The Revenue Balancing Act: The formula for MittMedia’s digital advertising and reader revenue

By Anisa Holmes

For those who believed reader loyalty was a thing of the past, MittMedia is proof of the opposite. MittMedia is an impressive media company, representing over half of Sweden’s territory, but what is most notable is how they built a stable subscription service and boosted ad revenue without alienating their readership.

With reader loyalty and revenue decreasing across the board, how did they accomplish this feat? Robin Govik, Chief Digital Officer of MittMedia, says the organisation’s culture of innovation and determination to win helped them to revolutionize their digital business strategy to great success. Besides that, it all comes down to their inspired strategy where “loyalty is [the] number one priority, and data is the enabler”.

To facilitate their data-centric approach, MittMedia built Soldr, a platform to store all demographic and behavioural data and stimulate and predict user data. This includes a user activity map that provides journalists and content development teams with realtime insights on who’s reading their content and when. It even provides push notifications to the journalist if their content is underperforming.

MittMedia has also found greater efficiency by leaning into automation; their TextRobot is their best performing journalist employee, automatically generating content on house sales, sports, and more.

Besides automation they employ data to gain a greater understanding of what their readership wants, by creating cluster combinations based on audience interests. These cluster algorithms are updated nightly and are used to apply personalization. Finally, their ad strategy is also based on personalization, whereby ads are directed to these chosen target groups, rather than by location of the ad on the website. This has led to 27% growth in revenue from the past year in addition to a 25% decrease in ad impressions.