Beauty is bit deep: Schibsted scores on the Internet
Professor Media Critic Dan Kennedy links a New York Times article on Norwegian publisher Schibsted’s unusuallly successful Internet ventures.
Writes the Times about Schibsted:
Its earnings rose 28 percent in the fourth quarter. Online operations will generate about 20 percent of the company’s revenue this year, according to analysts at Kaupthing, a bank based in Reykjavik, Iceland, even as many other big newspaper publishers struggle to reach the 10 percent mark.
Perhaps more important, at least for investors, online businesses will provide nearly 60 percent of the company’s operating earnings by next year, the Kaupthing analysts predict.
Schibsted owns the two biggest newspaper’s in Norway, VG and Aftenposten, and Sweden’s biggest, Aftonbladet, which is also the biggest in all of the Nordic countries (I know, you’re incredibly impressed).
As the article points out, Schibsted has been an aggressive investor in online properties and has also invested heavily in its newspapers web sites. Aftonbladet actually beat Schibsted to the punch: It launched its website in 1994 and was acquired by the Norwegian company in 1996. Mr. Kennedy is apparently surprised by the ugliness of VG.no’s web site design. I agree it’s quite ugly (Aftonbladet’s is similar but better), however I think the greatness of the design in question is that you get all the news simply by scrolling, plus tons of pictures, polls, links to video and what not. The websites are staffed around the clock and are thus able to break news at any time. Aftonbladet.se and it’s Swedish-owned Swedish competitor Expressen.se break news just as quickly as any other news site in the world.
In addition to well-developed and content-rich web sites, Schibsted has also invested in several non-news online ventures, including classified ads, mobile services, and a search engine. Reported the International Herald Tribune in December last year:
For Schibsted, the Scandinavian media group, search is seen as a competitive necessity. “We defined Google as our main competitor some years ago,” said Kjell Aamot, president and chief executive of the group. “It was obvious when we followed the money trail of our classified advertising revenue over to Google.”
The newspaper group still stands a chance against Google in Norway, since search-based advertising has remained a relatively small part of the Scandinavian online advertising budget, Aamot said. Search-related advertising accounts for 10 percent of online ad spending in Scandinavia, compared with 30 percent in Europe and 50 percent in the United States, Aamot said.
(Schibsted’s search-engine Sesam.no is powered by FAST, the Norwegian search company that also provides Boston.com with its local search engine).
I recently talked to a an old college buddy of mine who has parlayed a stint as new media sales rep at Aftonbladet into a nice sales management gig at a regional media group. He credited Aftonbladet’s online success with its (and Schibsted’s) willingess to invest in its websites and snap up promising start-ups that were strategically meaningful. In other words, Schibsted has done the same thing as most successful American online companies.
