Roar Media shuts down news, goes all in on production studio

Sri Lankan digital media company Roar Media has shuttered its news publishing arm in light of its content production studio. Roar, which has been in active operations for a decade, has now pivoted from news to a B2B content creation company. Issuing a statement, the company announced that moving forward, it “will be focusing entirely towards the development of platform-specific content for brands and agencies at scale.”

While Roar will no longer publish news, its existing content (2014-2023) remains online in archive form. Although sources say the company’s management at one point almost considered removing its news content library in its entirety. Its now-archived news section reads, “As of 2024, Roar Media has ceased editorial operations and will no longer publish new content on this website.” It further adds that Roar has now “transitioned to a content production studio, offering creative solutions for brands and agencies.”

Decade in the making

The company first kicked off operations as a media startup back in 2014. Over the years, Roar would go on to expand its footprint as an online media entity. By 2018, Dialog Axiata’s Digital Innovation Fund invested an undisclosed amount in Roar. In the same year, Roar Media raised $1 million in funding, backed by BOV Capital, Digital Innovation Fund, Hyperion Ventures, and Striders Corporation, along with two angel investors based in Bangladesh and Singapore. The funding came in as Roar was looking to grow in Asia, with its presence already extending to Bangladesh and India. At the time, the company stated that part of the effort was to build on its Content-As-A-Service model and its capacity as a “one-stop digital marketing solutions provider to businesses.”

Since then, Roar has slowly transitioned from covering current affairs to a digital agency-style company. By 2020, Roar Digital was established as an ad resales arm, until it was rebranded as Roar AdX a few years later. The company also entered the Australian market last month with Roar Apex, a platform that aims to connect businesses with marketing and engineering talent.

Declining investment in news media

But why is Roar Media shutting down its media publishing arm? As of now, the company hasn’t offered any specifics on the pivot, apart from its ambitions as a production studio. However, it’s believed the company may have come to the decision amid increasingly challenging conditions to sustain a digital news media outlet financially.

End of the early 2000’s social media boom?

Since the advent of web 2.0 and social media in the early 2000’s, the media space saw a notable burst in viewership and engagement. Many outlets ranging from Vice Media to Buzzfeed were birthed during the early days of social media, those which went on to build massive audiences online. However, after years of battling numerous controversies, hate speech, misinformation, and countless other matters, the likes of Facebook Meta distanced themselves from news distribution and journalism. This meant that most media entities that have come to depend on Facebook, were upended as effectively translating referral traffic to sustain publications became increasingly difficult.

Similarly, Twitter, a platform that has long been associated with news media, also saw diminishing influence for the sector. This was largely fueled by the turmoil that followed Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform. Then there’s TikTok, a platform that has skyrocketed in popularity thanks to the pandemic is now becoming a central platform for news content.

The result is that publications that were built on early social media, could no longer be satiated with its existing infrastructure. Today, in the backdrop of post-covid effects and the growing presence of generative AI, the honeymoon period for news media appears to be truly over. At the time of writing, both Buzzfeed New and Vice Media have shut down with one report claiming that media companies slashed over 20,000 jobs in 2023 in the US alone.

Roar’s announcement mirrors a similar sentiment considering its positioning as a Sri Lankan-based digital media outlet. Either way, the loss of a digital publisher does little to help foster a healthy news media space in the country. This is particularly poignant in a landscape where some of the biggest publications in Sri Lanka holds little in terms of transparency and accountability.

As to what the future holds for media in the coming years, remains a curious question for many. But for now, it marks the closure of one of the more compelling digital news media entities in recent times for Sri Lanka.