Nick Shelton is owner-founder of the 13-year-old Broadsheet Media in Melbourne, Australia, which self-describes as “the authority on the cultural life of your city”. It’s a digital brand, with a free quarterly print magazine in Australia’s major cities. It sounds a bit like Time Out (which launched in London 55 years ago this month) but Broadsheet is focused much more on style, food & drink, fashion and home – as well as entertainment and travel.
It’s been a stunning creative and financial success for someone who (apart from working for a catering company in university and as a barista in London) had prior experience neither in media nor hospitality. Broadsheet has an increasing number of “Access” members who pay A$10-15 per month for exclusive deals, reserved tables, venue previews and freebies.
Shelton launched the brand (now in Australia and New Zealand) in 2009 with a A$20k bank loan (secured on his parents’ house). The company has been soundly profitable since Year 3 and is believed to have some A$12mn revenue and A$3mn EBITDA.
It has more than 2mn monthly uniques and is credited with creating huge traffic for restaurants it recommends. It has also been responsible for its own pop-up restaurants, cafes – and cookbooks and videos. Shelton is campaigning for a slice of the A$200mn payments (made as a result of legislative pressure in Australia) to leading news organisations by Google and Meta to be shared across leading non-news publishers – like Broadsheet. Having lived in London in his 20s, he has set his sights on launching in the UK, 2024 perhaps?
Nick Shelton graduated in politics and film from Melbourne’s Monash University.
What were your earliest ambitions?
I was never really sure what I’d end up doing, but always had a natural pull towards something entrepreneurial. I was attracted to the idea of making a business out of something creative. And I was also always attracted to food and drink and worked in hospitality through university and while travelling in my early 20s. So, those threads are definitely all connected in Broadsheet.
How did you start in media?
Starting Broadsheet was my first job in media. The same one I have now. Until that point, it had all been hospitality. I was 24 and naive and making it all up as I went along.
What was the inspiration for Broadsheet?
I had been living in London for a few years, working in a coffee shop – doing the thing that many young Aussies do. I’d had this experience of arriving in this incredibly big, interesting, diverse city. I knew that it held all kinds of exciting things to do, but I had found discovering them pretty difficult.
Where’s a great place to get a beer, or a meal or to hear music? Where is the best butcher in my neighbourhood? Where should I take a date? Where should I be buying my clothes? All the great spots were there, but it took a long time to discover them all and to really get underneath the surface. So I had imagined this website that would give me curated direction on all this. Essentially, a guide to the best that the city had to offer. All the good stuff and none of the bad. This was about 2005, so the internet was well and truly established, but media was still very print-centric and the weekly supplements in the newspapers weren’t doing it for me.
I arrived back in Melbourne to discover a city in the early stages of a cultural renaissance, especially in restaurants. It was all anyone was talking about, but the media wasn’t reflecting it. So I just decided to give it a go myself.
How did you launch it?
The bank lent me $20,000 which I used to design a brand, build a website and commission some young writers. We struck the cultural nerve pretty quickly and it all took off from there.
It took about two years before we were generating consistent cashflow and could then begin to scale. Until that point, it was just me and a rag tag group of freelancers I was paying using the revenue from small ad campaigns we managed to secure. We then signed an annual partnership with a bank which gave us the funding and security to start hiring a real team, who created content, which attracted an audience, which we sold advertising against and it really just snowballed from there.
There were countless hurdles and still are. But I put them all into the category of growing pains. Every day we were doing something for the first time. Our inexperience and naivety were both strengths and weaknesses. We definitely made mistakes and often took the long way round, but we were also building a digital business at a time when that entire industry was still being defined, so we weren’t dealing with any legacy issues or old ways of thinking. We were very early to branded content, for example, because it just made sense to us – and we could build that capability from the ground up, rather than needing to redefine how we monetised our audience.
In some respects, our success was never in doubt. Not because we were undeniably successful from day one, but because we started with humble ambitions which have grown as the business has grown.
What have been the milestones so far?
It’s sometimes hard to pinpoint specifics. Maybe our first major advertiser contract, or achieving large scale audience milestones, or winning industry awards over much bigger, well-established peers, or building the team from 1 to 10, to 25 to 50 to 80 and beyond.
But, more realistically, I think about our ambitions and achievements as a horizon point. As we get closer to a stated goal or ambition, we look up and set another one at the horizon – something we can only just see or imagine. It’s helped us maintain a growth mentality and motivated us to keep pushing.
What’s special about Broadsheet?
We think a lot about quality, credibility and independence. Quality in both what we cover and how we cover it.
We love high-quality operators and experiences and are unusual in that we only cover things we like. Our editorial mission can be boiled down to: we think this is excellent and we think you will too.
We then apply this mindset to ourselves and what we produce. That starts at our editorial and extends outwards from there. Our editorial director is a double masters from Columbia Journalism School, we are a rare digital native publisher that employs a team of sub-editors and all our work is the result of original reporting. Our view is that, while our beat is culture rather than politics, our journalism still deserves and demands rigour.
Credibility is also central to our mission. Readers trust us and what we stand for. That trust is earned through consistency in the credibility of our reporting and advice.
Finally, we are somewhat unique in the Australian media landscape as being wholly independent. I’ve never raised capital or taken an equity partner. That independence gives us total freedom and flexibility to approach challenges and opportunities in the best way we see fit.
What’s been the impact of the pandemic?
While the early days of the pandemic were certainly challenging, as they were for most, we’ve came out the other side in good shape. As cities started closing down, we felt very vulnerable. We write about cities and the things that make them great, so were confronted with an obvious challenge. However, it didn’t take us long to recognise that what we actually do is cover culture. Just because our cities were shifting, that culture doesn’t just stop – it adapts. So we were covering the way people were living in lockdown, from all the innovative takeaway and pop-up projects, restaurant and bars, to the symphony and ballet giving performances online. And lots and lots of recipes to cook at home.
The lasting impact was a sharpening of our focus and some improved discipline in our operations and business.
Is the Australian media market different to the UK and US?
Yes and no. All the same pressures apply. Google and Facebook take 80 cents of every dollar spent in digital advertising, distribution can be a constantly shifting challenge and then we have the spectre of generative AI in search and what that means for referral and copyright.
But we’re perhaps different in that the industry is highly-concentrated – and the venture capital driven growth of independent business seen in the US never came to Australia. And then, of course, there are all the differences in cultural nuance.
What’s the future?
We definitely see a lot of growth potential in the Australian and New Zealand market. But we certainly plan to have a meaningful presence in other markets within the next five years.
London and the UK is next for us, and then either Europe or the US.
We’re keeping an eye on the UK market, which appears to be having a tough time at the moment. We’re hoping that early next year the conditions might be improving and be a good time for a new entrant. We’re exploring a couple of partnership options. Going in with a partner who can help support audience referral, advertiser relationships and funding might potentially accelerate our growth there. But we’re also very confident in launching independently.
What is your own primary role?
My title is Publisher and I lead the business, but I have a very strong general manager and senior team who manage the day-to-day operations. I most enjoy bringing a vision to life – developing an idea and bringing it to fruition. I find that very rewarding.
I’ve tried to set the business up in a way that means I can maintain an entrepreneurial approach to my work, focus on growth opportunities and keep my eyes up and set on the horizon, while my very talented team keep the trains running on time. But it’s not cut and dried, I’m involved and connected to the day-to-day and the team also contribute and buy into the future vision.
Which companies do you most admire?
I’m drawn to brands that have developed scaled businesses through high-quality products, both in media and beyond.
I feel like when I was growing up, so many big brands appealed to the lowest common denominator. Tabloid papers and gossip rags sold millions of copies and reality TV took over. But, in more recent times, companies who create high-quality media and products have dominated. We think of so-called ‘prestige TV’ becoming a cultural dominant force with the rise of Netflix and HBO. Disney has become one of the largest entertainment and media businesses ever on the back of high quality programming. The New York Times has become a global monster by doubling down on high-quality journalism. And, outside media, Apple has become the biggest business in the world by creating the highest-quality products on the market.
What do you wished you had known when you started out?
There are so many. Initially, I was mostly using intuition to guide me so I’ve learned a lot over the last 15 years. But if there’s one thing that stands out to me as being consistently relevant it’s: that there’s always a way.
It’s so common for people to come across an obstacle and immediately decide that it can’t be overcome. But my driving philosophy is that, if you have a good reason for wanting to do something, a little bit of creative thinking and perhaps re-framing how you think about the mission, or the obstacle, anything can be achieved.
