Cannabiz is three – tantrums and tiaras

As Cannabiz turns three, co-founder and chief growth officer Martin Lane reflects on a year in which we found ourselves under the spotlight – and it wasn’t an experience he always enjoyed. 

Cannabiz turned three over the weekend which, in developmental terms, sees us emerging from toddlerhood. Given the amount of tantrums I’ve had this year, that feels about right.

According to psychologist Erik Erikson’s model, toddlerhood is the moment when we test our independence, and there have certainly been plenty of times over the last 12 months when we’ve had to do that.

To stretch an analogy beyond breaking point, the industry is in its early-school years, so we’ve had a few playground bullies to deal with, but I guess that’s all part of growing up.

While we largely flew under the radar as we built our audience in year one, our second year of operation saw us break a number of big stories and really start to get noticed.

And in the last 12 months, our audience has grown by another 45%, bringing the number of people signed up to our weekly newsletter to over 4,000. With an average open rate of 45% – well above the publishing industry average – it’s not surprising we’re under more scrutiny than ever before.

And while the feedback we get is overwhelmingly positive, the nature of our work means we can’t please all of the people, all of the time.

With the Therapeutics Goods Administration dishing out record fines, companies going into administration, and others falling out over commercial terms, not all of the news in the last year has been good.

Even the regulator has come in for some flak for a perceived lack of consistency when it comes to investigating advertising breaches.

So it’s not surprising that some of those involved have not been overly happy at our coverage. But such is the nature of news reporting.

To be fair, that’s still a very small number. The vast majority are savvy enough to know a news story when they read one, even if it’s inconvenient for them at the time.

Among other gripes have been suggestions that we are somehow endorsing a company by writing about them. Our view is that we write for our readers, and they have a right to expect us to tell them what’s going on in the industry.

It’s worth quoting our editorial policy here.

“We do report company news and product launches in order to educate and inform our B2B audience. We are editorially independent and do not endorse any company or product. The fact that we write about a company or product is not — and should not be read as — an endorsement of any kind.”

If you think we’ve breached those guidelines, please do get in touch. Despite appearances, we are very open to feedback and will amend any stories which fall foul of them.

We are very grateful to have had some commercial support this year from companies who want to talk to our audience about the services they offer.

To be clear, these are not cannabis firms advertising their medicines – that would be illegal – but suppliers to the industry with a product or service which will potentially help our readers do their jobs better.

To ensure transparency, those articles are labelled as Partner Content so everyone is clear there is a commercial relationship at play.

Another accusation sometimes thrown our way is that we use ‘clickbait’ headlines to entice readers in. 

Now that’s one that does tend to get the toddler in me stamping my feet. 

According to Wikipedia, “clickbait is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalised, or otherwise misleading”.

The italics are mine, because I can’t think of a single example of a headline in Cannabiz that meets that definition.

Do we try to write headlines that draw people in and encourage them to click on the story? Of course. Arguably, the most important piece of writing we do all week is the subject headings for our weekly newsletter.

But it is never our intention to deceive or mislead our audience. They’re too discerning – and we have far too much respect for them – for that.

The other big feature of the last 12 months has been running the inaugural Cannabiz Awards for Australia and New Zealand.

I’ve written elsewhere about what we learned from that experience, but suffice to say it was the highlight of our year.

One member of the Cannabiz team – who has worked in other industry verticals – was blown away by how passionate, committed, and downright decent everyone was on the night.

That’s not always true of other sectors and it makes us even more determined to recognise the great work that’s being done at the 2024 presentation ceremony.

The awards were another area of our business where everyone had an opinion. But that’s what made us so aware of our responsibility to get them right.

There’s definitely room for improvement, but the support we got from the industry was overwhelming and we’re determined to make them even better next year.

We’ve got a few other plans up our sleeves for the next 12 months, but we’ll tell you more about those another time.

For now, I’m jumping on a plane from the UK to Italy and Croatia for a long-planned break booked in the days before Covid. Both countries are in the middle of a deadly heatwave – it’s enough to make your blood boil.