One column online.
Then a top 5 website
in Pakistan.
Building, staffing and monetising a network of news and entertainment publications.
The starting point
A well-known columnist with a large offline readership and no digital home. The first site was a WordPress build I made myself. For two months, almost nobody came.
The insight
Publishing is not distribution. We started posting where the audience already spent its evenings, on Facebook, and the traffic arrived in volume. From there it became a system: what to publish, when, in what format, and which headline earned the share.
The network
One publication became five, each aimed at a different audience:
- Javedch.com, columns and news
- Baat TV, video
- Icons, entertainment
- Politix, English-language coverage
- NewsToday, daily news
Plus a set of Facebook pages built to feed all of them.
Monetisation
I applied to Facebook’s developer conference and was invited three times. We tested Instant Articles early, well before most publishers in the market, and turned it into a revenue line rather than an experiment.
The team
I started alone, hired two classmates, then built the newsroom to 30 people across editorial, video, social and operations, with the publishing workflows to keep it running daily.
What changed
A platform algorithm update removed most of the referral traffic. The lesson was permanent: an audience you do not own is borrowed. The publication survived the change and still publishes every day.
What this brings a client
Audience building from zero, publishing systems that run daily, platform-native distribution, content monetisation, and a newsroom-grade production pace.
The First Amendment wall in Washington. Easy to carve into stone, harder to run a newsroom on.
Building an audience
from nothing?
I have done it once from a single column and once from an empty Shopify store. The method is the same and it is mostly patience.
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