In two years, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) has gone from 98,000 to more than 158,000 digital subscribers. With growth of over 60% the Swedish daily hit its target for end-of-year 2026 by August.
It would be easy to look for the clever paywall trick behind numbers like that. But when I sat down with Christoffer Lindvall, who heads subscriptions at SvD, he kept coming back to the same point: subscriptions start and end with journalism.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about the content. If you don’t have the right content and the right profiles, the rest doesn’t matter really.”
What’s interesting is how that belief shapes the way his subscription team works, and how SvD got its newsroom and business side pulling in the same direction.
> Svenska Dagbladet went from 98,000 to more than 158,000 digital subscribers in two years, over 60% growth, and hit its full-year 2026 target by August > One North Star: publisher Lisa Irenius replaced separate goals for reach, logged-in users and social with one, more subscribers. A weekly reach of 1.7 million Swedes against roughly 100,000 subscribers was read as headroom, not a problem > Content has two jobs. Quick news builds habits and traffic, while "aha" stories convert. During the Swedish election traffic spiked, but many of the best-converting articles weren't political: readers came for the news and subscribed for something else > Paid by default: most articles publish behind the paywall, so the newsroom decides what to leave open, not what to lock. An algorithm flags trending open articles so they can be closed mid-life > Around 80% of SvD's audio subscribers are new to the brand, people text had never reached. And content commissioned for impact rather than conversion often brings in the most subscribers
Content first: what that means for a subscription team
Schibsted is a matrix organisation, with separate subscription and advertising organisations. Christoffer sits on the subscription side, responsible for SvD, and his team has worked closely with SvD’s editorial teams for several years.
Because content is the thing that matters most, the subscription team is deliberately clear about where its role starts and stops:
- Make subscribing frictionless. The team runs A/B tests on the paywall to make it as easy as possible for readers to sign up.
- Share data and insight. It gives the newsroom perspective on how stories are performing.
- Leave the editorial calls to editorial. “When it comes to deciding which kind of story to go for, it’s totally up to the editorial team,” Christoffer says.
He describes his team’s contribution as giving perspective and collaborating, rather than steering. For anyone who’s struggled to bring a newsroom along on the subscription journey it’s a useful framing: the business side earns influence by being helpful, not by setting the editorial agenda.
Lesson: if content is what sells subscriptions, the subscription team’s best work is everything around it. Remove friction at the point of conversion, and give journalists insight they can actually use.
One North Star for the whole organisation
So how do you get editorial and business to genuinely work together? When I asked what had helped most, Christoffer didn’t hesitate: a single, shared goal.
When Lisa Irenius became SvD’s publisher two or three years ago, she set a single North Star: reach more subscribers. Before that, SvD had separate strategies for reach, for logged-in users, for social media engagement and more.
It sounds simple, but bringing goals together under a single KPI made it much simpler to understand what everyone was aiming for. It also gave teams a shared starting point for the harder conversations: what do we need to do to get there, what are our strengths together, and what do we need to work on?
The numbers made the goal feel obvious. SvD reaches 1.7 million Swedes every week. When this push began, it had around 100,000 subscribers.
For Christoffer, that ratio between reach and paying readers wasn’t a problem. It was a sign of huge potential.
Lesson: if your teams are pulling in different directions, cut the number of goals. A single, easy-to-say target gives editorial and commercial a shared language, and comparing reach with subscribers shows everyone how much room there is to grow.
Habit content and “aha” content: you need both
SvD is very focused on conversion. But the most useful thing Christoffer shared was how the newsroom thinks about two different jobs content has to do.
Job one: habit. Quick overviews of what’s going on in the world and what you need to know today. This content “doesn’t give us new subscribers,” he says, but it delivers the daily engagement and routines SvD relies on.
Job two: conversion. Lisa talks internally about creating “aha” moments: pieces that offer insight, appeal to the intellect, make readers feel a bit smarter, or simply bring some joy. These deeper stories are what bring in new subscribers.
Neither works on its own. “You need to have both of those to have a news experience that is worth paying for over time,” Christoffer says. One type of content explicitly feeds the other.
Interestingly, SvD doesn’t formally work with the classic user needs model, though Christoffer says it has drawn some inspiration from it.
The big story isn’t always the one that converts
Sweden’s recent election offered a clear example. Traffic spiked, as you’d expect. But the articles converting readers weren’t mainly about politics.
People came for the news of the moment, then found something else on the site worth paying for. That’s why a broad news experience matters: the story that brings someone in isn’t necessarily the one that makes them subscribe.
Lesson: map your output to the job each piece is doing. Measure habit content on engagement and return visits, and treat traffic peaks as a doorway to the rest of your journalism.
Impact first, conversions second
One of SvD’s standout pieces of journalism this year was “Why Did Max Die?” (“Varför dog Max?”), a three-part investigative podcast with accompanying articles. It looked at the death of a 13-year-old boy who had been bullied, how the school system failed to support him, and his mother’s fight for answers. According to SvD, it has led more than 4,000 readers to subscribe.
Yet Christoffer is clear the team never started from conversion. “In that case, we didn’t see it as, ‘Okay, is this going to give us a lot of subscribers?'” he says. The starting point was a sensitive, important investigation that needed to be told, and the question was how it could have the most impact. SvD then scaled it across the formats it does best.
Some pieces are planned with conversion in mind, he adds. This one wasn’t, and that’s exactly the point he was making earlier about content coming first.
Lesson: track conversions closely, but don’t let them drive every editorial decision. Serious, well-told journalism with real impact can turn out to be your best acquisition content.
Paid by default, with data deciding the exceptions
The paywall isn’t reserved for a special premium section. “Most articles are behind a paywall,” Christoffer explains. In practice, the newsroom publishes paid content from the start.
That flips the usual question. Rather than deciding what to lock, SvD decides what to leave open, and when. An algorithm advises the team rather than deciding for it: if an open article starts trending on social media or drawing heavy traffic, it may be moved behind the paywall along the way.
The next step is a dynamic paywall, setting access levels automatically based on signals such as engagement with the article, where the reader came from and their user profile. The aim, as Christoffer puts it, is to set access levels “without being a part of the process on a daily basis.”
Lesson: if most of your journalism is paid, put your energy into the exceptions, and let data flag when an open article has earned its place behind the paywall.
Audio reaches people text never did
SvD has been producing audio for several years and is honest that it’s still learning. Text remains its core strength. But audio is doing a different job.
Around 80% of the people who subscribe for audio are new to SvD, Christoffer says. These are readers, or rather listeners, that SvD had never managed to reach through text.
That raises the question SvD hasn’t fully answered yet: retention. How do you keep someone who arrived for a podcast? Christoffer sees two routes. Help them discover text journalism, and build other things they’ll want to stay for.
Getting more out of the text you already have
SvD hasn’t tested AI-generated article summaries. Instead, it has repackaged its journalism in three ways:
- Read-aloud articles. Rather than AI voices, a reporter reads the article. This has had some success.
- The Morning Brief newsletter. Sent at 7am every day, it covers what happened while you were sleeping. Its value is habit: it gives readers a reason to start the day with SvD.
- An AI book recommendation bot. Built on the culture section’s archive of book reviews, it drew strong engagement, though Christoffer stresses it’s early days.
Across Schibsted, most AI work so far has gone into tools for journalists rather than reader-facing products.
Lesson: treat new formats as a way to reach new audiences, then plan the bridge to the rest of your product. And don’t overlook your archive: it can be the raw material for genuinely useful reader tools.
Free for 18 to 25 year olds: lowering the barrier
SvD now offers full free access to 18 to 25 year olds. It launched ahead of the Swedish election, largely as a marketing campaign, so it’s too early to know how many will convert when they turn 26.
Christoffer is refreshingly realistic about it. Given SvD’s current product, he thinks it would be optimistic to expect many people in that age group to pay right now. SvD is a text-heavy experience, competing with social platforms and content creators for younger audiences’ attention.
So the aim is simpler: remove the barrier, let them in, and build a relationship over time. Just as importantly, it gives SvD a group of younger readers to learn from. What works for them, what doesn’t, and what they’d like to see more of.
For anyone looking for inspiration here, Christoffer points to Amedia in Norway, who ignored older subscribers in dashboards to attract younger ones.
Lesson: a free youth offer is an investment in relationships and insight, not a quick revenue play. Watch how they engage and listen closely, so that the product you build for them later is one they’ll want to pay for.
