Sifted launched in January 2019, founded by digital entrepreneur Caspar Woolley (best known for Hailo) and John Thornhill, the FT’s innovation editor, and backed by the FT and seed money, largely from external angel investors. It described itself as “a media platform backed by the Financial Times, shining a spotlight on European innovation.” Its pitch is: “We want to be an essential, trusted and independent resource for those in Europe’s startup and tech world; a source of news, information and analysis, but also a channel for discovery – sifting and sharing the best events, content and networks that already exist.”
Thornhill had stood down as the FT’s deputy editor in 2016 to take on a new role as innovation editor to strengthen the FT’s tech coverage, write a regular column and seek out innovative opportunities. He perceived a gap in the market for high quality journalism and data about Europe’s fast-growing startup world.
Editorial Director Thornhill said to Cognito: “Our original idea was to create a new media business combining the brand strength and journalistic authority of the FT with the speed, agility and lean cost structure of a startup. We have now built a brilliant team of journalists and are hugely excited by the progress we have made in the year since our launch.”
A year on, profitability and revenue metrics may naturally be hard to come by, but it’s definitely not too soon to measure the publication’s initial impact. We know it’s got £1.3m of capital as of its last filing, and it has attracted 2m unique visitors to the site with an accelerating rate of growth. Sifted told Cognito: “This month we will surpass 340,000 unique monthly visitors. We also have 30,000 newsletter subscribers, currently rising by 5,000 a month.”
Sifted now has 8 staff journalists in London, Paris and Stockholm, as well as part-time reporters in London, Berlin, Barcelona and Bucharest and occasional contributors elsewhere. The editor, Michael Stothard, brings a strong European flavour after bouts for the FT in Spain, France and the Nordics, while innovation editor Maija Palmer is an award winning FT technology specialist. Palmer has also launched Future Proof, a separate Sifted newsletter focusing on corporate innovation. All this is a substantial investment in editorial media by any measure.
Community first
Sifted now has 4,432 followers on LinkedIn and 8,089 on Twitter (but compare this to circa 20k for 11:FS). On Twitter it seems to have attracted good quality engagement, but perhaps not a breakout success in terms of engagement numbers. Its name does not make it easy to track online, but search results does not reveal a great volume of third party mentions or endorsements.
“Community”, inevitably, is important to Sifted. The company promised to “to put our readers at the heart” of its work. While not shirking from being principally a media outlet, it is keen to stress its ability to provide data around events, service providers and jobs. The community section on the site is now in closed Beta. (Having belatedly registered Cognito for the community area, at present I am waiting to get a response and look at this in more detail.)
Sifted has done a great deal of excellent reporting. There are certainly some lighter pieces – lighter in the sense that they give organisations a chance to profile themselves without too much critical scrutiny. Various articles under the monikers “Power Players” or “Who’s Who” feature executives of a tech firm (eg Starling Bank) answering written questions, but without really having their feet put to the fire. It’s interesting stuff, and a common approach in trade media, but not something the FT would tend to do.
Sifted has however also been doing more investigative, tougher stories, for example around the fallout relating to RBS’s digital bank Mettle; N26’s failure to make inroads in the UK; and scepticism about the arrival of Sequoia and a new wave of US VCs in Europe.
A modern presentation
The content is not too cluttered with outside contributors (who often can’t write), and it’s not too over-dependent on surveys (though it clearly has some connection with Dealroom.co).
It uses graphics well, and its corporate innovation directory is useful. Many stories are effectively illustrated by app ratings. So far it seems to be able to get tech firms talking, and indeed the VCs to some extent. The challenge is to keep that going in tougher markets over time. It has covered deeptech extensively, while its fintech coverage is skewed to consumer facing platforms, but that is where most value has been created.
The length of many of the bigger stories works well – without making a fetish of long form, they are able to expand into a level of detail the audience will undoubtedly appreciate.
Beyond the media
In many ways Sifted has plotted its own course: it is not a media partner, for example, for Money 20/20 or Finovate Europe. This can be seen as showing confidence as a quality product and not rushing to ape others, but this self-sufficient approach, above the froth, can limit awareness. It has already partnered with several organisations to run joint events.
One other curiosity is that Sifted doesn’t have its own podcast, while John Thornhill hosts the FT’s Tech Tonic podcast. It says though it will launch a Sifted podcast once it has refined its ideas about creating a distinctive offering. The FT each week helpfully summarizes Sifted’s “European Startup Week”.
It should be said that whenever I’ve mentioned Sifted to people, the feedback seems positive – one fintech executive described Sifted “one of the only two newsletters I think it worth subscribing to” while a French reader commented to Sifted: “J’adore cette lettre! Comme j’aime le FT ;)”.
A chance to break out
In the media landscape, it is without doubt well positioned against older, smaller competitors, many with more of a PE bent. It is much more genuinely pan-European than some traditional UK business tech titles. Quartz and Business Insider are perhaps more significant competitors, even though their mandates are much broader and their resources on startups and tech coverage rather less.
Undoubtedly it is harder for a new media outlet to get talked about today. The days when Industry Standard and Red Herring were lauded in mainstream media as titles of unique, mysterious influence, are not coming back.
Two humbly submitted pieces of advice to the editorial team. One, Sifted needs to hype itself blatantly. Both the FT connection, and its community orientation, are good and bad in terms of Sifted’s salience as a media title. And secondly, for the size of the editorial team, there should clearly be an ambition to broaden the product significantly – in terms of conferences, video, podcasts, research. It has already launched The Sift, a series of monthly in-depth, data-rich reports on Europe’s new economy. The first, published last month and downloadable, was on the on-demand food delivery market. Sifted says it has many new initiatives planned, and we’ll be watching with interest.
Andrew Marshall is Cognito’s deputy chairman