Today, we're shutting down Westmonster, our UK political website. Last month, we closed our other site, Glitterditch. So we're no longer in the digital publishing business, and we're focussing instead on digital consulting to the UK media, NGO, and advocacy sectors.

We're not taking the decision lightly, but the fact is that the audiences for these titles didn't warrant continued investment, particularly in the light of the advertising downturn the media sector is wrestling with.

When we launched last year, it was with the belief that there was an unserved niche for stylised reporting and content that fell between what the large media companies were doing, and what independent bloggers were providing. We're not saying that isn't true, but we are saying it's going to take significant amounts of investment in marketing and audience-building to build a business in there, for all sorts of reasons.

We've also found it really hard to recruit writing talent for the titles. We started with the working assumption that there was a significant tranche of young journalists in the UK willing to take a punt on a small publisher in return for increasing their own profile - we were offering pay, of course, but linked to audience and posting levels. What we found was that, at least at this point in time, those writers just don't seem to exist in any significant numbers in this country. While we were able to find some very dedicated and talented writers, the effective advertising CPM we'd have needed to pay them a reasonable wage only existed at an audience size orders of magnitude larger than we were able to achieve.

That said, we've had a lot of fun during our brief stint as media moguls. Despite the size of the audience, Westmonster in particular had moments where it punched well above its weight, attracting the attention of the traditional media and of the blogosphere.

To all of those who read and supported our titles, and particularly to those few intrepid writers who were willing to have a go, we'd like to extend our heartfelt thanks.

We're still working on things, separately and together, and MessyMedia does have a future. But not, for now, in digital publishing.

--Lloyd Shepherd & Andrew Levy, co-Managing Directors, MessyMedia

Welcome to MessyMedia. This is our corporate blog and the front door to our website.

Have a look at our About page - it will tell you about MessyMedia, about us and about what we're up to.

We're going to be using this blog both to make announcements about MessyMedia, and to discuss the developments in online media which interest us. Lloyd will be posting here about professional issues instead of at his personal blog. Andrew will also be having his say.

We're also going to be using del.icio.us. Links from del.icio.us will be appearing here in the normal way, and you can see all our shared bookmarks at del.icio.us/messymedia.

Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to contact us or find out more about what we're doing, do visit our About page.