And as the year begins we are blowing our own trumpet!!

by Brendan Maxwell on 4 Jan 2014 Well who else will do it??

Sail-World.com was launched in August 2000, we made it to 2014, who would have thought!!

In March 2013, the little Aussie battler www.Sail-World.com became the most visited sailing web site in the world and has not been headed since.

In the last six months we have averaged 400,000 unique users each month - that is 4 x MCG's, eight times Sanctuary Boat Shows, six times Sydney International Boat Shows, not once a year but every bloody month.

Obviously the America's Cup was a major boost but the traffic trend continues upwards but when you think about it’s not surprising...

At the World Yacht Racing Forum 2013 (WYRF) in Gothenburg, the attendees voted on the most important media for sailing at 80% of the audience is the internet… TV is 17% (but who has that budget?) whilst print is down to 3%.

And put that in context, after almost half a century of sailing media domination... the latest figures suggest that one of the best known Australian sailing and yachting magazines now has less than 4,000 subscribers per month. That’s the number of readers Sail-World hit this year at 4am on January 1st 2014

In 2000 we registered Sail.World.com not sail.aus or sailing.aus. It’s not rocket science we followed the standard media model, good enough for News Ltd. Good enough for us, a mix of local news and international content, 24x7 news.

We had competitors then, their names go down in history, Quokka.com, BoatingOz, Yachte, Sailingonline, but they did not last the distance.

And as we've spread our content has become more international as well, we had the largest media contingent at the last two Olympic Games and the America's Cup, and we will have the most significant media presence on the ISAF Sailing World Cup circuit in 2014. And then it’s the Volvo Ocean race, our European head office is just 40 mins down the road from Alicante, the VOR HQ and race start, so you can imagine that our coverage will be more intense than others.

As multimedia becomes the best content delivery, our Sail-World feature articles have gained more and more traction with a mixture of text, images and video delivering feature material in a way that other media cannot.

In 2014 we will launch 11 new sites, yes 11, that will bring the group to 30 sites, we operate 24x7, and our news is published in 78 languages, some 15 of those we have 1200+ sailing technical words and phrases that have been translated by our team.

By the end of 2014 we expect that list will have grown to 30 languages, meaning Sail-World assisted translations will be available to 95% of the sailing readers worldwide.

And so the growth continues, traffic up more than 50% in 2013, with more than three million unique visitors.