Schibsted is an international media group with approximately 7,800 employees. Schibsted has operations in 29 countries. Schibsted’s strategy comprises two main objectives: further development of its media houses and establishment of online classifieds services.
Strong media houses represent the core of our activities, and its corporate growth strategy is based on close collaboration between different media channels. The objective is to develop the business activities so that it can offer users a wide range of services, irrespective of which channels they choose to use. The diversity of Schibsted’s product range is closely aligned with its strong tradition of editorial freedom and our ability to adapt to a media market that is constantly undergoing rapid change.
In 2008 the international online classified advertising business was reorganized into a separate company, Schibsted Classified Media (SCM). Today the company has activities in many countries around the world, most of them based on the successful Swedish Blocket.se concept.
In Norway, collaboration between the regional newspapers Aftenposten, Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad and Fædrelandsvennen was formalized through the establishment of the media company Media Norge in 2009. The objective is to take full advantage of economies of scale by means of editorial and commercial collaboration. In 2012, VG and Schibsted Forlag joined the company and the name was changed to Schibsted Norge.
In Sweden, Schibsted Sverige was established in 2009, a collaboration which embraces all the activities in the Aftonblad and SvD groups. This structure has clear similarities with the Norwegian set-up. From 2011 all of Schibsted’s Swedish activities gathered under one roof in Kungsbrohuset in Stockholm in 2011.
See the “Schibsted at a glance” presentation.
Source: Company Website
As Schibsted is moving strongly into analytics, Outsell Inc. sees a seismic shift in the tracking of consumers. The reasons are twofold: 1) “cookies” have become a bogeyman, both to publishers and consumers, as “privacy” concerns, warranted and fanciful, multiply; 2) the multi-device world has upset the “traditional” counting of digital customers. The desktop/laptop web, while still dominant, is beginning to flatten in usage. As consumers move to multi-device users, tracking them across platforms becomes essential.
Despite Schibsted’s outsized successes, it’s noteworthy that the company believes it must greatly expand on its customer knowledge and use that knowledge as a central part of its business and product development. It is a strategy led in the news industry by the Financial Times, which has served as the industry’s model (see Outsell Insights, August 18, 2010, FT’s Financial Results Prove Out Its Strategy). Now its peers are adopting and adapting its tactics.
Source: Outsell Inc.
