The Nordic Context: Achieving Growth in a Saturated Market

FT Strategies, supported by the Google News Initiative, is proud to share the learnings from the Subscriptions Academy Nordics 2023 programme, the first of its kind to focus exclusively on the Nordics region.

The programme helped news publishers to build and maintain sustainable digital revenue streams by addressing the entire lifecycle of digital subscriptions, from traffic acquisition all the way through to subscriber retention. Because the Nordics are widely viewed as a particularly mature and competitive market, the report places special emphasis on achieving growth in a saturated market.

This report presents the key findings and learnings from the programme. It provides details on:

• The industry context (on pages 6-8) including an overview of the Nordic news media landscape and challenges specific to the region
• An overview of the programme (on pages 9-11) through each stage of the process, from understanding each business to designing long-term growth initiatives using the North Star methodology
• A ‘playbook’ for subscriptions growth (on pages 12-17) that explores three tactics for maintaining engaged readers
• A selection of case studies (on pages 18-23) providing examples of how publishers have addressed issues specific to the region

After reading this report you should be inspired to:

• Prioritise reader understanding to inform compelling value propositions
• Carry out customer research and data-led experimentation, to jump-start subscriber growth
• Create more personalised and valuable content for your readers, and highly effective growth strategies for your reader revenue models