This week on The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices, we’re joined by Tav Klitgaard, Group CEO of Zetland Media. As well as news publication Zetland, the Danish company also has a book publishing business, an AI transcription startup, and has recently launched a Finnish publication called Uusi Juttu, which has attracted 15,000 paying members within the first two months.
Tav discusses the importance of designing products to address user needs, and how that pays back in attracting paying younger audiences, as well as taking their subscriber-first business model to Finland. He also explains why audio has been such a pivotal part of making Zetland successful as a member-driven publisher, and what future he sees for video podcasts.
Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
Why Finland was an appealing market for expansion
The reason why we wanted to try our service in Finland was, I come from software development. Whenever we see a product market fit, we are thinking, okay, how do we scale this? It’s not really easy to scale a journalistic operation. Denmark is such a small country and the audience is very, very small – there’s less than 6 million Danes. So if we wanted to scale our business and our impact, we had to think about other audiences.
Since the product is really working very, very well in Denmark, we didn’t really want to change our product to get more subscribers. So we wanted to expand the serviceable market, so we were looking outside of Denmark. The Nordic countries looked interesting for us – there are some special things going on in the Finnish media industry. It’s very centred around very few players, so we thought there would be room for a new player.
We’re at more than 15,000 paying members already, after a month and a half in Finland, so I think we have proven that yes indeed, there was a hole in the market.
Bringing humans closer with video podcasts
You can see in the numbers, the number of people who are using YouTube as a podcast platform is quite overwhelming in Denmark – not as much as in the US, but we are definitely learning to do it also in Denmark. We want to build a human product, and sometimes it really works to be able to look people in the eyes, and to also use your eyes to decode that this is a real human being.
Audio is so much better than text, but video is actually even better. The problem with video, of course, is that you have to use your full attention. But I think that vodcasting is very valuable because you can put it on as a podcast, you can go around to do other things, then once in a while you look at the screen and you see a real person talking to you. I think that’s a wonderful experience.
It’s an experience that we want to provide – we’ve been experimenting with video in our own platform for five years and we haven’t really been able to make that work. It’s basically not something that people expect from our platforms. So far, we are mostly using video on other platforms like YouTube or Instagram, basically as a marketing platform.
The importance of user experience
When I go around and look at the apps and websites that publishers are building, I think there’s still something wrong in the way that people prioritise. The articles are great. But then with the user experience, you can expect – especially younger audiences – to go onto a website and scroll through 1,000 ads, and then, if you’re lucky, you can find a golden nugget in an article. That’s just not how it works any more.
There’s so much high quality journalism being wasted because the UX, the experience, is not thought through.
For us, the value lies in the combination of great content and great distribution. You cannot divide the two. Journalism is really an experience, and it is a mediated experience. So really thinking about how that experience is being mediated – is it text, is it audio, is it hologram – is actually super, super important.
My humble wish to the media industry is that more people would invest time and resources into the distribution part of it, because I think the level is not really where it should be.
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