Internet Retailing bought Tamebay in August 2015. This is a potted account of how that came about.
For many years Chris and I were friendly with the guys at Internet Retailing. Head honcho Mark Pigou had, for some years, taken a keen interest in what we were doing and how things were going. And Ian Jindal, Editor in Chief, was someone we would often chew the fat with at events and socials.
In 2015, it became apparent to me, that the scale of what Tamebay was doing was becoming unmanageable for just the two of us. Chris was increasingly committed to ad sales and I was taking on more and more on the editorial side. The annual chore of constructing the Tamebay Guide was, in particular, becoming rather disruptive to the daily tasks.
We were also publishing dramatically more than we had even a year before. In the past, maybe four posts a day was the norm. We’d moved to writing as many as nine, but seven or eight was typical. We were starting to get a little frayed at the edges. Something had to change. And Internet Retailing started serious talks at the right time.
As Chris said at the time: “With the increasing volume of content we publish, combined with the growing complexity of ecommerce and the various aspects of running the Tamebay business, Dan and I have been spreading ourselves a little too thinly this past year. We’ve long recognised that to grow Tamebay to its full potential we needed expert help in many fields; we are looking forward to working with Internet Retailing Media to achieve this.”
It’s more than a year since we merged with IR and that means we’re doing more. More ebooks and webinars for starters. And we’ve also started producing video content.
On a day-to-day basis very little has changed because we’ve retained total editorial independence. There’s more office email and more people to talk to but that has its benefits. Indeed, it’s good to have clever people to converse and debate with. We’re freed up more than ever to write the news and that’s a good thing. Delivering you stories, and all the news that fits, is what Chris and I want to do.
I’m confident that we haven’t watered down what we write. There will always be critics but Tamebay remains a vocal and honest reporter on all things ecommerce. We’re looking forward to the next 10 years. The ‘new’ arrangement hasn’t changed that.
