Ten months is a long time in the media, says Maximum founder

Digital publishing business plans have short shelf life, according to man behind Joe.ie and Her.ie

Maximum Media founder and chief executive Niall McGarry says he never makes a business plan for the digital publisher that extends much beyond eight-10 months.
Maximum Media founder and chief executive Niall McGarry says he never makes a business plan for the digital publisher that extends much beyond eight-10 months.

The words "media" and "fast-evolving world of" often appear in the same sentence but what does this mean in practice? Niall McGarry, the Maximum Media founder and chief executive, says he never makes a business plan for the digital publisher that extends much beyond eight-10 months.

“You can’t go out much further than that,” he says.

Maximum, which has just added joe.co.uk to its portfolio of lifestyle sites, enjoys higher referrals from Twitter than it does from Facebook, in large part because the Facebook business pages need a track record of interactions before posts are favoured by its algorithm.

“In the UK, we’ll use Facebook as a direct response advertising tool to drive people to our site. But we won’t be investing in building a community on Facebook because, in 2015, it’s not worth our while.”

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But McGarry is open to changing his mind. “In 2017, that might be different.”

Laura Slattery

Laura Slattery

Laura Slattery is an Irish Times journalist writing about media, advertising and other business topics