Webmaster Justin Blake and I grabbed time between opening gifts and Christmas Lunch to shoot this short message to the Biznews Community. We are grateful for every ounce of your support this past year. Thank you for making the website successful beyond our wildest dreams. In just 16 months we are already at the place it took my first online publishing effort, Moneyweb, some 16 years to reach. As for the year ahead: we promise to keep having fun; work on new ideas; and ensure every day you wake up to a fresh edition of The Rational Alternative for your edification and pleasure. Â – AH
ALEC HOGG: It’s December 2014 – Christmas Day – and Justin and I are bringing the message to the BizNews community, after an extraordinary year.
JUSTIN BLAKE: So Alec, how was 2014?
ALEC HOGG: It was out of the ordinary in every single, possible way. It took me 16 years to build Moneyweb to a level where we got to 300,000 unique visitors. That was when I left, in 2012, I’m sure they’ve gone beyond that now. But it’s taken us about 16 months to get to almost the same level at BizNews. We were at 272,000 unique visitors in November. For that, we have to thank so many people like you, our webmaster, we started from scratch and look at us today. Our team: Jeanette, my wife, who’s very much part of the business. Then Lucy, who keeps us all in order – Lucy Ferreira, an integral member of our team. Mo, our intern, who is in our offices at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange every day, bright and early. Then, the correspondents in the United States – Felicity Duncan – and Jackie Cameron, who’s in the UK, and our many contributors and partners – Marika Sboros and Miles Downward. The list goes on and on. We have a lot of people putting in content. But actually, the benefit and the thanks must go to our customers, our readers, our community. Thank you for supporting us. We really have tried hard but it would be worth nothing if no one was watching or reading it. And 272 000 people say that love it. Thank you.
JUSTIN HOGG:Â Â And what can we look forward to, in 2015?
ALEC HOGG: New businesses always start off by pushing their roots as far down as possible. For many it’s just to survive. We’ve had great support from our advertising community and that’s really, been exceptional – when people have come on and advertised with us they tend to stay. We hope they keep staying with us so that we can keep developing and growing the site. We’ve been innovating a lot. We’ve been spending time looking at doing things differently.
I also think that South Africans have gotten into a little bit of a funk about negativity. They don’t realise how good things can be and how things are going to change in 2015. We have the oil price that’s come down, which is going to have a massive impact on this country. I’m expecting that you’ll see the economy lifting. When the economy lifts, the share prices in the stock market lifts because companies make more profit. When that happens, websites like BizNews do very well.
We have to keep innovating, keep working hard, keep trying and keep tap-dancing to work as I think we have been doing these past 16 months and if you do that, it’s not work anymore. It’s fun. We’re playing. We’re having fun. We’re making a contribution and we just thank everybody who has supported us, particularly our customers, our readers. We look forward to serving you again in 2015.
