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Being the largest newspaper in Norway, VG's goal is to be the number one destination for news. But like many publishers, VG had difficulties reaching the younger audiences. Especially the ones between 13 and 24 years old, - our future readers.
At the beginning of 2017, VG teamed up with Snapchat as the first and only publisher in the nordic countries. We launched our first news edition on January 22nd. We were eager to present news at a platform we knew that the young generation use, and have been serving news editions on Snapchat Discover every day since.
Our main goal was to explore and present journalism in an appealing and new way. We wanted to make our channel grow by learning what works and what doesn't - on the mobile platform. Our key objectives were:
– To explore and present journalism in an appealing and new way.
– To reach teenagers and young adults.
– To make our channel grow by learning what works and what doesn't - on the mobile platform.
– To have 30.000 unique viewers on a daily basis within the first six months.
We wanted to make stories to inspire, to engage and to entertain. We started by making a short and precise news edition with the most important events for young Norwegians.
By offering a mix of easy, fun, hard and serious stories we wanted to give our audience the variety that already exists in their lives on a platform they already use.
Throughout the year we have published a new edition every day at 7 AM, including Saturdays and Sundays. The weekend edition differ from the ordinary news editions by focusing on one topic for the entire story. Each edition consists of at least 11 snaps, so called top snaps, in addition to articles, polls, quizzes and longer videos.
The advanced analysis that Snapchat provides from each edition have given us a vital advantage. By knowing exactly how our audience react throughout the stories we have been able to improve in all aspects. We've learned what kind of stories that works and what doesn't work. And we've learned how we should tell stories to engage our readers.
The results were beyond expectations. When we first started we were astonished to see that 100.000 Norwegians wanted to read our news. One year later this number has tripled. Our expectation when we started doing Snapchat Discover was 30.000.
Over a million unique viewers engage in our channel every month. And keep in mind, this is in a country with 5 million inhabitants. By adding a totally new platform VG managed to reach out to a completely new audience - those between 13 and 17 years old, and those between 18 and 24 years old.
Our numbers show that they do read our news. Even though we publish news on the «as you go»-medium, the mobile phone, our users spend an average of over 2 minutes on each edition.
By using a language teenagers understand, we've managed to become the number one news destination for a large amount of young people in Norway. We've made thousands of news stories and created over 4000 top snaps the last year. By presenting longer articles in a more visual and understandable way, the news becomes easier to digest.
We've found that this is the key to success when it comes to presenting the news in 2018. Finally we can say that we have succeeded in reaching the younger audiences with our news.
