Anders Brenna

I’m a Norwegian technology journalist. My native language is spoken only by Norwegians, and there are only 4.7 million of us in total.

The amount of people genuine interested in information technology in mye homeland is therefore limited. My fairly qualified guess is that about 100.000 Norwegians fits within this category. This is enough, but it’s hard to reach them all.

digi.no has about 100.000 unique visitors each week. This makes us Norway’s largest news site for professional ICT industry news, and it might fit well with my guess that there are about 100.000 real technology enthusiasts in Norway.

I’m pretty sure, however, that not all of our readers fits within this category. We have a loyal readership consisting of people who check in regularly, but there are a certain amount of readers who only drop by now and then.

The gap is probably filled with people who bypass us and goes directly to the international ICT-news. They miss our stories about the local Norwegian companies, but they still get to stay on top of what’s happening in the industry.

We write our stories in our local native Norwegian language. This is both a blessing and a curse for us.

On the plus side, we get to be in pole position in the Norwegian media niche on Information technology and telecommunications (ICT). We have competitors, but we benefit from being the oldest and biggest media outlet in this part of the market.

We also get to set the agenda, and decide what the top story of the day is. This is possibly because small markets like the Norwegian, does not leave room for many small niche players. You have to reach a certain size to make break-even. I don’t know how big that is, perhaps somewhere between 10.000 and 25.000 unique visitors per week? But even then, it would only pay for one or perhaps two full time employees.

The small market results in relative few players, and that makes these markets different than in the English speaking world or in other markets with major languages.

From what I gather, English news sites gets much or even most of their traffic from search engines such as Google and their Google News service. We have those services in Norway as well, but they only provide a small amount of the traffic to our articles.

At digi.no, search engines like Google provide less than a tenth of our visitors. That includes Google News and their local Norwegian competitor Sesam. Most of our visitors comes through our front page.

We are a news site for technology enthusiasts, but RSS-feeds still does not list among the top ten entry points for our articles. Even the great and widely popular Netvibes.com, provides less than 0,2% of our traffic.

These stats are not unique for digi.no. Torry Pedersen, the Editor-in-chief of VG Nett, Norways largest news site, recently said at a seminar that they also get less than a tenth of their visitors from search engines.

VG Nett has an amazing 2.7 million unique visitors each week, according to TNS Gallup. They provide the official numbers on behalf of all Norwegian media sites. That’s a lot, considering the fact that we are only 4.7 million inhabitants in Norway (TNS Gallup filters out foreign IP-addresses).

Small markets limited by language, consists of relative few players. This makes it easy for the readers to track the news sites manually. It does not take long to surf through the front pages of all the national news sites, the regional ones and the local sites, as well as the relevant niche publications. You save some time by checking them through RSS-feeds, but not much.

This is obviously different in the English speaking world. There is no way that you can surf through all the front pages. That’s why you need to go through the filters of a search engine.

We don’t, and this works out well for us. The national market is big enough to finance our niche news operation, and it is easier to become the biggest fish in a small pond, than in the big ocean.

There are, however, several drawbacks with writing news stories in Norwegian:

• Only readable by Norwegians (duh)
• Limited growth potential
• Good stories stop at the border

The first point is a no-brainer. Our language puts a big wall around our market. It is hard for non-Norwegian speaking competitors to enter our market, even though most Norwegians understand English pretty well. Our problem is that it’s hard to expand from this position.

We could probably expanded our coverage with more journalists and more advanced features on our site, but there is a limit to how much more we could gain finance-wise on such moves. We are of course doing some expansions. We’re adding a new journalist next month, and there will be som major changes to our design in the near future.

Another solution could be to expand the area we cover, but that could quickly turn out to be a blind alley. You need to know the IT-stuff to write good articles from this business, and we’re already covering a vast area of specialty fields in doing both information technology and telecommunications.

Even though we are a Norwegian-only news operation, we still do some breaking news on an international level. We are sometimes first, and often very early with the latest, but our stories stop at the border. It is only available for our core readers, those who speak Norwegian.

It’s not exactly a big problem, but it’s frustrating. Especially when we know that some of the Norwegian technology enthusiasts we would like to serve, skips right to the English sites for the news they could have got at our site.

I don’t think these issues are isolated to Norway. There are several countries in the world with smaller populations and languages spoken only by a few million or less. It’s great if the local market is big enough, but it makes it hard to grow big ambitions.