Beating The Drum on On Line Opinion

Add to that a lavish budget of close to $1.3bn, mostly provided by the Australian taxpayer, and the squeeze on commercial publishers is severe.

At the same time it also makes it more difficult for mainstream media to migrate to the online subscription model, which is the only viable financial option for them, because the ABC will always offer similar content for free. (This is different from the broadcast model where everything has been free-to-air).

And not only is the ABC creating failures in the market, but it is stifling innovation.

Although On Line Opinion persists we are no longer a financially viable publication. Other publications, such as Punch and the National Times, have failed completely and no longer exist, and there are a myriad of publications that must have been still born.

On Line Opinion pioneered the genre of the online op-ed page in Australia. We started in April 1999 with the modest aim of publishing 4 to 5 articles each month. Microsoft FrontPage was our publishing platform. We now have 18,331 articles archived from 4,885 individual authors on a diversity of topics. We have broken stories others dared not published, and been threatened with legal action for publishing what was once considered offensive.

By 2006 we were the most popular politics website in Australia and we'd built our own content management system, as well as other platforms including a virtual parliament (aggregating material from members of parliament in a special site), a blog, a blog aggregator, online qualitative polling, and candidate-driven directory sites for a number of state and federal elections.

In 2007, along with QUT and the Brisbane Institute we even ran a television panel series during the federal election called YouDecide 2007. There was enough money from advertising to employ a full-time editor, and invest in further development.

In this you might even perceive the genesis of what The Drum would subsequently do, starting as an online op-ed page and then becoming a TV show.

We weren't the only ones doing interesting things in the news and current affairs space online. There was of course Crikey, but there was also a flotilla of blog sites, and Peter Fray's excursion into the field of Fact Checking.

The Drum wasn't the only reason that On Line Opinion has struggled.

The GFC cut advertising revenues, now permanently decimated as online advertising becomes a commodity, and our premium advertisers were also targeted by anti-free speech gay rights campaigners (for details see here).

But The Drum was a significant factor.