I've been writing about SEO since I was 15 years old, and a decade later I'm fortunate to have consulted for companies I love like Ahrefs, Kinsta, Buffer, ConvertKit and multi-billion dollar brands.
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This is already too much text for a 'click-to-read-more-fade-thing' but there's more if you like.
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Haymarket Media Group, owners of ad industry magazine Campaign, today announced the acquisition of Canadian advertising blog, The Message.
The logo on the site has already been redesigned to include ‘in association with Campaign’ on it, but early next year the site will be renamed to Campaign Canada.
While no financial details were revealed, The Message was only launched in 2019 so it looks like a quick success story for founders David Brown and Chris Powell.
Both are staying on to help run the editorial operations of the site.
What caught my attention was the comments on how Haymarket are entering the Canadian market, essentially in preparation for the growth in the countries’ advertising business online.
Not only is the ad market growing, but it’s expected to become the sixth biggest market in the world by 2025, up from eighth place currently.
I’m going slightly off topic for this next point, but it made me think of an email we recently received from a company wanting to acquire our Detailed SEO extension for Chrome and Firefox.
We’ve never said the extension is for sale, and would only ever consider an incredible offer that guarantees no kind of clickstream tracking or similar is added to the tool. I have no intention or plans to sell, and would happily continue to update it for the next 10 years.
That said, we do receive 1-2 offers for it each month, and potential acquirers are very keen to know how many users we have in the United States, Canada, UK and Australia. A recent offer specifically valued the three latter countries as worth 70% of the first.
Other European users are only worth 40% of American users to them, with other countries worth 10%.
Again, I want to reiterate that we have no plans or need to sell the extension. It’s just interesting to see what kind of offers come in, and how users are valued based on their location.
The Canadian market online is clearly valuable.
Haymarket are one of the biggest media brands we cover, with their top sites including the likes of:
- WhatCar (Vehicles)
- AutoCar (Vehicles)
- EMPR (Health)
- ManagementToday (Business and Consumer Services)
- Cancer Therapy Advisor (Health)
- CampaignLive (Business and Consumer Services)
- CIPS (Law and Government)
- GPOnline (Health)
In terms of search traffic, the majority of their brands we monitor receive fewer than 100,000 visitors per month from Google, according to data from Semrush. None reach more than one million visitors per month from the same estimates.
A site like The Message isn’t being picked up for its search traffic, but for the position it has in a market where Haymarket see their audience as invaluable to future plans.
As they stated in their press release (emphasis my own):
We certainly found this with The Message, as it aligns perfectly with Campaign’s business model, already enjoys a specialist following of dedicated advertisers and marketers, and we’re excited to serve our content to existing and new audiences in Canada.
I already covered recently how newsletter The Peak – focused on the Canadian market – was acquired in a $5M deal. With these deals in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to be announcing a few more brands trying to grow their presence in Canada going forward.
