Newspapers are now struggling because the revenues they used to receive from classifieds have shifted to the internet. The online company, which was founded nearly 15 years ago, was floated on the share market last week.

“It was certainly much harder in the early days. It was going into a car dealership and saying there is this wonderful thing called the internet, you should be a part of it,” Greg Roebuck, told ABC1’s Inside Business said.

“And their question was ‘what’s this internet thing?’ Today we don’t face that same issue, and I would suggest that maybe some of the print guys left us alone for a bit too long before they realised that it was a compelling medium – and that allowed us to get to where we are.”

Mr Roebuck says rival media company Fairfax has done little to stand in his company’s way. It had an opportunity to increase its stake in his company four years ago, but chose not to. He says that Fairfax has been one of the companies hardest hit as a result of its growth.

“They certainly know who we’ve been even all the way back to, I would say, the late 90s,” he said.
“Early in the 2000s they knew who we were and allowed us to get to where we got to without really trying to stop us.”

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