The Pedestrian Group CEO and several incensed titles, including Vice, Refinery29 and Gizmodo, are casualties of Nine’s broader restructure.
Nine is shaking up its youth publishing arm, the Pedestrian Group, amid a declining advertising market and the poor performance of its licensed brands.
Pedestrian Group chief executive Matt Rowley, who has led the division for the past five years, will be exiting the business along with up to 40 staff as Nine cuts all of Pedestrian’s licensed brands. Nine said it will seek a replacement for Rowley.
Pedestrian has licensing deals to publish global titles in Australia, including Vice, Gizmodo Refinery29, Lifehacker and Kotaku. Australian versions of these titles will no longer be available.
Nine will focus on the brands that it owns, Pedestrian and Pedestrian.TV, while the future of its Web3 publication The Chainsaw is uncertain, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
The moves are part of Nine’s plans to restructure its business, which could see up to 200 jobs go with the publishing division particularly hard hit.
In a note shared with staff and seen by B&T, Rowley said that over the past two years the licensed branding model had faced “financial headwinds” that had impacted the performance of licensed titles.
These include a declining advertising market and the rise of TikTok and Instagram.
“Given these factors, we’ve made the tough decision to focus on our wholly-owned Pedestrian brands where we control the strategy, the content, the product, the sales and the outcome – the entire business. This means that we will transition out of our current brand licences, which will reposition our business for the future,” Rowley said.
“This will have an impact on roles within the group and I appreciate the uncertainty this change creates, so we will be in contact immediately with those people. Where possible, we will look for opportunities for redeployment and will continue to work with everyone over the coming days to support this difficult transition.”
Social eating publishers’ lunch
Once globally profitable digital media titles, particularly those that rely on social media to distribute content, have struggled to commercialise their audiences in recent years, leading to the closure of some titles or seeking out new models, such as Val Morgan Digital acquiring the LADBible, Tasty and BuzzFeed brands.
Advertisers that once funded these titles are spending more on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to reach younger demographics.
Pedestrian Group was established in 2018 to unite Pedestrian, which was wholly-owned by Nine, and the Fairfax Allure Media business that publishes licensed global brands in Australia.
Rowley joined Fairfax Media in 2016 as an early member of Project Blue, which restructured its sales teams into category verticals rather than agency groups. Rowley was elevated to Fairfax Media chief revenue officer a year later and became the sales lead publishing when Nine acquired Fairfax in 2018.
Rowley, who has been the CEO of Pedestrian Group since 2019, said that in spite of the division being trimmed down, youth publishers still had an important role to play in the Australian media landscape.
“The market forces that have created today’s changes make the work that Pedestrian.TV does – engaging young Aussies with news and content they can trust – more important than ever,” said Rowley, an Australian rugby fanatic.
“While these decisions have been hard to make, we believe this new approach – with a strategy and plan focused on the growth of our own business at Pedestrian.TV – will create a long term, sustainable business which continues to lead youth publishing in Australia.”
In a separate move, nine.com.au will not be replacing existing vacant roles at the business to tighten costs.
