THE HISTORY OF MONEYWEB

Moneyweb is an integrated media company in South Africa and aims to publish and broadcast quality
business, financial and investment content on its radio, print and digital platforms. The flagship brand is
Moneyweb.co.za. Moneyweb's internet content is first published on this website, in South Africa.

Moneyweb was founded in 1997 and has over the past 16 years established itself as one of the leading
online sources of business, financial and investment content in South Africa. In addition, Moneyweb
produces financial radio programming for three SABC radio stations. These stations are SAfm, Lotus FM
and RSG. Moneyweb also provides content for CitiBusiness, the business supplement of The
Citizennewspaper and publishes its content on its digital mobile applications, known as Moneyweb Now
and Moneyweb Talk. Moneyweb also has a copy sharing arrangement with MyBroadband.co.za which
allows reciprocal use of up to three articles a week.

Moneyweb's content strategy is to provide excellent, unique and original business, financial and
investment content to the Moneyweb community. This content includes, but is not limited to:

- Breaking news in the financial, business and personal finance sectors;

- In-depth analyses of and opinion on financial events;
- In-depth analyses of and opinion on investment trends;
- In-depth analyses of personal finance trends;
- In-depth data of all key economic and financial indicators;
- In-depth analyses of and opinion on JSE listed company results and corporate activity;
- In-depth data of all listed companies on the JSE and selected international markets;
- In-depth data on all unit trusts in South Africa; and
- Other articles that the Moneyweb community will find interesting and/or useful.

THE APPROACH OF MONEYWEB

Moneyweb's editorial approach is based on the generation of unique and original business, financial and
investment content for its various platforms.

Although Moneyweb, like most online news services, uses syndicated content from wire services for which
it pays licence fees to the owners of the services, and other sources, Moneyweb's core focus is on the
generation of unique and original content. Unique and original content refers to article ideas that have
been conceptualised by a Moneyweb journalist or editor, and which are then written or produced for
exclusive publication and/or broadcast on the various Moneyweb platforms. These articles are not found in
any other publication or radio programme as the reporters are required to write their articles for exclusive
use by Moneyweb.

This refers to all types of news, ranging from breaking news, to unique and original angles on public news
developments and news interpretations. It is important for the editor to ensure that the work of his
journalists comprises their own original skill, effort and expertise. The article ideas are generated in
compulsory editorial meetings and agreed upon before the stories are written. In this way, the editor is
able to exercise oversight over the editorial content of the Moneyweb website.

Moneyweb uses a core team of journalists to generate this unique and original content. Through the past
16 years they have established an excellent reputation as provider of exceptional business, financial and
investment content.
 Moneyweb's journalists are either full-time employees of Moneyweb under a contract of employment, or
are freelance journalists, who provide journalism services to Moneyweb under contract. All works
produced by these journalists are produced in the course and scope of their employment or services
contracts with Moneyweb.

THE APPROACH OF FIN24

Moneyweb's business model differs significantly from their competitors who have adopted a strategy of
predominantly publishing syndicated copy from wire services such as SAPA, Reuters, Bloomberg and AFP,
as well as from unsolicited press releases generated and distributed by the public relations industry. In this
regard "syndicated copy" refers to material that is distributed by wire services, for a subscription fee, for
purposes of re-publication by newspapers, magazines and websites.

The "wires-only strategy" of such competitors is much less costly than employing a team of journalists.
Simply put, where Moneyweb believe a story warrants it, it requires journalists to personally investigate
all angles of a particular event or development, to leave the office and to attend press conferences and/or
to interview individuals and relevant experts before they apply their minds and write their articles. This
approach ensures that Moneyweb publishes unique and original content.

The wire-services approach, on the other hand, regards news as a commodity and places no premium on
originality. In this environment, third party material is published as is or merely re-purposed without a
‘journalist' ever having to leave his or her chair.

23 One of the consequences of a "wires-only" strategy, however, is that the particular website or
publication cannot properly differentiate itself through unique and original content, as other competitors
are able to publish the exact same syndicated articles.

COMPETITION IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN FINANCIAL MEDIA MARKET

There are three main South African entities that operate as financial media organisations via the internet.
There are other players, but these players are the largest players in terms of traffic. They are:

- Moneyweb (www.moneyweb.co.za);
- Fin24 (www.Fin24.com); and
- BDLive (www.bdlive.co.za). BDLive is owned by BDFM, a subsidiary of Times Media Group.
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As I have already foreshadowed, while these three players compete directly with one another for readers
and advertisers, their editorial strategy differs significantlyAs already indicated, Moneyweb focuses on the
publication of unique and original content for its various digital, print and radio platforms.

BDLive follows a hybrid strategy where it publishes articles already published in the Business Day
newspaper, as well as breaking news articles written by BDFM journalists.BDLive focuses on the
publication of unique and original content written by a centralised team of journalists within the BDFM
group.BDLive also publishes syndicated content from wire services to augment its original offerings, but
the majority of its content is original as BDFM journalists generated it.

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Historically, Fin24 generated original content from its own team of journalists. These journalists were
predominantly working for FinWeek magazine, but also did freelance work for Fin24. This practice was
stopped in 2009 following an aggressive restructuring and the inclusion of both Fin24 and FinWeek into a
new entity, namely FinMedia24. FinMedia24 housed all the financial titles and publications of Media24,
including Sake24, Sake24.com, Fin24, MiningMX, FinWeek and McGregor BFA.

The restructuring also brought about internal restructuring at Fin24. The staff was reduced to a few
content editors who posted mostly wire copy and English translations of some original articles first
published in Afrikaans by Sake24.At the time there were also a few freelance contributors who produced
unique and original content for the Fin24 website.In 2011, Fin24 was restructured again and the editorial
management of the entity was transferred to News24 based in Cape Town.

Moneyweb is one of the local market leaders in the field of online business and financial journalism. This
position in the market was slowly built when the company opened its proverbial doors in 1997. At the time
Moneyweb was the first dedicated financial news portal in the South African web domain. As indicated, it
now competes mainly against Fin24 and BDLive.

In recent years, Fin24 was market leader in the online financial space in terms of both page impressions
and unique browsers. Moneyweb has, however, seen significant growth during the past few years and its
traffic has recently surged and surpassed Fin24's traffic in certain months. For example, in March 2013,
Moneyweb's page impressions exceeded Fin24's by 85,362 impressions.

The statistics just quoted and those that appear in the tables below are for March 2013 as measured by the
Digital Media and Marketing Association's (DMMA) measuring service known as "Effective Measure". The
DMMA is an independent association, whose traffic measurement reports are relied on by all industry
players, including Fin24 and Moneyweb.

I point out that in the tables that follow "unique visitors" are defined as the actual number of unique
visitors who visited the particular portal during the month of March 2013. By contrast a "page view" or
"page impression" is the number of individual pages that were opened on the website and viewed by a
reader. Thus a single visitor might open five different articles/pages on the site during the month - that
would mean one unique visitor, but five page views.

Measured by the number of unique visitors, Fin24 was the market leader and Moneyweb was ranked
third:
Unique Visitors
1. Fin24 413,174
2. BDLive 306,211
3. Moneyweb 277,514
Source: Effective Measure, South Africa traffic, March 2013.
Measured by the number of page views, Moneyweb was the market leader in March, followed by Fin24. It
was only the second time in recent years that Moneyweb managed to attract more page views in a
calendar month than Fin24. Since March 2013, Fin24's monthly page impressions have surpassed
Moneyweb's.
Page Views
1. Moneyweb 2,650,019
2. Fin24 2,564,657
3. BDLive 1,487,777
Source: Effective Measure, South Africa traffic, March 2013.

There is considerable competition between Fin24 and Moneyweb for visitors and page views, which I
collectively refer to as traffic. Indeed all the financial websites compete for traffic.
The revenue model of Moneyweb is based on the selling of advertising to advertisers. Without advertising
revenue, Moneyweb cannot operate as a going concern. Moneyweb does not charge visitors to read its
content.Their revenue is directly correlated to the number of page impressions our websites generate and
the number of unique visitors we receive. In other words, advertisers pay for delivering audiences to
them.

The majority of advertisers use advertising agencies that specialise in online advertising. These agencies
carefully monitor and compare the internet traffic of websites, as this greatly impacts their decision to
advise their clients on where to advertise. Bluntly put, growing audiences and traffic translate into
increased revenue.

The table set out below - again reflecting the DMMA figures - graphically depicts the monthly page
impressions of the three main competing financial websites I have referred to:

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As I have set out above, there is clear competition amongst these players, both for traffic and advertising
rands. Financial pressures have now forced some publishers such as Fin24 to cut their editorial costs to the
bone. Other publishers, such as Moneyweb, have increased investment to offer unique and original
content. The theory is that unique and original content would attract more readers, while a low-cost model
would lead to a commoditised offering of syndicated content. The reality is that the volume of Fin24's own
generated news content is inferior to competitors who invest in original content. However, in order to
generate revenues, Fin24 needs to generate traffic to its website.

Fin24 overcomes this problem by copying the original content from competitors to be able to compete.
The reason for the need to indulge in this behaviour is alluded to above. It is based on the fact that internet
traffic is directly correlated to revenue. Indeed advertisers pay publishers per 1,000 advertisements served
on a site, meaning each reader who opens the web page is measured and counted and this earns money
for the publisher. Advertisers themselves are also more likely to buy advertising space in a high traffic site
than a low traffic site. Thus the content offering of a news site is a crucial competitive advantage.

The critical role played by content on a news site is heightened by the manner in which search engines
operate. One of the most significant generators of online traffic is from people who use a search engine
such as Google to search for information on a particular topic. When so requested by a reader, the Google
search engine searches the World Wide Web for content that accords with the search parameters set by
the reader, using a secret and complex algorithm. The Google algorithm ranks the content it finds and
displays what it perceives to be "original" content higher up its search rankings than content that is simply
a reference to someone else's article.
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