Hungary’s market for online news last week lost one of its most promising new entrants, with the sudden shutdown of portal zoom.hu, which in its one year of operation had zoomed to upwards of 200,000 unique users a week. But according to some news reports, the portal may not have been a failure, despite being closed down. As the site was going dark on Wednesday, index.hu reported that its owner, Péter Tarjányi, had sold zoom.hu’s parent company to an unknown firm that was not interested in the website itself – which largely featured political content and streaming video – but the know-how and commercial contacts behind it.
According to this version of the story, Tarjányi had made a great breakthrough by reaching out directly to top managers at big advertisers, in the process bypassing traditional media agencies. As a result, the company had income topping Ft 300 (€1 million) last year, a healthy sum for Hungary. This success had stretched into additional hundreds of millions of forints booked for 2009, which will allegedly be swapped for ads on the other websites of the still-unidentified new owner.
Meanwhile, hwsw.hu published an altogether different account of the shutdown, saying that the portal went black simply because it ran out of investment capital, and was showing lower revenue than expected. This report also claimed that the number of visits was dropping, and that half of the editorial team had been let go by mid-March, with the others – including a dozen journalists – sent away last week.
Since the media above all likes to cover itself, the truth of what happened will probably come out in due time. In the meantime, a three-year no-compete clause in Tarjányi’s contract to sell zoom.hu means he won’t be able to replicate his mysterious success; instead, he says he will invest in property and tourism.