Mashable is mulling the launch of an Australian site, potentially following in the footsteps of The Guardian and The Daily Mail. It is likely the social media news site will do something locally this year.
Chief strategy officer Adam Ostrow is in Melbourne this week speaking at an ecommerce conference, talking about digital trends and where he sees community building and content management heading.
Ostrow was hired in 2007 as the site's first editor-in-chief, after Pete Cashmore started it in Aberdeen, Scotland as a nineteen year-old two years previously. The social media, tech, business and entertainment focused news site is now headquartered in the US.
Ostrow would not comment on whether Mashable would launch a full scale operation or potentially set up a joint venture, as the Mail Online recently struck with Mi9, but it is thought that international expansion is one of the firm's top growth priorities and that a local venture follow later this year.
The company has previously claimed it has an audience of around a million monthly uniques in Australia. However, that is likely to represent a million unique browsers as opposed to unique audience. Nielsen data puts Mashable in the top 35 Australian news sites. On that basis it is likely Mashable's Australian monthly unique audience would sit somewhere closer to half a million.
Globally, Mashable states that it has 34 million monthly unique visitors.
Outside of linear audience, Mashable has a strong social media following with some 3.89 million Twitter followers and over a million Facebook fans.
By comparison, The Guardian has around over 7 million Twitter followers across its main, news, sports, media, science, books and tech accounts), the Huffington Post has about 4.75m across six accounts, Daily Mail has around 700,000 across various accounts and Buzzfeed has around 840,000 (including 5,500 followers of its Australia account).
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