Media Matters: Chewing over Snakk and Scout’s ‘snackable content’

In this instalment of Media Matters, NBR Radio’s Owen Poland chats with Campbell Gibson and Nick Grant about the inner workings of New Zealand’s media industrial complex.

Mr Gibson kicks proceedings off by discussing the annual general meeting for Snakk Media [NZX: SNK] he attended this week, at which chief executive Mark Ryan said the company “needs to be profitable in the next 12 months.”

Although Mr Ryan has often talked about the “path to profitability” for the company, in the past he’s typically declined to commit to a specific timeframe.

As Mr Gibson notes, up to now the company has focused on rapidly increasing its revenue, resulting in large losses and a high cash burn rate.

Asked whether mobile advertising was a high-yielding market, Mr Gibson says the future seems bright. Mobile advertising is forecast to grow 38% to $US71 billion in 2016, according to ZenithOptimedia Advertising Expenditure Forecasts (you can read Mr Gibson’s article on Snakk’s performance to date and prospects here).

Of course, probably the biggest media story in NZ this week (in the sense that “the empty vessel makes the loudest sound” at least) was the launch of Scout, the gossip website that’s a joint venture between Rachel Glucina and MediaWorks.

The execution of the project thus far has been so inept, Mr Grant says, that it’s difficult to know where to begin cataloguing its faults – and almost impossible to stop.

A major disappointment with the site, Messrs Gibson and Grant note, is that despite Ms Glucina insisting Scout wouldn’t be a MediaWorks PR platform, a great deal of the paltry content it’s carried so far has either been plugs about the parent company’s products or spin.

An item about the amount the contestants in this year’s Dancing with the Stars earned for the charities of their choice, for example, completely failed to make the obvious comparison with previous seasons’ totals – probably because the most recent figures are so embarrassingly low (fear not, the NZ Herald did the maths).

Then there’s the mean-spirited – and inaccurate – attack the site launched at Scouts NZ, after the youth organisation had the temerity to express concern about the potential for confusion between it and the gossip portal.

Messrs Gibson and Grant carry on in this vein at some length, itemising various issues with Scout.

Even so, there’s much they don’t get the time to mention, so here are a couple of bonus points:

• Someone at Scout appears to misunderstand what a ‘scoop’ means, given they included the word in the headline of a post about the new Hunger Games trailer, despite it having been available on YouTube for at least eight hours beforehand;  
• One of the “25 most influential Kiwis 25 and under” isn’t actually a New Zealander – Victoria Secret model Stella Maxwell is actually Irish and merely studied at Otago University – while the #16 spot is taken by one Jamie Johns, whose major claim to fame appears to be that she is going to appear on the upcoming season of TV3's The Block. And lo, the listicle that rates Max Key as more accomplished than Lorde is rendered even less credible than it appeared at first blush.

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