How Børsen generates new
digital revenue with Norkon's Pulse

Introduction
Dagbladet Børsen is one of Denmark’s leading business newspapers. Founded in 1896, it is now part of the Bonnier Group and JP/Politikens Hus. With a circulation of 197,865 weekly readers, the website borsen.dk serves 214,156 readers weekly.

The challenge
Like numerous other newspapers, Børsen has actively transitioned from a paper and advertising revenue model to one focused on digital revenue.

In 2018, Børsen set out to define a new strategy for growth, as reader habits were clearly changing. Their new strategy would focus on digital products and editions with the goal of generating digital subscriptions and online ad revenue. In part, Børsen faced a positive challenge: they used an in-house digital news solution that provided good coverage of markets, including Nasdaq Nordic equity exchanges, currency pairs, commodities, indices, and bonds. 

But as the digital imperative grew, the in-house solution could not meet the growing demand for reader engagement and tools for users. Similarly, the solution did not have the capability of showing news and articles segmented and tagged by security, i.e., easy access to relevant, related news about the security they were looking up. Essentially editorial content was siloed from market data, which limited the potential for engagement and ROI.

These limitations led Børsen to reexamine their digital strategy and to turn to Norkon for an effective, scalable solution.

Keeping growth going

In addition to the surface-level increases in traffic and engagement, Børsen introduced new strategies for registration and subscriptions as well as advertising partnerships. 

Registration and subscription strategy

Børsen Investor offered users free access to most of the news content and features of Pulse, opening the door to high levels of traffic and increased engagement from both existing and new users. 

To access more advanced features, users were asked to create a free account, which allowed them to store favorites, create alerts, and build portfolios. Registration for a free account built user habits and stickiness, enabling them to build out favorites, alerts, and portfolios, which encouraged return visits to the site and was an ideal starting point for the user journey to paid subscriptions.

For users who wanted extended functionality, such as the ability to create additional stock alerts and have access to real-time prices (free and registered users receive data with a 15-minute delay), they were asked to subscribe to Børsen Private. This subscription also included a bundle of other Børsen content. Including Børsen Investor in the subscription increased the value of the package for readers.