User habits are changing dramatically. Linear TV viewing in Norway has decreased significantly in recent years. At the same time, the use of Web TV has gone up. This was the reason the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, with TV director Mads Andersen in the lead, devised a new content strategy for Web TV a year and a half ago.

The newspaper, owned by Aller Media, is Norway’s second largest tabloid. Over the past 18 months, Dagbladet TV has tripled the number of daily started streams, and advertising revenue has increased even more thanks to dedicated work from Aller Media’s sales department. Dagbladet TV’s new content strategy centers around three important areas:

1. Breaking news

Breaking news is at the heart of Dagbladet. The goal is to be the fastest, and qualitatively the best, at news distribution. As we see it, it is impossible to deliver the best coverage of breaking news if one is not also the best on Web TV.

Dagbladet TV today has an editorial staff with very skilled video reporters. They control everything from direct reporting to filming, editing, studio production, and programme management. This makes the organisation quite flexible compared to the large broadcast companies, where the tasks are much more specialised and the number of employees is several times higher than Dagbladet TV.

Dagbladet TV’s news desk is staffed for much of the day, but the newspaper’s reporters and commentators, as well as photographers, contribute to the TV work. Due to our strong culture of internal collaboration, we can deliver better than the number of employees would indicate.

Dagbladet TV has also built a groundbreaking new TV studio in the middle of the newsroom. The studio makes it possible to deliver a full-scale television broadcast with only one person in the studio — both presenting and producing at the same time. With this solution we can go on air in seconds. A tiny smart panel with hotkeys is easily operated by the news presenter — who has pre-arranged content and sources — ready for alternative publishing. This has given us a huge advantage on Web TV.

2. Personalisation

The daily newspaper reaches 28% of Norway’s population every day. The editorial staff of Dagbladet TV produces a lot of good and accurate content. But on a front page with over 100 articles every day, the TV content can quickly disappear.

Aller Media’s development department has developed a personalisation system, Xavier, to provide the right video to the right users. The system also removes videos the user has already seen. About 80% of traffic to videos from Dagbladet’s front page is now steadily coming from positions controlled through Xavier.

3. A new way of thinking

Dagbladet TV creates programmes for sports and entertainment, but we do not create programmes in the traditional broadcast sense. We create universes, consisting of single, shareable clips with a high completion rate. Our focus on high completion rate gives us up to 50% “play next.” It provides more digital views than if we had first created a linear programme and then split it up for digital presentation.

This reverse way of creating programmes gives us a more efficient tabloid and fast-paced product than if we had started off with a larger programme that later would have been divided into shorter segments. Each segment is just one minute in duration, often even shorter.

All in all, Dagbladet TV’s work on breaking news, segmentation, and our new way of thinking  has resulted in strong growth. Norway has well over 5 million inhabitants. Dagbladet TV has now more than 500,000 started TV streams every single day. In 2020, Aller Media and Dagbladet TV will increase their efforts further in this area.

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