SINGAPORE: Singapore Press Holdings' (SPH) Project Eyeball
newspaper has closed after losing S$13.3 million (US$7.3
million) since it launched in August last year as a weekday tabloid
aimed at younger readers.
The newspaper spent its three-year budget in the first 10 months. With
SPH now involved into another financially-heavy venture in its new
television business, it didn't have the appetite to top up funding for
Project Eyeball.
Cheong Yip Seng, editor-in-chief of SPH's English and Malay newspapers
division, said: "We could find no reason to go back to the SPH board and
ask for more capital. If we had even achieved half the revenue we had
projected we could have lasted longer than 10 months."
Cheong said the online edition - Projecteyeball.com - lost money because
Singaporeans wanted free content.
And circulation for the print edition fell well short of its forecast of
between 25,000 to 35,000 copies. The shortfall has been blamed on SPH
and rival MediaCorp later launching free daily tabloids, Streats and
Today respectively.
"These free sheets combined are producing over 400,000 copies a day,
which is a lot considering the size of the Singapore market", said
Cheong.
Ad revenue also failed to meet targets because Project Eyeball had to
compete against the free sheets and a plethora of other titles,
according to Cheong. "There has been a downturn in the Singapore economy
and there's excess media inventory out there."
