Case study: How Kauppalehti uses Norkon's Fantasy Funds game

Introduction
Kauppalehti is Finland’s leading business newspaper and part of Alma Media, one of the largest media and digital service business in the country. The reputable newspaper is in circulation since 1898 and is considered quite tech-savvy as Kauppalehti was the first media outlet to implement paywalls when Finnish media companies transitioned to digital.

The challenge
Attracting a younger audience segment of 18-34 years old as well as more female readers has been a major challenge for Kauppalehti - one that many face in the news industry. As part of a long-term strategy to win over this target audience, Kauppalehti partnered up with Norkon to run the stock market investment game, Fantasy Funds.

The solution: Gamification as a First Milestone

Gamification is a concept that Kauppalehti had already started to explore in an attempt to bring a fun and engaging element to their news site. Having tried various small games such as puzzles or daily quizzes that relate to the financial news being covered, Kauppalehti was able to achieve only limited results in attracting their desired target audience.

This led Kauppalehti to take a step further and look at the game-changing solution Fantasy Funds to attract and engage with a younger audience as well as a female audience.

Kauppalehti launched its first stock market game in January 2023 and saw immediate results. During the soft-launch period that leads up to the start of the game competition, Kauppalehti’s Fantasy Funds registered 10 000 players.

At the same time, Kauppalehti is well aware that the younger readers aren’t so easily won-over.

“It’s great when a young reader comes to our website to play the game, but we know it is not enough yet to get him to subscribe. We need to get them to our website many more times, over and over again” explains Laura.
For Kauppalehti, Fantasy Funds is the starting point to the user journey and lays the foundation for them to engage with users. From there, the next step is to nurture those generated leads, building reader habits to return to the site and ultimately show the value of becoming a subscriber.

The Result

Overall the game brought a solid amount of traffic back to the main site from users that came from Fantasy Funds’ featured news feed to the main Kauppalehti.fi news site.

The level of player engagement activity during the 5 weeks the game lasted represented good results and Kauppalehti was able to maintain a high level of activity through in-game incentives, such as weekly prizes.

Kauppalehti counted a total of 24k players. Out of these new registrations, 76% were men while 24% were women. It is worth putting those numbers into context, where the user base of the average European financial news outlet is less than 10% female.

Tying the game to editorial content

Kauppalehti’s strategy was to tie as many news elements to the game as possible in order to generate traffic to content. One example was the weekly newsletter that was created for game players specifically. During the duration of the game, one editor focused on covering just the game and produced around 3 articles per week, purely on the competition. Those articles were then featured in the player newsletter and drove engagement. This is just another example of how players were introduced to Kauppalehti’s brand and its covered content.

The news platform reported having reached a high amount of pageviews of news articles from users that came from the Fantasy Funds news feed to the Kauppalehti news site. The conclusion can therefore be drawn that the stock market game connects new users to a newspaper’s editorial content.

Looking to the future

The primary goal for Kauppalehti with Fantasy Funds was to bring a younger audience to register on their site as well as a greater female audience. Having met both of their goals, Kauppalehti is now putting their nurturing process in motion to rank high in their newly gained readers’ habits when browsing the internet who are looking for business news sources.

Just two months after having wrapped up their first game, Kauppalehti planned their next Fantasy Funds game season to experience similar success rates as during their first game.

Let the games begin!

Finland’s leading business newspaper attracts 24k players with Norkon's Fantasy Funds

Kauppalehti attracts 24k players in just 5 weeks with risk-free stock market game

Tying the game to editorial content

Looking to the future

Why Choose Gamification in Media?

A game changer for user interaction and audience growth