At a time when most publishers are struggling to attract young audiences, Schibsted’s Podme tells a much different story.

During the INMA Webinar Why young audiences pay: if you give them something worth paying for, Kristin Ward Heimdal, managing editor and editor‑in‑chief of the podcasts and audiobooks subscription service, explained how the company built one of Norway’s fastest‑growing digital subscription products and captured a young audience.

In a conversation with Kerstin Hasse, lead of the INMA Young Audiences Initiative, Heimdal explained how Podme proves that younger audiences are still willing to pay for journalism and storytelling; it just has to be the right format, platform, and value proposition.

Today, Podme’s 200,000 paying subscribers make it Schibsted’s second-largest subscription offering. And, even better, more than half of those subscribers are under 35.

The Podme story

Heimdal shared Podme’s back story, explaining it began in Stockholm in 2017, offering a “Netflix for podcasts” model: exclusive shows behind a monthly subscription. Schibsted initially invested in it, but by 2021, the company saw a bigger opportunity and took full ownership.

“We had, at that point, done a lot of experimentation in the news media brands around podcasts, distributing and trying out podcast formats on external platforms like Spotify and Apple,” Heimdal said. “We were seeing that, wow, this is really hitting a young audience and our content is translating really well to audio.”

However, none of it was monetised. The game-changer came when Spotify struck a deal with Joe Rogan. Inside Schibsted, that announcement sparked “a Eureka moment where we thought, yeah, why are we not really seriously considering if people are willing to pay for our content?” Heimdal recalled.

The company already had strong podcasts and loyal audiences — some so loyal they were buying tickets to live shows. The missing piece was a platform built for audio, not text.

Podme became that platform.

A culture that encourages boldness

Schibsted’s culture made the leap possible, Heimdal said.

“The management team here really likes really gutsy, big ideas,” she said. “And that was definitely the case in this moment.”

At the time, Heimdal was working in the strategy department, and said it took less than five minutes for the management director to get on board: “It was just a spontaneous reaction from her like, ‘This sounds big, it’s bold.’ She bought into the idea and from there we went for it.”

But they didn’t jump in blindly; Schibsted had already experimented with paid podcasts, had witnessed Podme’s traction, and saw the broader market shift toward subscription audio. Still, many in the industry told them it would never work.

“People are never going to pay for podcasts,” Heimdal heard repeatedly. But within weeks of putting major titles behind the paywall, the data proved otherwise.

The three pillars

From the start, Podme was designed as a standalone audio destination, and it offers three content pillars:

1. News and current events. These shows come directly from Schibsted’s newsrooms — political explainers, daily news podcasts, and commentary on society and sports. About once a month, they release “a good audio documentary from online news brands” and the shows also include studio-based conversational podcasts about timely topics.
2. Narrative storytelling and true crime. This is Podme’s biggest subscription driver. Audio documentaries and investigative series consistently reach the platform’s broadest audience. “Everyone loves a good narrative storytelling piece,” Heimdal said, but producing them is expensive and difficult to sustain on an advertising model. Subscription revenue makes them possible.
3. Humour, entertainment and creators. This was an early source of growth for Podme, as Schibsted acquired popular, long‑running shows with loyal fan bases but that weren’t monetising well on open platforms. The bet paid off: Audiences followed their favourite hosts behind the paywall. “It was that realisation that these audiences are really, really loyal and they are attached to their podcast hosts,” Heimdal said. “You feel like you know them. It’s a very intimate format. And even though there are a lot of free podcasts out there, that doesn’t mean that people will just easily switch and swap out their favourite title.”

Across these pillars, Podme now publishes 30-40 exclusive titles every week.

Inside the paywall strategy

Podme’s paywall strategy has evolved significantly since launch.

Schibsted was “really strict in the beginning,” putting many major podcasts behind the paywall at the same time, Heimdal said. The reason was to create a mindshift in the market and get listeners accustomed to paying.

“We worried that if we only did one podcast at a time, it would be easier for people to just … swap it out for something else [they didn’t have to pay for].”

The strategy worked and allowed Podme to relax its approach and evolve into a more flexible model.

“We are versioning each podcast a little bit so that you can get a free version of it on external platforms like Apple and Spotify,” she said. “So for some podcasts, we might have two episodes every week where one is free for all and distributed broadly and then one is exclusive only on Podme.”

The openly distributed episode gives the company the opportunity to talk about the Podme subscription and promote it to non-paying audiences.

Podme offers a standard 14‑day free trial, with occasional longer campaigns. In markets with lower willingness to pay — such as Finland — pricing and promotional tactics play a larger role. But the core insight remains: People will pay for audio if the value proposition is clear and compelling.

How Podme reinvented Schibsted’s audio strategy

Podme did more than just create a new product; it changed how Schibsted thinks about audio across the company. Newsrooms increasingly produce stories in 360°: text, video, and audio versions of the same investigation.

“Right now, when we’re doing an audio documentary, for example,” Heimdal said. “The best case scenario is that it’s not only an audio documentary, it’s an investigative piece and it comes out as an audio documentary, as a big text special, and maybe even also a video content.”

Running its own platform taught Schibsted what works: clear, descriptive titles and strong imagery. Gone are the abstract, artsy podcast covers of five years ago. Now, titles like “The Murder in the Bathroom” outperform vague or poetic ones, Heimdal said.

“It’s very descriptive, very clear what the podcast is about. We’re seeing that it’s all about making it very easy to decode and understand what the content is about.”

Heimdal acknowledged the Nordics have an unusually high willingness to pay, but that doesn’t mean Podme’s success is unrepeatable. The key, she said, is not geography but value proposition.

“I think that the problem is not the willingness to pay per se. Of course, that will be different across each geography, but I think the problem also is related to what are you asking the user to pay for,” she said.

“At the end of the day, it will come down to whether or not the package that you’re offering is attractive to that target group.”

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