Emap fails to sell AME Info business website
Posted on 10 August 2010 with no comments from readers
The UK’s second largest publishing house Emap has failed to find a buyer for AME Info, the leading Middle East business information portal that it bought almost exactly four years ago for $27 million.
In a complete volte face the local CEO Lara Boro said that despite several ‘multimillion-dollar offers’ Emap had taken a strategic decision to keep the website and will be putting more money into the site and introducing paid-for services.
Advertising model
Only in March this year Ms Boro announced that advertising driven AME Info did not fit with Emap’s subscription based publications telling The National that: ‘It’s all about future-looking, high-value information, and AMEinfo doesn’t fit into that model. It’s an advertising-driven, volume game.’
In truth all Dubai based media have been hit by a massive slump in advertising since the real estate crash in October 2009 and do not know what to do about it.
That said selling a business at the bottom of the business cycle is no way out either. Nobody is going to pay a high price in this environment, and to try to sell at all looks an act of desparation. And if you do not need to sell, why try in the first place?
It is said in the investment world that the definition of a long-term investment is a short-term one that had gone wrong. But then when Emap bought AME Info, it publicly stated that it was in for the long-term, so its latest decision to keep the website is almost certainly the right one.
Cyclical downturn
Advertising revenues will return as the UAE in general and Dubai in particular recovers from a very nasty local cyclical downturn compounded by the global financial crisis. It will then be a matter of getting down to the humble business of selling advertising that determines whether or not media businesses succeed.
Trying to sell subscription-only content on the Internet is going to be a far harder business model, especially with the UAE still in recession. You might as well try to sell sand on a beach. There are no magic solutions, only hard work in a very tough media environment.
