Publisher chases rich, famous and influential with new website and patron

Michael Hedges April 1, 2008

You can fault newspaper people for many oft-documented mistakes ravaging their industry. They never quite got over television’s rise and thunder. So, now that the Web has risen it’s a perfect place to dust off that old business plan and try it one more time.

Swisster.ch is the latest Web project of Swiss publisher Edipresse Group. The English-language site targeting Western Switzerland is for “…managers, scientists and celebrities who are established in the region and who contribute to its development,” said the press release. And what better way of reaching the up-scale, smart and frightfully rich; make them pay for it.

The site, which officially went live this week, is reasonably attractive, rather straight-forward, but text heavy, lacking video, audio or anything else that fits the Web 2.0 design model. It reads like any of 30,000 bank-lobby magazines, but without the Rolex ads. And access, including newsletters, costs CHF300 (€ 190) per year for individuals, about the price of an average dinner in Geneva, up-scale of course. But the real target is employers who would, presumably, buy in bulk for their ex-pat employees. Oh, after 48 hours Swisster.com articles, heavy on banking news and personality profiles, are free to all.

It’s not that Swisster.com lacks competition for English-speaking Swiss residents eyeballs. Switzerland’s public broadcaster SSR-SRG produces the highly praised news site Swissinfo. More recently SSR-SRG upgraded the website for its national radio channel World Radio Switzerland (worldradio.ch), light-years ahead of Swisster in audio, video and interactive elements with the not insignificant benefit of a radio channel for built in promotion. Plus there are dozens of other websites and blogs catering to English-speaking ex-pats living in Switzerland, all free access.

But, publishers being publishers, the Webs partiality toward free access is a difficult business model. Edipresse is having enough trouble with competition from free newspapers for its Tribune de Genève and 24Heures titles. And niche market advertising carries a very high cost of sales.

Swissters ‘innovative’ business model is built on patronage, not uncommon in Switzerland or many other places. Edipresse Group is rich and, being so, understand the secret of being rich: use other peoples’ money. The primary patron for Swisster is private banking giant Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch & Cie (LODH), which, for obvious reasons, also invested in a Russian-language website launched by Edipresse targeting the few hundred Russian ex-pats living in the region. One can imagine an Arabic language site coming next.

LODH senior partner Thierry Lombard recently invested in former US vice-president Al Gore’s Generation investment fund. He has lots of money.

Another patron, banking on the high-tech sector, is Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Federal Institute of Technology). Swisster also offers a ‘health corner’ sponsored by a physicians group. "We can just as easily imagine in the future services in the field of employment, education and real estate,” said Edipresse project manager Philippe Sordet. The invitation is obviously open to more sponsors.

Like other upscale target publishing, success comes from enticing big sponsors rather than consumers’ eyeballs. Swisster.ch is on that track. Ex-pats as a target market are illusive and an illusion: they move on. A year from now, when sponsors’ accountants ask, “Why are we doing this?” yet another ‘innovative’ publishing venture will face the music, which the ex-pats will ignore with their iPods.