News
Nordlys' digital solutions presented at the 4th International E-Reading & Tablet Conference in Vienna01/11-2011
Anders Opdahl of the Norwegian newspaper Nordlys had an interesting speech at the "4th International E-Reading & Tablet Conference" in Vienna, which was held in conjunction with IFRA Expo 2011. This international conference is one of the most important conferences dealing with the media houses utilization of smartphones and tablets as a new distribution platform.
The newspaper Nordlys from Tromsø has a daily circulation of 24,800 ex. Like many other medias, they have experienced a circulation fall - over the last year a decrease of 2.8%. But in return, they have online 33,000 daily visitors.
In 2010 Nordlys began to look for ways to publish the newspaper on the Apple iPad. Therefore, they started collaboration with Visiolink. Focus was on creating an app that would meet Nordlys' and the reader’s needs. This continuous development has led to a Nordlys app that currently contains the following elements:
- 1:1 replica of the daily newspaper including XML-based text and image display
- Online news in HTML5 format
- Video Calendar
- Daily news videos
- Webview with news RSS feed
- Webview with geo-located weather reports
- Webview with "social mirror", which is based on a number of local Twitter feeds.
Profitability and cash flow
Anders Opdahl told the many participants at the conference, that Nordlys is experiencing a steadily increasing number of subscribers to the digital solution and have a good conversion rate in the relationship between the number of app downloads and the number of subscribers.
Crucial to the profitability of the various elements of the app is, that the app draws information and data from existing systems at Nordlys and other external data sources. This means that there are no extra costs tied in publishing content via the app for smartphones and tablets. This is one of the key parameters to ensure profitability in tablet solution.
The philosophy behind the app has been:
To ensure the same quality as the printed newspaper offers the reader
- To exploit the opportunities tablets offer as a new distribution channel
- To exploit Webviews integrated into the app, as the basis for online news
- To focus on simple, consistent user interface across the different content types.
The solution is highly scalable, as it has been possible both to expand with new functionalities and also create space to test new possible features along the way. The solution is based on open standards and auto-generated content and is grounded in "a fantastic e-paper technology," as Anders Opdahl said at the conference :-)
