The Danish news media Zetland belongs among the few big success stories in European digital media brands. It was profitable three years after being launched, attracts a comparatively young audience and is set to launch a new brand in Finland in January 2025. I spoke to their CEO Tav Klitgaard about how to engage audiences, working business models and the future of journalism in an AI-supported word.
Tav, interviews shouldn’t begin with praise, but Zetland is an outstanding success story in digital media. Your team founded it in 2016, it was profitable three years later. Today you have more than 40.000 digital subscribers. What do you do that others don’t
An advantage was that we did not have any print legacy when we started. We had the privilege of sitting down and thinking really hard about what does news media mean. Among other things, we found out that it means journalism is an experience. You have the content and then you have the distribution. Those two together create an experience. The value does not lie in the journalism. The value lies in the moment when the journalism becomes an experience that changes something in your head.
But you seem to be very proud of your journalism?
Sure, we are! But existing companies way too often produce journalism from a sender’s perspective. We always try to have a receiver perspective. I would see this as the key reason for our success.
Zetland doesn’t do breaking news but publishes just a few in-depth stories a day, it focuses on explanation and analysis and has offered everything in audio format from the beginning.
Our first principle is that we are our members. This is why we came up with audio, because we asked them and they said: ‘Well, I really would want to consume your articles, but I’ve been looking into a screen for 10 hours today and I’m tired of it.’ We said, then audio could be a thing for you. And it turned out we were right.
In the age of generative AI, converting stuff to audio will be very, very easy. Won’t you lose your competitive advantage when everyone can just press the audio button everywhere?
I believe the last frontier against AI is personality. Audio is awesome at creating an intimate relationship. So, when we create a human audio product, we don’t use an AI robot voice, because the problem with that is that it’s too good. It’s perfect. We don’t like perfect because perfect is not trustworthy. You should not be perfect, you should be a human. And that’s what we are doing in all our products, creating something that is human.
Managers from traditional news outlets envy you because your audience skews young.
We are not a news outlet for young people, but we do have a pretty young demographic. About 50 percent of our audience is in their 20s and 30s. And we believe that the way that you build trust within a younger audience is to be human. It’s a giga trend in the world that that the trust is moving from authorities to persons. That’s also the reason behind the success of Instagram or TikTok. That’s why we always focus on the tone of voice and the storytelling. We imagine ourselves to be your friend and get into the car with you and tell you the story from the passenger seat. The world is super interesting. But there needs to be energy and engagement behind the stories we tell.
Part of your distribution model is people need to pay for a membership, but they can share the story with as many people as they like to. Don’t you fear that many free riders are taking advantage of you?
That’s right, our readers can share everything for free. Actually, the more members share our content, the happier we are. It proves to us and themselves that it has value to them, and it means more people get to know us. Journalism is great when it is discussed, and it should be easy for our members to get someone to discuss it with. It’s also great for our sources that they can freely share what they told us in their own network.
A Zetland membership is pretty expensive compared to other digital subscriptions though.
Yeah, it costs around 18 or 19 euros per month. I keep hearing: Young people don’t want to pay for news. That is not true. You have to look at the user needs. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because your product is not valuable to them. If you look at, let’s say, a person who is 25 years old. She has a strong need to understand the world. Who am I in this world? What does society mean for me? What do I mean for society? The key is to not require a whole lot of prior knowledge for her to understand the world but to tell her super interesting stories about the world. Younger audiences are underserved by the media, at least in Denmark. If you’re 60 and a doctor and live in Copenhagen, well, you have a plethora of options. If you’re 26 and a nurse working at a rural hospital, you don’t have a lot of places to go to in the media world. So, what happens? You end up at TikTok. The right price is whatever value the product gives to the user. Our average member spends more than seven hours per month with us. I think €18,50 is actually very cheap for seven hours of value.
Are you still growing or have you reached a ceiling with your particular audience?
We are growing very much. On the group level, we will have a revenue growth of at least 40 percent this year and I pretty conservatively project that to be the case next year, too. It’s not a 40 percent growth in Denmark, but it’s a 40 percent for the group which consists of journalism outlets in Denmark and now in Finland. And then we also sell other things, for instance, we sell books and technology.
So, you’re not only a media and journalism company, but also a tech company.
Exactly. The day before ChatGPT was launched, we launched our transcription service. That means very early on, we have been working with large language models and generative AI. The number one use case people think about when thinking about AI and journalism is transcription. So, we built a transcription service that for the first time ever has worked in Danish. That is basically contributing almost a quarter of our revenue this year. We also sell our distribution technology. We license the website and app and CMS that we built for Zetland to other media companies. It’s not something that we do to become filthy rich, but we need to be tech-savvy. Spotify is spending a gazillion dollars on tech development, and we need to be able to compete with Spotify.
You are planning to scale the Zetland concept internationally? Tell us about the Finnish project that you made headlines with recently.
The Finland case is super exciting for us. Three or four years ago we decided that we would begin the international journey. My background is within tech and in the tech industry, we always say if you have a product market fit, the next thing you need to do is scale. It’s not as easy as translating something, but we asked ourselves if the concept was replicable outside of Denmark. In the beginning of 2024, we hired a founding team in Finland and tasked them with creating a splash in the market to test whether our assumptions were right: that there is no big difference between Finnish people and Danish people in terms of what user needs they have. We talked about our mission of quality journalism and then said: If you’re willing to pay for this, we’re willing to build it. And that’s what we told them in September and October. What happened was that 10,000 Finns decided to prepay a subscription worth around 100 euros, which was much more than we had anticipated. We got 10,000 Finns to pay for something that does not exist!
When will it start to exist?
We are currently hiring a ton of people in Helsinki, a lot of journalists, and then we will start publishing the Finnish version of Zetland on 15th January.
What will you name it?
Zetland in Finland is called Uusi Juttu, meaning something like “The new thing”. Check it at uusijuttu.fi.
Do you have other markets where you have these kinds of assumptions or is this a Nordic thing? After all, the willingness to pay for journalism is much lower in other regions of Europe.
I think what we have learned to do in Denmark is very usable in a lot of different markets in Europe. It could also be outside of Europe, but it’s going to take us some time, some partners, and some money to be able to prove that I’m right.
Of course, I have to ask you about Germany now.
Well, Germany is definitely interesting, and it’s close to Denmark. If anyone who reads this thinks they want to build that in Germany, please reach out, because it’s also obvious for us that we are not going to be able to do it alone. We would need German partners who agree to our mission and are awesome journalists, tech people, and businesspeople.
Is there still some advice you could give to legacy media, or do you think they’re just lost?
If you have a print paper, you have to really, really think about why do you have a print paper? Most managers say: because it’s profitable. This means they do not focus 100 percent on the future and will innovate at a much slower pace.
What is the future of journalism in the age of AI?
I think there is a golden future for journalism. I think that the user needs that journalism fills are very much there, also among younger audiences. People need someone with feelings and with human intent to tell them about what’s going on. Plus, I believe that besides information, people want community and a sense of belonging. And I think journalism is wonderful at filling these needs. That’s why I believe that that there is a golden future.
So, it will be a golden future for less journalism, a lower volume at least.
Yes, I think that there has been a lot of work within journalism that has really been not super creative and that will go away.
Interview: Alexandra Borchardt
This text was published in German and English by the industry publication Medieninsider on 5th January 2025.