The Hoopla

» see thehoopla.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Hoopla was written for Australian women over thirty five. I was a thirty one year old Turkish man when it closed, so the distance here is not subtle and there is no point dressing it up.

It went up in July 2011, founded by Wendy Harmer, a comedian and broadcaster with a name in Australia, together with Jane Waterhouse. The stated brief was news through the eyes of women, and the audience was defined narrowly on purpose: women past thirty five whose children had grown up, or who had never had any. That is a group with money and time on its hands, and in 2011 almost nobody online was writing for it.

Over not quite four years it published around five thousand articles from three hundred writers. Harmer paid them, which in the era of unpaid contributor networks was a position with a cost attached. Every article the site ran was money out the door before a single ad was sold, and the site was competing against outlets that had solved that problem by not solving it.

It closed on 23 March 2015. Harmer wrote the notice herself and put it on the site, which is the correct way to do it and rarer than it should be.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who was actually reading ~

The advertising problem was specific and worth stating plainly, because it explains the whole shutdown. Media buyers in Australia would not spend to reach women over fifty. The received wisdom was that this group had already made its brand decisions and would not be moved, so the money went to twenty five year olds instead.

So a site with a loyal and well-off readership could not sell that readership at a decent rate. The audience was real. The market for the audience was not. Harmer had found a genuine gap in Australian media and the gap turned out to have a reason for existing.

~ the paywall ~

In April 2014 The Hoopla put up a hard paywall. Everything went behind it. The result was the one every publisher fears: subscriptions leveled off almost immediately and the visitor numbers fell off a shelf, because a site nobody can read stops being shared and stops being found.

They corrected in October 2014 and softened it, letting some material out front. Subscriptions started climbing again, around twenty percent month on month, and reached five thousand. That is a real number for an Australian independent, and it was still growing when the decision came. It just was not growing fast enough against a burn rate that included paying every writer.

~ the last three months ~

The competitive picture at the end was not subtle either. Large media groups had worked out that women's lifestyle and opinion was a category worth owning, and News Corp launched its own women's title into the same market around the time The Hoopla folded. Harmer's line about it was that the game had become one for players with very deep pockets, and Crikey ran the closure under a proverb about elephants going to war and ants getting trampled.

What is left is the archive, and only through the Wayback Machine, because thehoopla.com.au did not survive as a standing site. Four years of writing by three hundred people, most of them women being paid to write, sitting in a crawler's copy. There is a version of this story where the paywall came a year earlier and the subscriber curve had time to work. Nobody gets to run that version.

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