office, which is the floor of a cafe cuz you don't have an office when you run a startup and have no idea what you're doing. Um, and we were like, right, well, There goes our whole business plan. Perfect. Um, and so we had to diversify really quickly and we had to pivot.

And that is the agility of running a startup. And it is the most wonderful part that you have to ask absolutely nobody for their consent to do something. You just do it and you do it quickly and there's no red tape. So we started a newsletter because, hey, if we can. Exist on the platforms that we want to, we will try own our audience, and that's a big diversification method for making sure that no matter what happens out there, you have a direct connection to your audience.

So we started the newsletter. Um, it is a 7:00 AM weekday newsletter, much like the podcast is a 6:00 AM weekly daily podcast, which I regret every. Taking the name the Daily Os, cuz the Weekly OS would've done just fine for my sleep. But here we are. And so it was these three products that were really raining.

We were growing, we were, you know, meeting thousands of young people we felt on top of the world. And then TikTok we're like, oh. Right TikTok, what do we do with that? I somehow, at 25, had become too old and out of touch with TikTok audiences, which was humbling thought. I knew it didn't. Uh, my videos did terribly.

And so this year, very recently, we hired a 19 year old who does our TikTok, and she is fabulous. She is wonderful. But the biggest thing that I had learnt through our TikTok journey, through our Instagram journey, whatever, Is that the success of our platform and of the way that we have managed to engage?

Oh, we wouldn't want you. Yeah, you're safe, you're good. We're good. Um, we, we wanted to, um, speak to young people and what we have found is that the best way to speak to young people is to speak across from them. So it is not to speak down to them. It is not in your organization to realize. We need to speak to young people.

This is a problem, so and so go do it. Lead the strategy. And so and so is not a young person, so-and-so does not understand the habits, the behaviors, the, you know, everything there is to understand and young people are not one block. We are very different as you know, you and I and everybody is. But there are some things that make us a generation that are unique.

You know, we've all just come out of the last three years that changed our. And our studies and everything else that, you know, older generations might not understand to the same degree because they're at a different stage. And so, What we learned through all of this and through hiring a 19 year old is speak across from your audience because young people can tell the second that it is inauthentic, that it is a strategy.

Uh, and we've seen this in Australia happen that you know, the biggest media company in the world has invested millions and millions and millions of dollars into launching a youth news outlet in Australia. And they have hired young people, which is wonder. , but all of the decision making is still coming from the top and the top and all the, you know, financial decisions are coming from the top, and the top is not run by young people.

And so even if you are hiring on the ground even, so you need to be giving your young people some agency to make decisions and also to make mistakes because that's what it's all about. We make mistakes every single day and we pay for.

But that was all to say that we are just at the beginning of our journey. So though we have 400,000 on Instagram, you know, 40,000 on newsletter, however many on TikTok we are just at the beginning. There is a huge market both in Australia and globally. To speak to, to engage with and to relate to young people.

And we have just started that. But it is such an exciting journey to be on. And I alluded earlier to the fact that very early on we, we had investors, and investors wanted to understand how we were going to make money. And so I always joked that my co-founder, who is a very confident. A young man who just says whatever comes to his mind was like, well, we're never doing advertising.

We're doing things differently. Granted, we now do advertising and that's our biggest revenue model. But, um, you live and you learn. You just never say never. Because unfortunately though you might try to innovate and innovate and innovate, it is a difficult market. And, um, when you are focusing on audience growth as your top thing, you need to take the revenue that you can at that time.

So, At the moment we have got Instagram, uh, this is an old deck, so I'll just kind of speak to it. But we have Instagram, uh, where we put up Instagram story ads. Um, and the reason that we don't do native content, so branded content, is because in Australia, like everywhere else in the world, there is a significant lack of trust in the news.

Uh, and so when we look at the Australian media market, there are lots of publishers who will. You know, the best vaccines brought to you by AstraZeneca, and that is like mildly problematic when you are trying to get objective news. Um, and so we have it, it's gotten especially bad in the youth news space in Australia.

Um, I don't know if it's the same everywhere else, but certainly is at home. And so we have created a very clear delineation between editorial. And commercial. And so every ad that is anywhere is very clearly marked an ad. There is absolutely no blurring of boundaries because our most important commodity with our audience is trust.

And so in saying that, we have a newsletter that I said goes out every day, a podcast every day. Um, none of those have ever gone out without an ad. Um, and they've been going for close to, to two years, and we are very selective about the partners that we work with because young people, again, I don't wanna generalize, but in Australia, are increasingly moving towards supporting for purpose companies and brands.

And so if we were to, for example, have an advertisement by a coal. That would not work very well for us, and our audience would push back. And because we exist on social media, they tell us what they think all the time because we have this constant 24 hour loop of communication. So they will DM us, you know, thousands of dms, comments, everything.

And it is so wonderful to have that real sense of community that you just write back and you tell. , you know, thank you for this. We will take it on board. Um, and we learn a lot from our audience through that. And it was through that, that we created this new polling aspect of our business because, you know, ads are great, but we wanted to have some deeper engagement with our audience.

And during Covid we started experimenting with asking our audience questions, um, on. Instagram. So we would just put up an Instagram question and say, what do you think about not being able to leave your house, for example? Um, and then overnight we would get 90,000 responses. And very quickly we could tell what the sentiment among our audience was, and we realized that this was something that was incredibly useful and incredibly difficult to get for a lot of other legacy publishers who continue to try to understand young people, but perhaps can't reach them in the same way that we could.

But Instagram was limited in the data that we could get from that. It was. Difficult to discern where these people were, what their gender was, whatever else, without manually doing that for 90,000 people. Um, if Instagram would like to change that, you can. And so we decided to create an off platform polling offering.

And so we are taking people to our website. Don't judge me on our website. We are trying to make it better. It's a work in progress, but that polling is that we can now work with brands to. If you wanna know what young people think about, for example, there was a big horse racing event in Australia yesterday that is very controversial.

If a brand wanted to understand whether they should sponsor that or not sponsor that, they could come to us to get a really great sense of what young people think about it. And we would tell them, young people hate it, you should not do it. But that is what we have learned through polling and so, Then we have video video's, A tricky beast.

Um, given that we exist primarily on socials and, and again, even more specifically, uh, on Instagram. We hired a brilliant video guy who had worked for cnn who came to us. It was like, I'm gonna do these amazing videos about, I don't know what long thing, long form, like great exploration. And then we realize, well, no, you need to be doing reels because reels are the only way that our audience will see it.

And so we have had to innovate. We think we have hacked the system by creating carousels of one minute videos that amount. , you know, a 10 minute video. But it has been an amazing way for us to continue to do long firm, long form video journalism. For example, last week we, uh, we sat down with the treasurer in our country to talk about the budget, which he had just handed down and about an impending recession and all the rest.

And that's very difficult to put into a reel. Uh, so we made it 10 reels and it meant that we could still have that content out there for our. But also play into what we understand about the algorithm and um, also about the priorities of the platforms that we exist on, because ultimately we are at the whim of these algorithms, and that is a huge risk to us.

And again, one, one of the reasons why newsletter and podcast are so important.

I think one of the values of what we do is that we're not a bunch of journalists who have had very traditional training. We are people with very varied backgrounds. I heard there was a reformed accountant before, and that speaks to me because, um, I think that's when you get. your best work when you are not classically trained in one certain way.

And so, I mean, we've got a, a team now and we've hired a former economist and and all sorts of people, and that's been a really great learning for me because we can then engage different facets of the young community and really appeal to them in different ways, not just through straight journalists and straight journalism, which has been fascinating.

This is a bit about how we. So you'll notice one thing big on colors. Very big on colors. We have got four colors that we use over and over and over again. Diagonally always have, we have always had our lovely cup there, our coffee cup. It goes to say that we think that you should be reading TDA over a cup of coffee, that it shouldn't take you longer to be informed.

And it is clear there is no messing about, you know exactly what you're getting with something like, Same here. We just had an election. I mean, not just timers morphing into itself, but uh, we had an election recently in our country and it was amazing because we worked with the electoral commission in our country to try get enrollment up for young people.

We have mandatory voting, so nobody thinks about enrollment being a thing. You just think you get on the enrollment list and that's that. But, um, young people, The lowest demographic when it comes to enrollment. So we worked to try push enrollments and there was the highest, um, youth enrollment of all time at the selection.

So that was something we were really proud of, but we also had a really big responsibility of explaining all of the key concepts behind what made up an Australian election. With that was a responsibility we took very seriously. We ended up sitting down with a now prime minister to ask him exactly what he thought young people needed to hear, and we asked him the hard questions.

That was, you know, this was a little hobby a couple of years ago, so that was amazing to see that now both politicians and you know, the media are taking us seriously and are taking young people seriously because they've got a lot of voting power and they're very important. Again, this is our prime Minister anyway.

You see what I'm saying? Um, but it's not just, Australia, we understand that young people, everybody needs to have well-rounded, holistic understanding of the world in which they operate in to understand any biases, uh, and to understand their privilege more than anything. We also include, uh, news from around the world, uh, which is interesting because obviously we don't have people in the ground, on the ground in other countries, and I think that that can limit.

The nuance that you can bring, but we try to do our best with this and um, it's something that we take very seriously and I think that, yeah, it's something that we're thinking about long term, about do we move across the world? Do we try to engage young people in other markets? Because we know that this has been tried and tested in Australia, but is this a transferable kind of expectation on.

Youth demographics across the world. So Sam had the weirdly incredible foresight to take all of these names on Instagram five years ago, kind of creepy. Um, think the Daily America will get us sued, but that's okay. We've got nothing to lose. And so we are keen to in time, um, really understand. There are some similarities across markets and whether this idea of speaking across from young people in a really engaging, really accessible kind of no assumptions way will work in other markets.

I mean, my co-founder Sam, just came back from the States. He went to a conference there and he spoke to a lot of different publishers and it's a really tough market. There is a Hyperpartisan expectation of news. There is very little going straight down the. and there is a hunger for opinion, and we don't do opinion.

We think that there is a foundation of knowledge to be created and to be accessed, and that we wanna be that for everybody, but that then they can go out and seek their own opinions. We're not good enough to do that. It's not our lane. Lots of people do it great, and we just wanna kind of be the springboard for them to go out and seek further news.

Somebody asked me. Yesterday whether we would send people to other news platforms in particular. Um, and I think that part of what we're doing is trying to create an open mind so that people at least have the media literacy. Oh, I'm getting a 15. Oh, okay. I'm gonna just stop talking and ask if anyone wants to ask a question, which is always a bit awkward cuz no one puts up their hand and then everyone can trust the Aussie to do it.

It feels weird talking to an microphone. So close. Um, thank you so much for this. This is amazing. Um, I'm, I know you probably hate this as always being the Gen Z in the room, but Australia of course has a hyper homogenous sort of news environment. Has that had any impact on your growth? Like as Australians were used to, you know, two old guys or their sons running things, how does it look for you now?

Great question, and this is what I've loved speaking to people about. At this conference about is that there is an expectation cause we're all like laid back and chilled. In Australia though we have a really diverse media market and that is couldn't be less true. Um, our media is dominated by two key players, one of them being Rupert Murdoch and News Corp.

Um, and the other being nine. And so Murdoch owns two thirds of the Australian media market and that is a terrifying stat for one. To own that much of a media market. So when it comes to how we operate, firstly, I don't think that it is an environment that encourages new media players to arise. We have seen, um, many, many players kind of just stagnate and stagnate and then get bought by Murdoch or by somebody else.

Um, and that has tried to, they've tried, but they are the, uh, the company that also then just started a youth news. Called the Oz. And so they are investing millions into what is essentially young people, which is I think fabulous and creates a contest of ideas and creates a space where there is a competitive market.

So I think that's fabulous. I think in our experience it's very difficult to be taken seriously. Uh, there is, I don't wanna say ageism cuz I think it's a bit wonky, but there is something to the fact that we are inexperienced. But to us that is our greatest. It is our greatest asset that we are going on a journey with our audience, that we are trying to learn with our audience, that we are the first to admit to our mistakes.

And this idea of radical transparency is really important to us. Um, recently we wanted to do a newsletter push. And so we wrote, we could either give unnamed big tech X amount of money, or you could just sign up to our newsletter and would save us the money so that we can pay for journal. Um, and that did really, really well.

People love that honesty and that transparency. And so I have lost your question and gone on a bit of a tangent, but yes, a unique market that we are trying to navigate and hope that we are a sustainable long-term player rather than this blip in time that Murdoch just eats. So from working on, on the cafe floor, how big is your staff now?

I'll start, we've got 13 full-time. No one is over the age of 30, which. Uh, an interesting, that's why I asked, I don't know if he's here. I asked somebody who was on stage yesterday about the trials and tribulations of hiring young staff because it is a huge asset in terms of editorial. Um, but it's bloody difficult to navigate when you're all the same age trying to figure it out and be each other's bosses and you know, like are also best friends.

But we have been very lean in our spending. We are going into. What we understand to be quite a tough economic time to raise capital. Um, especially, I mean except in Australia, someone just secured a $1 billion anyway, but it is for most a tough time. And so we wanna be quite conservative with our capital and invest where we see fit, which is in our journalists because our biggest growth mechanism is good content.

And when our audience grows, so too does our revenue. Um, and they are so intimately tied that we're just continuing to. Yes. Hello.

[00:27:55] Audience question: So hi. Um, so I think Pat already asked the first part of the question, but like related to that, so you said you have a team of about 13 ish people. Um, so can you categorize like, you know, uh, how many sort of editors, graphic designers, and what sort of, uh, content flow do you have?

Like, do you have any KPIs? Like every day, how much or every week? How many videos do you have?

[00:28:19] Zara: Great question. So in terms of how our team is split, so I look after the editorial side. Sam looks after the commercial side. Sam looks after one person, , and I look after the rest, which gives you a bit of an indication, and I don't think that that's a healthy balance.

I think that that is something that we are aiming to rectify now that we have healthy month on month revenue. that needs to be invested in. There is one person doing sales and Port Tara is getting her, her money's worth. So, um, in that editorial team, we've got a podcast producer who we only hired very recently, um, which, you know, we should have done much earlier.

We've got journalists, we have got, uh, one editor, Toker, whose title I should probably make more professional than Toker and. We have also started a new, a new thing very recently, which is a new revenue play. Um, we have, uh, collaborated with the biggest beauty retailer in the country and they are launching a gender equity news platform as part of their work to kind of fund gender equity philanthropy in the country.

And so they have asked us almost in an agency model to create content for them that will sit on their pages and not. And so that's a very new thing that we have done. It's a lot of work. I dunno if we'll do it again, but we, so we also have somebody that works with us and has been trained by us, and you know, gets edited by us, but that sits elsewhere.

So we'll usually aim to get around eight or nine pieces up on the Instagram, a newsletter every day, a podcast, every day. We've got a second podcast as well at the moment. You should listen to it. It's called The Mirror. It's about sexism and misogyny in Australian. Fabulous. So that's kind of where we aim to sit every day.

And reels are the only way that we can grow because the discoverability is humongous. Uh, and it's a huge opportunity for us. So we are really trying to push as much onto reels as possible, which is both deeply frustrating, but also a unique challenge that we are navigating as a team. And our video guys hate us for it, but everything, like you got a stat, make it into a reel.

Um, so that's something that we're looking at at the. . Any other question? Oh, hello?

[00:30:36] Audience question: Hi. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you for the presentation. I was just having this conversation with some participants the day about presenting content for young people. And I'm curious whether, you know, as these young people grow older, you know, um, are consuming your news, do they eventually request for something of a different.

No. Do they say like, but I want something more. I want some opinions. I know you say you don't produce opinion articles. Do they make requests? Because I guess, um, they may feel like what you produce may, may feel like one note, although I'm sure you might disagree. And then my second question is, um, could you share a bit more about the, your audience engagement process? Cause I imagine it can be quite intensive, it being like around, Yeah.

[00:31:24] Zara: Two very brilliant questions. Thank you. So, uh, and I am going to forget the second one when I go to the first one, but, um, I'll actually start with the second one first. It is super, super, um, draining to always have audience feedback. I don't think that there's any way to shy away from that.

I think that it is just the reality of what we have signed up to in Australia. There was this whole big kind of court case around defamation. Um, the high court wanted media publishers to basically have somebody on 24 hours a day to moderate, and anybody that owns a media company knows that that is absolutely absurd and that nobody could have someone 24 hours a day moderating.

So I think that there's a long way to go between where we are at at the moment, which is just our staff reading every comment, trying to respond to dms and having a 24 hour moderator. But it's really draining stuff. When it's good. It's amazing when people tell you that, you know, you changed the way that they think about the world or the government or whatever it is.

Um, or that they have now started reading the news for the first time or shared it with their families. That is brilliant. Um, but of course it also comes with the fact that you can't ever turn off. Um, and just before this, I was just going through our dms to see what I needed to respond to, so it never gets easier.

Um, but hopefully as the team grows, that's something that falls as a. Um, or opportunity, um, on everybody equally rather than a select few. And your first question. Oh, audience engage? No, when they grow up. Oh, great question. Something that we think about every single day. Um, so there's a publisher in Australia that is very much focused on women, and so it's been really fascinating to watch as they have developed alongside their founders age.

So first they did like, I don't know, young adult content. Now they've moved into like the young mothers, then they move into, you know, the home loans and whatever else. For us, we think that young people are underserved when it comes to content, and so we are very much trying to empower the next generation to take over what we are doing when the time comes.

When I am no longer young, uh, we don't see ourselves as graduating. older markets because again, there are people servicing those markets. We think that our niche and what we can offer the most value in is this stage now. And so we hope to just continue nurturing, um, that age group and create leaders, you know, who are coming through the ranks, through university now to continue to serve that because I think that the adult market is not underserved, especially in Australia.

And we'd like to see continual value provided to young a. , may I clarify the, what you said about audience engagement? How many people do you have dedicated to audience engagement? N none. , zero. I mean, no, not a single person. Um, audience engagement falls into all of our job descriptions. It is. Uh, comes into our content, it comes into our editorial direction, it comes into our commercial, comes into our videos.

So we don't have a dedicated standalone audience editor or audience development person. It comes into every single person's job. Um, and it is, I think that that's the best way we always say that. Journalists now need to do so much. You know, like we don't have a graphic designer, for example, our journalists create everything on Canberra, every single thing.

Um, we have never had a graphic designer work for us. We probably never will. Um, but it is built into what they need to be doing, which is create visually engaging as well as the content side of things. But we are, you know, a very small lean team trying to do a lot. And so there are no specific audience, people attached.

Hi,

[00:35:12] Audience question: Zara. Hi . Uh, how do you funnel your users from Instagram to the other products? I think you said you have also a website. Uh, yes. I think you said, uh, you have 40,000 subscribers to the newsletter and. , of course. I suppose they are young people. Okay. So yeah, I'm interested on that and also if you decided to specifically not to use Facebook or Twitter or other platform.

[00:35:45] Zara: Thanks. Yeah. So in terms of the conversion of audiences from one place to another, um, this has been something that we have learnt the tough way, which is that. Sometimes quite difficult to migrate audiences elsewhere. On the first day that we created the newsletter, there was a dire need for it, and everybody kind of came over it once because they needed news and they couldn't get it from certain social media platforms.

But since then, We've really focused on growing those audiences organically as their own audiences. So we often, which I think is probably a flaw in the system, but we often don't migrate people from different places. Um, we are trying to grow that. So that there is that sustainability aspect to it as well.

Um, and we believe that once they're through the front door, whether that is through the newsletter, the podcast, the Instagram, then they're in our ecosystem and then we can really bring them into the daily Aus ecosystem at once. But I think our newsletter audience skews a tiny bit older than our Instagram audience, just by nature of the platform, but they've got wonderful features to them.

You know, you've got that personal touch that perhaps you don't have on other platform. We believe that we are platform agnostic, that we will go wherever our audience goes because again, huge diversification risks. If we are married to one platform and for example, that platform decides they don't want news anymore.

So we need to be really aware of those risks. We're not on Twitter, really. I mean, we have one, but it's not great because we understand that we're trying to reach more of the passive news. and that Twitter is more for the active news consumer. And again, we think that they are serviced elsewhere and that what we're trying to do is bring the people who might not be accessing the news on their own kind of volition.

And so that's why we exist on Instagram, which otherwise is just a photo app. And you know, you see a wonderful avocado toast and a wonderful photo splice feeder, and then you get a post on something very important in between that. But we, the idea is that on people's social travels, they can get inform.

without even knowing it really. So that's kind of the logic behind the platforms that we choose to exist on. But as I said, TikTok has been a new beast for us to try and conquer. It's not chronological, which means that when you're trying to do news content, the beginning we tried to do something about Trump and people were commenting like, he's gone.

Why are you still talking about him? But it was just because it was being served months and months afterwards. Cuz that's just the Twitter at the TikTok algorithm. So it's just navigating the quirks of, of each platform.

[00:38:21] Audience question: I'm really curious. For you to talk a little bit more about your relationship with Big Tech.

I don't know exactly who's in the room from the tech companies, so I encourage you to speak freely though. I'm really interested in if you had the opportunity to make recommendations or demands to these tech companies, what would you demand from them? Like on one of your first slides, you said something sort of criticizing the traditional news establishment as forcing users to go off platform.

Yet that seems to be what you've discovered as the only way to make. with the big tech companies closing the space for news and continuing to really dominate attention as the currency of the modern age, especially with young people. So, especially coming from Australia, um, your laws have recently sort of pushed back against this model, um, which has been.

Inspiring in some ways, but also made it a lot harder, um, in other ways to navigate the system. So Right. Question. Yeah. Make your demands .

[00:39:17] Zara: Um, well, hope someone's taking notes. Two things. The biggest issue, and I do think it's changing, but it goes to the idea of the legislation that you're speaking about, which basically was trying to create a fairer system for publishers against big tech.

That was kind of the essence of it, and I think what that has served to do, whether. Intended to or not is just entrench the power dynamics that already exist in the Australian media market, which is to say that the big players who dominate got their funding arrangements, got their agreements in place, and off they went.

And smaller publishers, newer publishers, digital publishers weren't able to, whether it was because they didn't have the resources, the connections, the network. Access that same funding. I think that the legislation, while well intended, didn't actually deliver the outcome that was needed, but I do think that Big tech is coming to the table in Australia.

I think that, I mean, the fact that they're here in Thailand wanting to hear about the ecosystem that exists is a really good sign. What our frustration is, is that a lot of the funding is never allowed to be used on journal. . And so we have been really lucky and fortunate to access funding and I would be very wary of relying on that funding because it can be pulled out at any second.

But it is a nice to have alongside recurring revenue. But we're in a situation where we've been given money for a project. We are a media company. We do news, but we can't actually invest in. And so that's the incredibly frustrating part of it. And you get some very creative accounting that goes on just to, um, kind of get to where you need to be, to be sustainable.

And especially when it's project based. I think that there is a genuine effort to support the news ecosystem by big tech. Whether that is a, a reaction to what has happened or whatever else it might be. We certainly feel supported as newer publishers now. It was not the case two years ago. And so I think that continuing to nurture those relationships, but also realizing that you cannot be dependent on them has worked really nicely for us.

And um, yeah, if they'd like to fund journalists, that would be wonderful. But I also understand that yeah, the issues there. So that is my kind of take. . Any other questions?

[00:41:42] Audience question: Hi. Um, I'm au from Mongolia. So when you famous, so you, when you were showing this slide, I just quickly looked up daily, Mongolia just there.

So I was wondering what if you already have the platform, the accounts there yet, so what are you looking forward if you were to do the other, the dailies, what are you looking in, in for partner? In those, in those locations. And I'm low-key pitching myself here, .

[00:42:12] Zara: Oh my God, I'm flattered. Um, I think that look at the biggest issue, not the biggest issue, the biggest. thing for us is that we intimately understand Australian young people. We really get them. We are them. And so we've been having conversations about the Daily India, um, and the Daily Mongolia. And I think that our hesitation is, uh, not wanting to miss the nuance of these markets. And that means hiring locally.

It means having teams locally so that you can execute it adequately. That comes with resources. And for us it's this constant tension of we have not cornered the Australian market. There are a lot more than 400,000 young people in Australia who have Instagram who care about the news. Um, but we just. Are continuing to have to grow that.

And so in our minds it's do we continue to focus purely on that or do we start to reach into different markets? Um, and I think that this conference has told me that I must go into different markets because I think that the greatest value would be that this works elsewhere. Um, in really diverse communities, and that it, it is something that can really float.

But again, it's just that constant startup battle of how do you allocate very scarce resources. Um, so stay tuned. , we're good. All right. Thank you so much for coming guys.

You've been listening to a session recording from Splice Beta 2022. Let us know what you think. We refining splice media.com. This is a Splice podcast produced by Norman Cell at Pot Chaser. We'd like to thank our sponsors Google, International Fund for Public Interest Media, International Media Support, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Luminate, Media Development Investment Fund, Meta, and Telum.