The establishment of The Trillium, a new Queen’s Park news website, may be Village Media’s latest launch, but it won’t be its last.

Jeff Elgie, Village Media’s CEO, said the company plans to expand its news network of 24 websites in the next few weeks and beyond. The company has plans for sites in Oshawa and Milton, in line with growth that has focused on providing local digital news to different communities in Ontario. But Elgie also says a “nationally-focused lifestyle site” will be up in the coming weeks as it expands its offering to other areas that might be of interest to its readers.

In the 10 years since Village Media was established as a pure play digital news organization stemming from the 20-year-old site Soo Today, the company has orchestrated a number of new publications and created proprietary technology to expand into a business that employs 145 people.

The company is also quick and flexible when it comes to establishing new ventures. Elgie (pictured, left) says The Trillium had been in the works for a month-and-a-half, with the idea being that representation at Queen’s Park would be beneficial to its local coverage across Ontario.

But the coincidental timing of mass resignations and layoffs of editorial staff QP Briefing at iPolitics led to a week of intense negotiation to bring the whole team on board. And more expansion is on the horizon.

“Village’s interest is to continue to grow our owned and operated markets across Ontario,” Elgie says.

With an estimated audience reach in the millions in Ontario alone, the company has a healthy subscription and social media base.

“Not including our partner markets, we have over 300,000 newsletter subscribers and hundreds of thousands of social followers,” Elgie explains. “Our own network does about 40 million pageviews a month, which is pretty significant.”

With partners, the numbers are up substantially, according to Village Media’s media kit, updated in January: 61 million pageviews, 781,000 newsletter subscribers and 1.76 million social followers.

As far as demographics are concerned, Elgie says that Village Media specializes in local communities, and it knows exactly who makes up those readers.

“Your average news consumer is probably 25 and up,” he notes. “You don’t reach teenagers with us at all. As you can imagine, people who are actively reading local news tend to be connected to the community and in the adult portion of their lives: they might have a family, they might have a home and they would have a job in the community.

“I would say we’re very good at reaching 25 and up, and our core audience is really 40 and up – the most avid readers,” he says. “That age bracket goes right up to 90: most people who love newspapers have shifted to digital.  So, there’s certainly no truth to the fact that older readers don’t read online anymore.  They’re very much a big part of the demographic as well.”

As for the vehicles available to advertisers and agencies, Elgie says Village Media offers a wide range products, including standard programmatic offerings and market research products targeted at the communities it serves.

“The big thing for us is the local focus, right? So, our community sites are very highly community focused and attract a very loyal audience,” Elgie says. “We have a very particular set of local products beyond standard display advertising – everything from newsletters to video to sponsored content and contests to business listings and classified listings.”

The company’s holdings, Elgie says, also includes some business publications in the North, as well as a national aggregator site and three local sites in the U.S. But the technology and content management system that powers its news sites is also licensed out, and is currently being used by 50 news sites owned by publishers in Canada and the U.S., which is another key focus for business growth.