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Quick hits

How Starter Story ditched recurring payments and built a $1.5 million information product. [The Business of Content]

Always encouraging to see this: four tech journalists left Vice to launch their own writer cooperative. [404 Media]

It's kind of amazing that publishers receive any traffic from Facebook anymore given how many times news has been downgraded in the newsfeed algorithm. The floor has been dropping for at least seven years straight. [CNN]

Taxi drivers in Asia are vlogging about their jobs and building up impressive followings and decent side incomes on TikTok. [Rest of World]

Consumer interest in traditional news content is at its lowest in years, so publishers are investing more in non-news verticals. [Press Gazette]

Why is a roofing company providing VC funding for so many buzzy media startups? [NYT]

"Most bankers and analysts say this is one of the worst times to sell a media company in modern history." [Bloomberg]

How Man of Many grew into the largest men's lifestyle media outlet in Australia

Like many great media brands, Man of Many grew out of a personal obsession.

Specifically, it was an obsession held by Frank Arthur and Scott Purcell, two Sydney-based roommates who lived together for about eight years. Both harbored a deep fascination with high-end luxury goods, to the point that they’d find themselves emailing each other throughout the day about new product launches. “I'm a bit of a nerd and tech head, so I focused a lot on gadgety stuff,” Purcell told me in an interview. “Frank has a background in design, so he was interested in street wear, tech products, cars, and whiskey.” They especially loved limited edition and hard-to-find products.  

The two often found themselves reading US-based men’s lifestyle websites like Uncrate and Cool Material, and in the early 2010s they began to notice that there weren’t really any Australian equivalents to these sites. “Even a lot of the men's magazines like [Australian] GQ or Esquire — I don't even know if they had a website at that time,” said Purcell. “Or if they did, it was very, very basic.” The two began to sketch out an idea for a website that would cater to their interests and fill a gap in the Australian media market. 

In 2012, they launched Man of Many, a website that covers men’s lifestyle interests ranging from health to consumer products to pop culture. Though neither founder had a large personal brand or connections in the industry, they stayed consistent in their content production and, without any outside investment, managed to grow Man of Many into the largest men’s lifestyle outlet in Australia. Today, the brand generates over 5.8 million pageviews a month and boasts 650,000 subscribers on social media.

How did they accomplish this? In a recent interview, Purcell walked me through their early growth strategies, their approach to monetization, and their expansion into new topic areas and content verticals.

Let’s jump into my findings…

Keeping it simple

Arthur and Purcell both had day jobs — in design and finance, respectively — and they knew that their only chance at sticking to a consistent publishing schedule was if they kept their content extremely simple. “We featured one product per day with very short descriptions,” said Purcell. He’d seen other bootstrapped media outlets churn out a large volume of content and then flame out because they couldn’t sustain their production schedule.  “So one product a day was really realistic for us, and it meant that every time someone came back to the website, they had something new to look at each day.”

In those early days, Many of Many was virtually unknown to the PR firms that handled product announcements, so Arthur and Purcell had to resort to curating content they found on other websites. But eventually the companies they were covering began to take notice, and they started to receive advance notice of new product launches. The real turning point came when they stopped with the single-product posts and began compiling lists around product categories. An early article titled “Best Watches Under $1,000” shot up in the Google rankings and brought in a flood of visits. Soon, search engines became their biggest source of traffic, and, even though they had originally founded the site to fill a gap in the Australian market, most of that traffic came from the US.

As time passed, Man of Many started to feel less and less like a side hustle for its two founders. “I think the turning point was really when I was going to work and all I could think about was getting home to work on Man of Many,” said Purcell. “I loved my finance job, but I started to notice I wasn't doing exactly the best of jobs because I was completely focused on this project.” Each day, he and Arthur would get home, eat dinner, and then work from 7 p.m. til late into the night.

Originally, they’d planned to quit their day jobs once they were generating enough revenue to replace their salaries, but at some point it became apparent that they needed significant runway to work on the business full time. By 2016, they’d generated around $50,000 through Man of Many, and they’d also put away a decent amount of savings from their day jobs. “We were in our mid twenties, both single, no mortgage, no massive financial commitments, no dependents like kids,” recalled Purcell. So they decided to quit their jobs and take the plunge, giving themselves six months to replace their previous salaries. 

Diversifying revenue

Spoiler alert: they did not replace their salaries in six months. In fact, it took at least three years to cross that threshold.

But quitting their jobs did allow them to scale up their revenue operations much more quickly. They immediately started scheduling meetings with the top PR and marketing firms in Sydney. “I think in the first week we were catching taxis all around the city, and we ended up spending like $400 or something on taxis on the first day, and we quickly realized that that wasn't sustainable for us, and so we needed to be a bit smarter with how we managed our time.”

It didn’t take long for the founders to establish their main revenue driver: sponsored articles. Hundreds of thousands of people were already visiting the site each month for product recommendations, so it wasn’t difficult to convince brands that the audience was primed to buy. “We've always been really consistent ever since the site’s inception that we maintain our editorial independence,” said Purcell. “So we don't let brands just tell us what to publish when it comes to our sponsored content. We make sure that it's in our own voice and that we can stand by what we say for any sponsored article that sits on the site.” It also helped that they could claim such a huge audience. “A big goal of ours was to catch up to GQ and be as big as them.” Not only did Many of Many quickly surpass GQ Australia in traffic, it now has four times the number of monthly visits, according to Similarweb. ...