Joey Alarilla wrote a piece on “The truth about INQ7.net…” which explains what has happened to the site Inq7.net and what will happen to the new Inquirer.net.
That, after some months of speculations (and denials), a praise release, and an obvious re-alignment of articles (with the occasional incidents of infinite domain redirections). Nice to really hear it from the horse’s mouth this time.
It almost completely answered the what but none of the why. So, now that it has been put on record, we can safely say that the Inquirer group took the better half of the deal. Here’s what I think why:
- The Inquirer team has always been on the driver’s seat while GMA7 has been at the back-seat all these 5 or 6 years of partnership.
- GMA 7’s Php100 million investment for the joint project ended up producing the No. 1 site in the country.
- All existing advertisers at Inq7.net were all moved to Inquirer.net. I don’t see the same ads displaying on GMANews.tv. Not sure how the sales team and the ad revenues were split though but I suppose it would have been cut into half as well.
- All organic search engine results with the domain inq7.net on it re-directs to Inquirer.net. See sample search results here.
- Inquirer.net still (somewhat) inherits the Inq7.net brand.
In the end, Inquirer.net only lost the Inq7.net brand domain but all the other perks are still intact esp. the most critical one — advertising.
So, the challenge is on for the best Philippine news sites — the more players and content providers there are, the better for us the reading public. May the one with best original and relevant content wins.
Hi joey! Thanks for the answers. At least now we get both sides of it. ;)
hi abe, interesting questions. let me try to answer them to the best of my knowledge.
1. “the inquirer team has always been on the driver’s seat” — hmm, i dunno about that. we sure would have loved some help while we were busting our asses running the site all these years.
2. it was a 50-50 joint venture between inquirer and gma. and oh yeah, inquirer.net was the number 1 philippine news site even before gma entered the picture and we spun off inquirer.net into inq7.net. not saying we’re ungrateful ‘coz at the end of the day it was a partnership (it still is, by the way), but those are the facts.
3. the existing inq7.net advertisers weren’t moved to inquirer.net. they chose to go to inquirer.net. dunno why :)
as for the last two questions, not really sure so it’s better if someone else tries to answer them.
hope that helps.
cheers,
joey
Yeah, I’ve been wondering about Inq7.net as well. Of course, you’re right when you mention advertising since it’s the life blood of any online venture.