Alec Hogg on Winslyn: Online trends, context rules & why there’s hope

Biznews was founded by Alec Hogg just over two and a half years ago. The site has grown in leaps and bounds hitting a staggering 592 000 unique visitors in February. Alec was interviewed by Divan Botha, the host of Kyknet show Winslyn on DsTV channel 144. The conversation goes back almost 20 years, as Alec recalls his days starting Moneyweb above his garage. The shift to online, especially business media, was a tough one, having to convert people from fax to email, and while the success is noticeable now, new challenges have emerged. Online is an open platform and anyone can literally start a website. So it’s how one differentiates themselves that’ll determine the success. It’s an interesting conversation that also unpacks some of the challenges the country is currently experiencing. But despite everything, there’s hope, and that’s all this young democracy needs. – Stuart Lowman

If you’d like to remain informed about what’s happening in the business world, the online platform Biznews is the place for you. Alec Hogg, Founder and Publisher of Biznews, joins Divan Botha, presenter on Winslyn on KykNet. Welcome, Alec.

Thanks, Divan.

Alec, I’ve always known you as the Moneyweb guy but I’m glad that we have you here for Biznews. Tell us. How did Biznews come about?

I started Moneyweb above my garage 20 years ago (next year). Can you believe it? It was the early days of the Internet. People were more interested in faxes those days than in emails and I grew it for 15 years. Then I left. I listed it on the stock market, left, had a sabbatical for a period of time, and came back and said, “This is what I know.” Biznews started in August 2013 – so 2.5 years old now and has been wildly successful. We tried something very different and we think it’s a sustainable model.

Let’s talk about that. What makes the platform different to any other online business news website?

I had to look at it, try to see what it is that we can do differently, and what we can do better than anyone else in the world could. We started off on the basis that we wanted to promote democracy in South Africa through free enterprise and attacking corruption. That’s where we’re at. The way we do it…instead of employing a bunch of journalists, who then go out and maybe cover a very small slice of it, we curate and contextualise. We will therefore scan the news. We pay quite a lot of money for some of our news services. We find the best (we think) in the world, and then tell you why we think it’s important in a pithy paragraph/paragraph-and-a-half, and the market loves it. We hit 600,000 unique visitors in December and we almost got there again in February. Remember, December was Nenegate, so that was no surprise but we were 592,000 in February, which was beyond my wildest dreams.

Money’s going from print to online. How do you get it right as an online platform, to capitalise on that money stream suddenly flowing your way?

Well, Divan, the big thing in online is that anybody can start a website and in fact, the amount of pages that you can serve is infinite so you have to recognise that it’s a different economic model. The model that we use, is ‘low, low costs’. With Moneyweb, I did it as I did in traditional business. Fifty people. We had businesspeople around the world. When I started again with Biznews, I thought ‘we’re going to have to do it differently’ because you could see the advertising costs are falling continuously in the online environment. There are six of us. We might be eight one day, but we certainly aren’t going to be 50.

Read also: A letter to treasure – Derek Kreunen’s thoughts after my resignation from Moneyweb

Content rules. Would you say that’s still the same in your world at the moment and if so, how do you get it right for the right journo to put something onto your platform that you may not find any place else? Do you see that happening at the moment?

The media is so fragmented that it doesn’t really matter where you take it from. We had a fantastic piece by Max du Preez, which was on News24 and was the gorilla in the space. We contextualised, put a different headline on, and it was extremely well read on Biznews. The fallacy that one has as a journalist is that you think, “Well, if it’s in my product and no-one else will ever read it”, that’s just not true. That’s one of the things we’ve capitalised on, is to think about people in a very different way. Jeff Bezos: when he bought the Washington Post for 250-million, people thought he was crazy but when he walked into their newsroom he said, “You guys have it all wrong. Your customers are your readers. Your customers are not your advertisers”, and that’s where we’ve come from. We’ve asked, “Who is it that we’re serving?” We’re serving the people who access our site and read our content, and they might not have seen Max’s story. Well, many of them wouldn’t have if they hadn’t come to Biznews. Not everybody goes to News24.

I’d like to ask you something completely different. Your opinion on the SARS wars that is going on between the Minister and Tom Moyane: who’s going to win that war?

Well, we are very much on the side of promoting democracy in South Africa and routing out corruption. We know that Pravin Gordhan – from the engagements I had with him when he was at SARS back in those days, and then as Finance Minister – is desperately wanting to kill this illicit cigarette business. A pack of 20 cigarettes today is R13.00 in tax that goes missing if you get it in illicitly, and so there’s a huge incentive to get under the radar. Our understanding is that there was a lot of progress being made by SARS to nail the guys in this illicit cigarette business, which is worth billions of Rands in South Africa. That was blocked for various reasons. That’s why Pravin Gordhan wants to get his hands on SARS again. Remember, his whole team was taken out and new people were put in. Now there are all kinds of rumours and all kinds of assessments.

What I can tell you is that in Davos this year, when Pravin Gordhan was having his presentation on the South African economy, a few of us were there and I asked him a question. The second question I asked was, “What are you going to do about SARS?” He got very passionate about it. This is something very close to his heart. He wants to crack it open. However, what he did do by saying, “If you don’t fire Moyane, I’m going to resign”…I think he’s painted himself in a corner. I think he’s realised that because if Pravin Gordhan resigns, R20.00 to the Dollar is around the corner. Who knows what happens thereafter?

In 20 seconds: is there still hope?

Of course, there’s hope. There’s much hope in our country. There are a lot of really good things happening here. You just need to look for it sometimes and just don’t get overwhelmed by the bad news. We’re a young democracy. We’re moving in the right direction. One day, we’ll look back on this time and say, “It was exciting. It was difficult, but we got through it.”

Alec, thank you so much. Brilliant. Feel free to visit Biznews.com and stay in touch with all business news.

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