How the wedding blog One Fab Day grew into a thriving media business

It stayed focused on the UK region and charged businesses to be indexed on its platform.

When Naoise McNally and her business partner launched One Fab Day, neither of them had any experience working for a media company. Naoise didn’t even have much knowledge of the wedding industry outside of planning her own wedding. But the lack of wedding-focused internet resources in Ireland presented a clear market opportunity, so they went for it.

Flash forward several years, and the site now has a full time staff and an interesting business model. Instead of relying on traditional advertising, it charges wedding vendors to be listed in an index it curates for readers. 

I recently interviewed Naoise about One Fab Day’s founding, how she settled on a business model, and what she hopes the site can accomplish now that it’s owned by a major media company. 

To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.

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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Why Naoise co-launched the site

Naoise didn’t consider herself a wedding expert or aficionado. She became interested in the topic when attempting to plan her own wedding, a process that left her frustrated with the lack of good online information. “We're based in Ireland, and there was no local information available to us. So we found ourselves turning a lot to US-based blogs. While the ideas were really fresh and interesting, the editorial content itself had limited value because we couldn't engage any of the [U.S.] suppliers or any of the businesses.”

Naoise and her cofounder didn’t have editorial backgrounds -- both came out of the tech world -- and they treated the wedding blog they launched as a hobby.  “Within about six months, we realized that we've gained enough traction to warrant it becoming more of a business … We started it as a blog and it was really about solving people's problems. We heavily optimized it for search. We grew it initially through a combination of word of mouth marketing and search optimization.” 

The site launched in 2010, with Naoise supplying most of the content. “We started hiring editorial staff and contributors within a year or so, but on an ad hoc basis, because obviously we were just building this business in the middle of the recession and we certainly weren't going out and looking for investment at that point. We bootstrapped it, and everything we made, we put back in hiring editorial staff.”

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How they monetized One Fab Day

One Fab Day didn’t go the traditional monetization route. It mostly eschewed standard digital advertising. “Essentially we don't do much work with brands or agencies. We don't do any big campaigns. What we actually do is we operate with a directory of small to medium sized businesses within the wedding industry, to whom we offer a kind of an annual campaign. It's not a subscription per se in the sense that they have to pay up front for a year, but it's a 12 month campaign with some basic elements. You get a directory page, you get a certain amount of display advertising through the year. You may choose to upgrade to a dedicated newsletter or a dedicated piece of sponsored editorial, those types of things.”

The directory is invitation-only, meaning you must be vetted first. “What that means in principle is we work only with businesses that we feel our readers are going to be very interested in and the business in turn is going to get a great return on investment. The wedding industry has a very low barrier to entry. You know, anybody can set themselves up as a photographer if they have a camera. Anybody could say, ‘I'm a great makeup artist.’ It's fairly easy. For us to promote any businesses that weren't going to deliver high quality of service, that would be really damaging. So we look to only work with businesses that we know are quality businesses that have a good reputation, where we can see their portfolio. Because of this, our renewal rate is running at over 90% with the businesses who work with us, and some of those businesses have been with us seven and eight years.” 

Why One Fab Day sold to a larger media company

In July, DMG Media, a large holding company that owns the Daily Mail and other media properties, announced it was acquiring One Fab Day. “Having built the business over the previous nine years, our readership now stands at about  550,000 unique visitors a month. We're number one in Ireland,  and we’re in the top two or three in the UK, and in the top 10 in the U.S. for readership. So we were doing very well, but our entire revenue stream is based out of Ireland. Over the previous year or two we experimented with many of the things that other media companies had tried -- events and podcasts, etc… --  but we were struggling with how to expand the business because we were bootstrapped. “

Then Covid-19 hit, and the company’s founders were unsure as to how it would affect their business. “We looked around at our options and we thought that actually probably the best thing for us being a small organization was to try and merge with a larger organization with a more robust infrastructure, with all the things that we don't have. So we got into negotiations with DMG, and there's a really good fit because they have a baby website, they have other female focused websites, and male focused websites, and this wedding website fits with them. So this made sense for us, it brings us into a global and media conglomerate with all of that expertise, all of that financing and all of the support, which really helps.”

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.

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