The Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende is experiencing a welcomed increase in its subscription base. Sixty-five per cent of new subscriptions are either fully digital, or digital with the weekend delivery of the printed newspaper, and the number of readers of the digital edition has tripled in just one year.
A several-year period of falling subscription figures finally came to an end last autumn when Bergens Tidende made all of its content accessible on all platforms, implemented an online payment option and launched new subscription packages.
By the end of 2013, the Norwegian daily had a total of 68,068 subscribers, compared with 67,441 the year before.
Prior to being re-launched, the media house was losing around 40 subscriptions daily. Only 30 new subscribers came in their place, which means the newspaper lost a total of ten subscriptions each day. Now, however, Bergens Tidende is seeing a net growth of 40 subscriptions daily.
And a majority of the newcomers are opting for paperless subscriptions.
"We've changed our subscription structure so that all customers have the digital subscription as the standard product. From there, they can opt to have the printed edition delivered on the weekends for just NOK 50 extra, or for NOK 100 a month they can have it delivered all week," says CEO Andreas Thorsheim of Bergens Tidende.
"Before we implemented these changes, 90 per cent of our customers had the printed edition delivered all week, eight per cent were weekend customers and two per cent were digital subscribers. Now this structure has been completely inverted: 65 per cent of our new customers purchase either a digital subscription or a digital package that includes weekend delivery of the printed edition," Thorsheim explains.
In addition to the growing number of digital users, the number of readers who access the newspaper from their computers, smartphones and tablets has grown tenfold compared to the year before.
"This development has surprised the management group, which saw the digital subscription as a rather 'unsexy' product," Thorsheim notes.
How would you assess the e-newspaper's potential in 2014?
"We believe there's demand for an edited product that has a clear beginning and end, and which is the same for all readers at a given time. We want to offer our readers both an edited product, and one that provides a flow of content, as Scandinavian e-newspapers do," says Thorsheim who believes the results are due to the thorough groundwork carried out by the media house.
"In the ten months leading up to the re-launch, we established a foundation that makes it easy to convert from a paper to a digital subscription, such as by requiring a free log-in for a number of services. Our pricing for the product packages has also proven to be spot-on, not to mention that we now have a technical solution without any bugs."
Bergens Tidende's apps was developed in collaboration with Visiolink.
Bergens Tidende was first published on 2 January 1868 and is Norway's oldest newspaper. It is also the country's fourth-largest newspaper and the largest regional daily outside of Oslo. Bergens Tidende is owned by the Schibsted Group.
