How can you attract younger subscribers when daily analytics tools constantly push you to optimize content for your existing audience? The solution proposed by the Norwegian group is less about marketing and more about editorial strategy. It’s based on a simple idea: an editorial team eventually becomes very good at serving the audience that dominates its analytics dashboards. And at Amedia, that audience was too old to ensure the renewal of its subscriber base.
Janne Rygh, editorial content developer at Amedia, outlined this new strategy at the INMA Subscription Summit in Toronto.
> You become what you measure. At Amedia, older subscribers were the majority, so they dominated the dashboards and quietly defined what counted as high-performing content > The fix was blunt: filter analytics to readers under 40 only, making 90% of subscribers invisible to the newsroom. What the team optimised for changed as soon as what it could see changed > This wasn't a matter of adding a few pieces "for young people". At Romerikes Blad the editorial team overhauled its working methods and which topics it treated as priorities > It didn't cost them older readers. The sharper focus made the journalism more relevant overall: at Romerikes Blad, under-40 subscribers grew 30% in nine months and total readership and subscriptions rose too
More subscribers over 80 than under 40
It’s worth reiterating the starting point: Amedia is not a group lagging behind in digital. It’s Norway’s largest newspaper publisher, with 110 newspapers, 20 partner newspapers, 2 million daily readers, and 580,000 100% digital subscribers. By the end of 2023, their subscriber base stood at 684,000, with over 68% being digital subscribers, and nearly 90% of subscribers reading content digitally.
