Established sites rise to challenge

Today to the state's online news space has been a wake-up call for its two established competitors, which have recently boosted their offer and presence to maintain position in the lucrative sector.

"Both organisations [PerthNow and thewest.com.au] had well-established offerings in WA. When Fairfax launched its website, both media publishers lifted their game and lifted their local offering," Michael Mitchell, director of media planning and buying company Media Decisions OMD, said.

Fairfax's WA Today arrived in the middle of a six-week strategic marketing campaign by The Sunday Times's news website, PerthNow, and a couple of days after The West Australian's thewest.com.au relaunched its website on June 7.

"Our six-week campaign, the 'Now' was launched before WA Today entered the market," PerthNow marketing manager Lisa Ravlich said.

"We wanted to cement our position and get the message out there...we didn't decide to do a campaign in response to them."

All three organisations have focused heavily on marketing their products in the past few months with the use of outdoor advertising, leverage through their parent paper publications, and partnerships with radio and TV.

Currently, PerthNow is leading in terms of domestic unique browsers (UBs), which count the number of individuals visiting the website, as opposed to the number of page views.

Market research group Nielsen Online found that PerthNow had 532,642 domestic UBs in July 2008, followed by thewest.com.au at 391,858 and WA Today at 341,887.

Fairfax Digital Media division managing director, Pippa Leary, said a lot of advertising agencies had responded by beefing up their level of service.

Mr Mitchell said while the amount of resources the current three players had invested made it difficult for WA to support another news site, there remained space in the market for new niche players to establish themselves.