At the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in Toronto, executives from Norway’s Amedia shared how the company transformed local journalism into one of Europe’s strongest digital subscription businesses.

Markus Rask Jensen, director of news at Amedia, and Tone Krohn Clausen, director of subscriptions, shared how Amedia combined newsroom data insights, clear editorial metrics, and a bundled subscription product to grow digital subscriptions across more than 120 local news brands.

Today Amedia’s network in Norway has about 850,000 subscribers in a country with roughly five million people, with 76% of subscribers now digital and about 65% of company revenue coming from digital subscriptions.

The transformation began during a period of crisis for the company.

“We were in crisis; the ad market was collapsing. We had free sites only. We had no digital subscription revenue,” Jensen told conference participants.

Facing falling advertising revenue and declining print, the company decided to make a decisive shift toward digital subscriptions and data-driven journalism.

“The first one was, ‘We're going to go all in on digital payments,’” Jensen said.

The company also committed to a true digital-first strategy and began building a large first-party data infrastructure around user registration and login.

Today nearly 2.8 million Norwegians have registered accounts across Amedia’s network of titles — roughly half the country’s population.

Turning data into newsroom action

One of the central lessons from Amedia’s transformation was that data alone does not change newsroom behaviour. Instead, the company focused on making insights understandable and actionable for journalists.

“Showing newsrooms data, that’s not difficult,” Jensen said. “Showing them what you should do with that data, building the bridge to make them understand how to execute, that’s the difficult part.”

Amedia created internal dashboards that provide real-time insights into audience behaviour and content performance across its newsrooms. At the same time, the company experimented with a range of editorial metrics to determine which best supported subscription growth.

Those experiments did not always work as expected.

“We tried a lot of things,” Jensen said. “Every metric has its pitfalls, and it’s just a metric.”

Eventually the company focused on two core editorial KPIs: “sub reader,” which measures whether a subscriber consumes content for at least 10 seconds, and “well-read story,” which measures newsroom productivity by tracking stories that reach a threshold share of the subscription base.

These metrics connect editorial work directly with subscriber engagement and retention.

“The idea behind this — subscribers use their subscriptions, don’t churn,” Jensen said.

The company found a strong relationship between daily usage and subscription growth.

“The more digital users you have in the newsroom or on your site every day, the more likely you are to grow your digital subscriptions,” Jensen said.

Experimentation across 120 newsrooms

Because Amedia operates with centralised product and technology teams supporting more than 120 newspapers, experiments in one newsroom can be tested and then quickly scaled across the entire network.

Jensen described this as one of the organisation’s key advantages.

“At the moment we have several new startups that are currently testing a 2.0 version of this data room approach,” he said.

One example involved experimenting with editorial strategies to attract younger audiences. In one newsroom pilot, editors temporarily excluded audience data from readers over age 40, allowing journalists to focus exclusively on content that resonated with younger readers.

The result was increased reach among younger audiences without significantly losing older readers.

Personalisation improves content discovery

Amedia has also experimented with automation and personalisation to help readers discover more content across its network.

The company found traditional front pages were a major bottleneck for content discovery, Jensen said: “Less than 50% of the users actually saw more than 50% of our content.” 

Using audience segmentation and automated recommendations based on consumption data, Amedia began presenting different story lists to different reader groups.

“The first version, which we tested … was 50% better than manual teasers,” Jensen said.

In one newsroom experiment testing a fully automated front page, click-through rates increased significantly compared with manual editorial curation.

Despite the use of algorithms, Jensen emphasised the tools are designed to support — not replace — editorial judgement.

“They’re not meant to replace newsrooms’ judgment; they’re meant to help newsrooms get the most out of their journalism,” he said.

Bundling drives subscription growth

While newsroom transformation helped drive engagement, Amedia’s largest subscription growth came from a bundled subscription product that gives readers access to content from across its network of newspapers.

Clausen described the product as a mass-market offering rather than a premium add-on.

“A lot of companies create bundles, but it’s really kind of a premium bundle with a premium price. But this is our mass market product,” she said.

The idea emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when Amedia temporarily opened access across its entire network of titles.

“Overnight, we had 50,000 who started using it,” Clausen said.

Within weeks the number of users grew rapidly.

“In a couple of weeks, we had 175,000 who used it,” she said.

The company later converted that behaviour into a paid bundle priced only slightly higher than a single newspaper subscription.

Today more than 450,000 subscribers use the bundle, representing more than half of Amedia’s subscription base and generating significant additional revenue for the company.

Usage data shows subscribers read across multiple titles within the network: “Sixty four percent of our subscribers read at least one more product,” Clausen said, adding “18% are like me, reading at least four other newspapers.”

This cross-reading behaviour increases engagement and reduces churn because readers perceive greater value in their subscription.

Lessons for news publishers

For publishers around the world, Amedia’s experience shows how local journalism can scale when supported by strong data infrastructure, clear editorial metrics, and a subscription bundle that creates network effects across multiple news brands.

Clausen encouraged publishers to think more broadly about collaboration and partnerships when building subscription ecosystems.

“I think we should believe in bundling more together,” she said. “Together, we will have a much larger structure, much larger ecosystem than if we do everything on our own.”

Photos by Robert Downs Photography.

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