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Why human-first audio is pivotal to Zetland’s subscription success

Danish news start-up Zetland’s ‘user needs’ approach led them to identify the importance of audio early on. CEO Tav Klitgaard describes how audio has gone from being a test to one of the most crucial reasons the publication has succeeded with subscriptions, with over 80% of their audience listening. It has also paid off with attracting younger audiences.

A decade ago, the team at soon-to-be-launched Zetland were thinking about what people actually wanted from a news service. They believed that publishers had seen digital as an opportunity for speed. With a business model usually monetised through ads and therefore incentivising clicks and eyeballs, stories had become very short, and very quick.

CEO Tav Klitgaard explained that Zetland wanted to do something different. “Our analysis… is that that’s not really what people need or want, and more importantly, that’s not really what people are willing to pay for,” he told The Publisher Podcast this week.

Instead, they chose to focus on two user needs. Firstly, to ‘Let me know what’s going on in the world,’ and secondly to ‘Inspire me to participate in the world and participate in society.’ This means that the most important story each day could vary from the global impacts of Trump’s row with Zelensky to a climate change situation that’s been building up for a century.

Zetland joins a growing number of digital news organisations which are shunning ads in favour of subscriptions. They have a dynamic paywall, which lets potential members sample content. Klitgaard is a firm believer that news outlets can be sustainable on subscriptions alone, if the product is right with good UX and good content. “We’ve been profitable since 2019,” he explained, noting that publications like his have difficulty scaling. “In a very small language [like] Danish, there is no business model for ads.”

Aside from sustainability, Zetland’s other major achievement is the number of young people it has been able to convince to pay. Organisations like the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism have long charted trends showing young people are less and less likely to pay for news. But Klitgaard shared that 45% of Zetland’s subscribers in Denmark are in their 20’s and 30’s. 

“It’s one of the things that, impact-wise, I am most proud of, is that we have been able to build a product that makes sense for a young audience to pay for,” he said, explaining that although younger people may have less disposable income, there is still demand. “I would argue that the needs we are feeling are actually bigger among the younger audience, because they’re underserved by most of the media industry. So the business opportunity and impact opportunity of a 25-year-old is much bigger.”

So what is it about Zetland that makes younger audiences willing to get their credit cards out?

Identifying a need for audio

When Zetland first launched in 2016, it was as a text-and-image publication. But even from early on, the team could see the potential for audio to play a role. “We work a lot of hours per day, and we look into our screens. When we’re off and want to consume news, we don’t want to look into a screen,” Klitgaard explained. 

Soon, their members started echoing this sentiment. Klitgaard shared that they spent a few hours building an HTML play button, which he says didn’t really work well at all: “We launched it, and then we looked at the numbers, not really expecting anything, and were just immediately taken aback by maybe 10-20% of users who actually clicked the play button.”

Even more surprisingly for Klitgaard, in the following days, readers continued clicking the play button. Even though it was a fairly poor experience, people were still using it, which indicated there was a need.

In early 2017, the team came up with a new product vision: that Zetland should be as consumable via audio as it was via text. By mid 2017, the audio app was ready to launch. “We maybe thought we could get 20% of our audience to use audio,” Klitgaard said. “But very quickly we were at 50%, and now we’re above 80%.”

Now, one of Zetland’s selling points to members is that they can choose how they want to get the news. “We tell our audience that we produce the content, but the way you consume the content is up to you,” noted Klitgaard. “If you’re in your car, you obviously cannot read. If you’re at home in the evening and sitting in your armchair and you want to scroll a bit, then you can read it.”

Humanity through audio

This vision meant a big shift for Zetland’s journalists in the way they thought about their stories. Initially they trialled hiring voice actors to read articles, but realised they were actually too good.  “They were so great at reading a manuscript that it almost sounds like a robot - it’s too perfect,” Klitgaard explained. “We don’t trust perfectness. We trust the human cracks in the product.” 

This emphasis on humanity is also the reason why Zetland won’t use AI or automated tools to create audio. Klitgaard said that their aim is to create a human product to build relationships with human audiences, and make them feel like humans are helping them understand the world. 

Now, everything Zetland publishes is in text and audio. Many articles are still written first, then journalists ‘tell’ - not read - an audio version afterwards. Sometimes, audio producers work with the journalists to use interview recordings in pieces to add another dimension. The publisher is also increasingly branching into audio-first outputs like five minute news briefings and ‘shows’ with multiple journalists.

The app as a vital piece of the puzzle

Launching an app for Zetland also proved to be a wise move and is part of the attraction for younger audiences. The vast majority of listening now happens within their app, which Klitgaard says isn’t surprising as browser-based listening is still a sub-par experience, especially when people are listening in the car or on smart speakers.

“[The experience] really has to be super, super easy,” he emphasised. “When you’re working with text and images on the internet, people are actually very forgiving [about poor design]... but that’s not what’s going on with audio. People are super unforgiving, because if it doesn’t work via their car, they’re just going to switch on the FM radio instead.”

Now, Klitgaard sees the competition as Spotify and the other big players that people may choose when wanting a news update, as opposed to text publications. “We need people to choose our red logo instead of the Spotify green one when they are about to get into their car,” he added.

Being a subscription publisher has also influenced where else they publish the audio content. Zetland uses Spotify and other RSS channels for marketing and sampling, but the primary focus is to drive people to the app as a ‘destination platform’, which means the content can’t be widely available elsewhere. Klitgaard was keen to emphasise that this isn’t a need motivated by ads to keep people in the ecosystem, but is instead driven by wanting to provide a great user experience and build habit.

“I’m a great advocate for the value of an awesome user experience,” he said. “Because we want to design a user experience that really fits our content, that’s what we have done in our app.”

Audio apps are something that other publishers have seen success with in the last few years, from De Correspondent to the New York Times. Zetland Media Group licences their distribution technology to other publishers, and Klitgaard noted that they have seen a lot of new interest following the New York Times’ Audio app launch.

A work in progress

Zetland’s business model isn’t one that they can scale much further within Denmark. Instead, they’re looking to replicate the model in other markets. This has led to the recent launch of Uusi Juttu in Finland in January, which has attracted 15,000 paying members in just 1.5 months.

Klitgaard thinks that the reluctance of young people to pay for news isn’t because of news itself. “Making people understand the world, the user need is really there, and the willingness to pay is through the roof for people who can fill that need,” he said. “The problem is, obviously, that the media is just not doing a good enough job.”

Despite Zetland’s success in attracting a large body of younger subscribers, Klitgaard still thinks there is work to be done. “The product has to be much better,” he emphasised. “You have to compete with Spotify and Instagram. You shouldn't compete with a legacy print paper, and it seems like a lot of people in the media industry are still believing that’s [who] you need to compete with, which is just totally wrong. You need to compete with YouTube.”

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