Small Finnish media market offers lessons for the global industry
Conference Blog | 07 October 2024
The Finnish consumer is highly willing to subscribe, love podcasts, and is connected to some of the best network infrastructure in Europe.
Juha Siintola, CEO at Mediabox, explained a bit about the easternmost country in Europe during the study tour as part of Media Innovation Week in Helsinki.
In this country of 5.6 million people, 80% of households have Internet connection, the country has the best student testing result in the world and the best paid teachers in Europe, 3.3 million own saunas, 380,000 speak Swedish as their first language, and there are 503,750 holiday houses. More than 10% of the country made up of lakes, and the country shares a 1,340-kilometre border with Russia (along which there soon will be a 200-kilometre border wall).
“The market is quite small, so you need to find super effective ways of working, getting rid of manual tasks,” Siintola said. “That’s why automation is high level with all Finnish companies.”
Another fun fact about Finnish news: 80% of their traffic comes directly to their homepage. The global average is about 20%, INMA Readers First Initiative Lead Greg Piechota said. “Why? Because brands are trusted.”
Personalisation is a priority
If you ask readers if they want content personalised for them, they’ll say no, according to state-funded Yle’s Mika Rahkonen, head of strategy.
“A lot of people say, ‘I don’t want personalised news. I want to know everything.’ But they’ll also say, ‘I don’t want to know this.’ When they see something they don’t like, it implies maybe they would like personalisation, they just don’t know how to say it.”
His advice: “Personalise with a scalpel, not an axe. Personalise not only on topics but location, user motives, forms of content.”
In 2019, Alma Media created its own large language model with a predictive analysis system — a “sentiment tool,” measuring whether stories were provocative, sad, breaking, entertaining, useful, or critical. Interestingly, negative stories are read more than positive ones, personalisation favours negative stories, yet positive and useful stories bring more subscriptions.
The tool helps personalise content for subscribers.
“Sentiment data is very useful in development of paid content,” said Perttu Kauppinen, editor-in-chief of Alma’s news product Iltalehti. “Twenty-eight percent of subscribers are middle-aged women who enjoy compassionate stories that generally do not perform well otherwise.”
As Sanoma’s Ilta-Sanomat, where 80% of traffic is direct, the top three articles on the homepage are pinned so everyone sees them. “That’s a journalistic decision,” Managing Editor Simo Holopainen explained. “Position four is personalised. Position five is pinned. From position six on, almost everything is personalised.
Maximilian Koppatz, lead data scientist at Sanoma, shared these learnings from the company’s personalisation efforts:
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Interest profiling is difficult but worth the effort.
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Overriding the algorithm is rarely worth it.
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Specifying certain content for a certain position loses engagement.
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Personalised notifications are a good idea.
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Penalising seen content aggressively is worth it despite the annoying “where did that article go” experience of some readers.
“Any given reader is interested in 5% of our content,” he said. “With personalisation, good articles are given a longer shelf life. Every article has a chance to get shown.”
Find the revenue model that works
Alma Media has transitioned its business model from traditional newspapers to concentrating on B2B print products and digital services. It’s primary business is a marketplace-focused model: housing, cards, recruitment.
“That is our main business nowadays, and that is part of our transformation,” Juha-Petri Liomouvuori, executive vice president at Alma, told study tour attendees.
Alma’s recommendation tool learns from data and recommends marketplace content to readers based on users with similar habits. Known users bring in six times more traffic than anonymous users, said Antti Liikkanen, development manager at Alma.
MTV, the first commercial TV channel in Finland, advertiser-based news company with an advertiser-based business model.
“We needed to look at what we sell and how we sell it,” explained Sauli Asikainen, vice president/B2B sales and marketing at MTV. “Previously, we sent an agency this thick book of rules and demands they needed to meet so they can advertise with us. Someone wants to buy something and you answer with this book of rules? This is a huge legacy we wanted to transform.”
MTV has transformed its advertising offerings by combining TV and BVOD, creating self-service tools, and improving buying tools.
“We are a small country with a small population group,” he said. “We know the growth for advertising is going to be done with a wide reach and new customers.”
User-generated content isn’t just for social media
Sanoma’s Ilta-Sanomat increased its digital engagement by paying for user videos. If they publish one of their reader’s videos, the reader gets paid €60 — €550 if it wins video of the month.
“We publish them as a standalone video and on Tuesdays, we combine several videos into one five-minute episode,” Managing Editor Panu Karhunen said. “It’s working. We’ve had more than 35 million shares and 68% are from mobile.”
Automate where you can
Yle is the government-funded media company, with a budget coming from national taxes without much pressure on the commercial side. Now, it’s annual budget has been cut by 10% so things are a bit different.
“You need to find super effective ways of working, get rid of your manual tasks,” explained Markus Paul, COO of Media Tailor, who helped lead the study tour. “That’s why automation is high level with Finnish companies.
“Yle has a special role because it’s funded by the government so they are forced to be innovative, try new things others don’t have the money to try: AI, new tech, they just redid a new studio. In one AI use case, they combined all the old Olympic articles from the archives and built one data link, then started a machine learning project on top of it and inserted all news from Paris into the same platform so journalists could easily combine it.”
Sanoma Media created an automated system that categorises stories by the number of characters, photos, videos, visuals, amount of time invested: S, M, L, XL, XXL.
“We have more stories, more readers, happier journalists — all without hiring anybody,” explained Teppo Moisio, development manager/editorial processes. “Five years ago, we started diving into the digital world. We have a product built mostly on timely, accurate, and engaging news. With the help of SML, we can say we did that we just the right amount of effort.”
The result: 74% more stories, 106% more readers, 39% more subscribers, 42% less waste, and newsroom work-life balance is up 5.4%.
Sanoma also has AI tools for helping with headlines, summaries of articles, news tracking, and a transcription service.
“AI can’t find the most important or interesting details for the summary if the article itself is written in a messy way,” explained Antti Lehtonen, head of the visual team at Ilta-Sanomat. “If the article is good and logical, then the summary is normally quite good and its’ fast to check it out.”
Sanoma’s watchdog news tracking system, which works in Slack, is a favourite AI tool for City Editor Kaisu Moilanen: “I love it. It’s not so much a time saver as it’s giving us more stories. We are bringing more stories to light. I can go through a link to a document and have all the information I need right there — official public information.”
Find your niche
Several decades ago, Hufvudstadsbladet (HBL) and its Swedish-language newspaper didn’t make a profit. But the focus was on protecting the Swedish language in Finland, not on profits. Until it wasn’t.
Now the publication is owned by Stockholm-based Bonnier News. The newsroom has about 50 journalists. Yes, the niche audience speaks Swedish, but the content must be more than that, explained Chief Editor Kalle Silfverberg.
“If our content would be such that when translated was indistinguishable from whatever you do in Finnish, we would be doomed,” he said. “We really need to find the stories that are relevant for our audience. Which stories, which angles are the ones they don’t get from anyone else.
“We aim to be indispensable for our society. You need to read our stories to function. You meet your friends at a bar and they are talking about what we’ve written so you need to know about that. That’s what we think with every story we do.”
Keskisuomalainen Group’s Selkomedia is a local news product in “easy Finnish,” launched in March 2024. “Easy Finnish” uses familiar words, simple sentences and structure. The monthly, printed news product targets non-native speakers.
“There are over 120 different language spoken here alone, therefore Finnish is not the mother tongue of many,” said Editor-in-Chief Mia Laakso.
“Articles are not shorter, they’re usually longer,” she said. “The purpose is to help people gain information. You move here from another country and try to find out what’s happening in your neighbourhood. Finnish is too difficult, and English is not a solution either.”
Trust is everything
Kaj Backman, administrative head at Yle, shared many interesting facts about the government-funded media company:
It has 1,000 employees and an international presence. It’s mission is to serve all Finns and to be a part of building the nation and society. It has a bunker built during the Cold War that could house several hundred journalists for weeks — an important fact for a country sharing a border with Russia these days. They also know “acoustics are good in a sauna,” he said.
But trust is the “most important value,” he told study tour attendees.
The Finns have the highest media literacy in the world. They are high consumers of news and have high trust in institutions, including the media. They trust news content are a stable society.
“Trust makes us less susceptible to misinformation than other countries,” Backman said. “It is no exaggeration to say news journalism is the foundation for democracy. Without news journalism, there can be no democracy. In times like these, it’s good to reminder ourselves, our staff, our owners, and the public about this. It is a dangerous developent if media literacy comes down.”