Media network Vinyl Group has stuck to its end-of-year break-even deadline in an investor presentation that revealed plans to increase content output by ten times using AI.
The presentation reveals more details of the content strategy CEO Josh Simons has been teasing for months.
Financial details included in the presentation and in a separate ASX filing imply that Vinyl’s EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax and other deductions) was still negative in Q1 FY26 (July-September). While the exact numbers were not given in the documents, operating cash outflow (“cash burn”) was $1.41m, down on the previous quarter’s cash outflow of $1.76m.
Vinyl said the quarterly cash burn also included over half a million dollars in “one-offs” such as redundancy payouts.
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EBITDA is the measure that Vinyl has chosen to make its break-even target.
In revealing the “Automait” content strategy, Simons painted a picture of a publishing process that would be radically improved through task automation.
“ Producing content today relies on hundreds of small, repetitive tasks, monitoring for feeds, sorting stories, drafting, formatting, tagging, sourcing images, embedding metadata distribution across channels,” he said in the presentation video.
“These are essential steps, but they drain time and resources from the writers and editors whose skills are best spent optimizing high quality content.”
Simons said that “nothing changes” for editors under the new system, having described what is possibly a high-volume feed and AI-summary based content service.
“Articles take form through the drafting process before entering editorial review. Enriched by decades of proprietary content and music metadata, editors step in to tweak and approve before hitting publish and going live. For them, nothing changes. The workflow in the CMS feels the same, but behind the scenes, everything changes.
“This isn’t about replacing editorial, it’s about empowering and supercharging productivity.”
The “10x” content output aim is included in the presentation slide deck, with a timing of “end FY26” (June 2026).
Vinyl recently made editorial and other staffing cuts, including recently appointed head of publishing Tahlia Philips.
The redundancies affected “just under 10% of headcount” according to Vinyl, and were described as “a small adjustment following acquisitions”. Vinyl’s full-year accounts showed EBITDA loss was $10m in FY2025.