Editorial
Vincent Groizeleau led the editorial work and reporting, building the publication’s credibility with maritime professionals and institutions.
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Co-creator story · 2005–2010
MER ET MARINE
A specialist newsroom needs journalism. It also needs a product, infrastructure, distribution and a business model.
In 2005, I joined two complementary creators to build Mer et Marine, a digital media platform for the maritime world. My part of the adventure sat behind and around the newsroom: technical infrastructure, hosting, marketing, audience development and commercial systems. The result became a reference far larger than our tiny operating team suggested.
2005launched
1.6Mmonthly page views in 2007
3.2M+monthly page views in 2009
20+years still publishing
The opportunity
THE SEA WAS A HUGE STORY WITH NO SINGLE DAILY HOME.
Defence, ports, shipyards, shipping, offshore energy, cruise, public policy, training and jobs were all connected — but the information was fragmented.
Mer et Marine was born in May 2005 from the meeting of people who cared about the maritime world but brought different skills to the table. The editorial proposition was ambitious: cover the sea not as one narrow beat, but as an ecosystem of industries, institutions, technologies and people.
That mattered because the maritime economy is fragmented by profession. Naval officers read different publications from shipbuilders; ports live in a different information universe from cruise operators; defence, merchant shipping, offshore energy and public policy each have their own vocabulary. A digital publication could connect those worlds every day.
From the beginning, the goal was not a hobby site. Mer et Marine described itself as a real information medium, with the legal and editorial responsibilities of a publication. The newsroom had to earn trust from professionals while the underlying product had to make daily publishing dependable.
Three creators, complementary roles
THE WEBSITE WAS THE NEWSROOM — AND THE MACHINE AROUND IT.
Publication
Gildas Le Cunff de Kagnac carried publication responsibility and the structure around an independent specialist medium.
Systems & growth
I built and hosted the technical infrastructure and worked on marketing, communication systems, audience growth and monetisation.
In 2007 Mer et Marine publicly described the site as 100% owned by its three creators. That founder mix is one of the reasons I still value this experience: we did not have three people competing to do the same job. We had three different operating problems that had to fit together.
My side of the newsroom
BUILD THE INFRASTRUCTURE PEOPLE NEVER NOTICE.
When media works well, readers mostly see the editorial layer. They do not see servers, databases, publishing workflows, newsletter delivery, analytics, advertising systems or the practical work of keeping a site online when traffic spikes.
That invisible layer was my main contribution. Mer et Marine’s own 2009 article explicitly credited me with the technical infrastructure hosting the content and with hosting the site itself. I also handled marketing and communication systems, which meant thinking about the publication as both a technical product and a growing audience business.
The distinction still matters to me. A content business is not only content. It is a system that repeatedly turns reporting into an experience readers can access, trust, return to and recommend — while giving the organisation enough data and revenue infrastructure to survive.
The invisible product
PUBLISHING · HOSTING · DATABASES · NEWSLETTER · ANALYTICS · ADVERTISING · DISTRIBUTION
The first five years
A TINY TEAM, A VERY LARGE BEAT.
012005
Launch a specialist daily newsroom on the web
Mer et Marine launched in May 2005 around a deliberately broad definition of the maritime world: naval industry, defence, shipping, ports, offshore, cruise, training, jobs and the communities built around them.
022006
Build for an international audience
An experimental English-language version, Sea and Navy, went online in October 2006. The ambition was not only to report on French maritime activity, but to make French and European industry legible to readers abroad.
032007
The audience compounds
Two years after launch, Mer et Marine reported more than 10,000 daily readers and 1.604 million page views in a month. The site had already published more than 4,000 articles and its daily newsletter reached journalists as well as maritime professionals.
042009
A small team becomes a reference
By early 2009 the site reported more than 3.2 million monthly page views. The operation was still tiny: only two people were handling day-to-day management, with a network of correspondents around the editorial core.
052010
Find the next operating model
Mer et Marine entered a strategic alliance with Le Télégramme. The partnership brought commercial and organisational support while the specialist editorial proposition continued to develop.
06Today
The title is still alive
Mer et Marine remains an active specialist media brand inside the Groupe Télégramme ecosystem. More than two decades after launch, that durability is the part of the story I value most.
2007
WHEN A NICHE STARTS TO LOOK LIKE A MARKET.
The second-anniversary article in June 2007 captured the moment the experiment had become a recognised publication. Mer et Marine reported more than 10,000 readers per day and a monthly record of 1.604 million page views.
More important than the traffic was what sat underneath it. The site had already published more than 4,000 articles. Nearly 200 French and international journalists were receiving the daily newsletter. More than 70 political, military, industrial, port and labour leaders had been interviewed. Readers were connecting from across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia.
That was the strategic insight: a vertical publication does not have to stay small. If a sector is economically important, technically complex and poorly connected internally, a specialised medium can sit in the middle of a surprisingly large network.
1.604Mmonthly page views
4,000+articles published
200journalists on the newsletter
International by design
FROM BREST TO VLADIVOSTOK — AND BEYOND.
The maritime economy is international by definition. Ships, shipyards, defence programmes, ports and shipping routes do not stop at national borders. So the audience was international very early, even though the core publication was French.
In October 2006 we put an experimental English-language version online under the name Sea and Navy. The ambition was to make French and European maritime expertise easier to discover internationally and to extend the publication’s role beyond a domestic specialist audience.
That experiment was also a useful lesson in internationalisation: translation is the easy part. Audience habits, terminology, distribution and editorial expectations are different. A second language does not automatically create a second market.
2009–2010
CREDIBILITY BECOMES AN ASSET.
By February 2009 Mer et Marine reported more than 3.2 million page views in a month. Yet the daily operation was still remarkably lean: only two people were handling day-to-day management, with correspondents contributing around the editorial core.
The publication was increasingly being treated as a reference by other media. Mer et Marine described radio stations including France Inter, RFI, RTL and Europe 1 calling its team for expertise on major maritime stories. That is a different kind of growth from traffic. It means the brand itself has become useful to the market.
In July 2010 the site reported more than 30,000 newsletter subscribers and 5.486 million visits over the preceding twelve months. The next challenge was no longer proving that the audience existed. It was creating an operating structure capable of supporting a publication that had outgrown the resources of its original setup.
The next chapter
BUILD SOMETHING STRONG ENOUGH TO OUTLIVE YOUR ROLE IN IT.
In 2010 Mer et Marine announced a strategic alliance with Le Télégramme. The newspaper group could bring commercial reach, advertising infrastructure and organisational resources that a tiny independent team could not reproduce indefinitely.
My own chapter in the project ended around that transition. I had already moved to Berlin after the Trombi.com acquisition and my professional centre of gravity was shifting toward the Classmates/StayFriends European business.
What matters to me in retrospect is that Mer et Marine did not disappear when the original configuration changed. It kept publishing, expanded its formats and became part of the Groupe Télégramme media ecosystem. More than twenty years after its launch, it is still there.
For a builder, durability is a particularly satisfying form of exit: the thing continues to matter without needing you in the room.
What I still use today
LESSONS FROM BUILDING A MEDIA SYSTEM.
Mer et Marine is one reason I tend to look at ventures as systems rather than isolated products. Content, technology, distribution, trust and economics have to reinforce one another.
Complementary founders beat duplicated founders
The project worked because editorial credibility, publication responsibility, technology and marketing were not the same job. Clear ownership of different parts made a very small team capable of doing a lot.
Infrastructure is part of the media product
A newsroom can only be as reliable as the systems underneath it. Hosting, publishing workflows, databases, email delivery and measurement were invisible to readers but essential to trust and scale.
A niche can be enormous if it is deep enough
‘Maritime’ sounds narrow until you map defence, ports, shipping, shipbuilding, energy, cruise, public policy, jobs and international trade. Depth creates a larger market than generic positioning often does.
Audience quality matters as much as audience size
Mer et Marine became useful to professionals, decision-makers and other journalists. That credibility created leverage that raw traffic alone could not have produced.
Afterword
THE BEST NICHE BUSINESSES ARE NOT SMALL. THEY ARE SPECIFIC.
“Maritime media” sounds specialised. In practice it touches national security, industrial policy, global trade, energy, infrastructure, tourism, employment and technology. Specificity made the publication more useful, not less ambitious.
The same principle shows up constantly in startup work. A founder is often afraid that choosing a narrow first market will make the company look smaller. The opposite can happen: a sharply defined audience gives you the credibility and learning density required to expand intelligently.
Mer et Marine taught me that a strong position is not “we cover everything”. It is: we understand this world deeply enough that the people inside it come back every day.
Sources & further reading