OPINION: The decision by CRN in the USA to dump their Australian partner Next Media, who had the licence to CRN in Australia is not surprising, with the one time leader in the reseller channel now struggling to deliver traffic to their online site up against the likes of ChannelNews that last month (February) recorded record growth.
According to SemRush research ChannelNews delivered 1.2M visitors with 95% coming in directly.
Unique visitors to ChannelNews were 742,700, in comparison Channel publication CRN had 32,200 unique visitors Vs 40,200 overall visits, ARN only managing to deliver 27,600 unique visitors, and 32,800 visitors.
iTNews did better with 199,900 unique visitors and 231,200 visits.
In the appliance market Appliance Retailer delivered growth of 17% to deliver 26,700 unique visitors.
The arrival of US media Company Channel Co also raises questions with Next Media and the owners of ARN appear to be using their publications to drive event databases as opposed to employing journalists who actually know how to break news that deliver eyeballs to a site.
As a previous owner of both iTNews and CRN I know that The CRN Company actually have the journalists that know how to break the big tech news stories and if they are able to replicate their success in the USA Next Media’s new web site that they are punting on in place of CRN will face problems.
Steve Bourke who I have worked with in the past is one of the most experienced tech journalists in the USA and if they can replicate their success in the USA in Australia, they will create problems for both ARN and CRN.
Nextmedia believes that they can get away rebranding as techpartner.news, I doubt it.
The new operation will compete head on with The Channel Company’s CRN sit who have the relationships with the big brands that count and are in a better position to run events with better access to International speakers, they also have the global relationships with the likes of Synex and Ingram Micro. 
My understanding is that the US The Channel Company owns the URL crn.com.au but not necessarily the database, however in my old contracts with the US Company they also had access to the databases in the event of a termination.
This is not the first time that CRN has failed in Australia, the US event Company Penton Media acquired both CRN and iTNews back in 2021 from a Company that I owned at the time. Back then we syndicated 32,000 emails of a morning and a second news feed of an afternoon.
Like what CRN and ARN are doing today they used the web sites to drive event traffic.
Back in 2,000 CRN was known for breaking the big stories, allegations of tax avoidance at Intel, Gerry Harvey kicking the then market leader in PC’s out of his stores when they moved to set up Compaq stores. At the time he held over 60% of the consumer PC market.
Three days after selling the business and after being appointed as CEO of Penton Media in Australia / Asia Pacific I got an email from my US boss at the time, reminding me that they had acquired the business for the purpose of promoting events and that I had to go easy on the hard news story.
I sent him back a three word email “You will fail”.
Three months later I quit and within weeks set up ChannelNews and SmartHouse and after a fight in the Supreme Court with Penton Media who finally conceded that they were in breach of my contract.
Several months later Penton Media globally was placed into administration and the CRN and iTNews titles ended up a Next Media where it became the front end of an events operation.
Next Media claim that “After 20 years under a global licensing arrangement, The Channel Company (TCC) has chosen not to renew the CRN (Computer Reseller News) name license for Nextmedia as they expand their business globally.
“This marks an exciting new chapter for the Nextmedia team to launch a fresh, home-grown, local publication that will continue to serve and support the Australian channel community,” said Velvet-Belle Templeman, Publishing Director for B2B at Nextmedia.
“We are so excited for the next stage of our channel journey and are proud to introduce techpartner. news.”
Ironically the collective unique visitors to ARN, CRN, iTNews and Appliance Retailer are only 259,700 Vs the 742,700 that ChannelNews delivers.
