Decision by Scandinavian media giant to consolidate and migrate multiple entities to the Zuora platform pays off as digital subscription revenue hits the 1 billion NOK mark in 2020
Zuora, Inc., (NYSE:ZUO) the leading cloud-based subscription management platform provider, announced today that its customer Schibsted ASA (OSE:SCHA) has doubled digital subscription revenue to 1 billion Norwegian krone (NOK) from 2018 to 2020. In 2017, Schibsted, a Norway-based multimedia group that owns and operates newspapers, online classified advertisement websites, publishing houses, and other multimedia services, began migrating its brands to the Zuora® platform.
With newspaper ad revenue continuing its long decline, media companies are increasingly relying on subscription models to stay afloat. Schibsted, with a global reputation as a forward-thinking media company, has led the way, making digital subscriptions central to its business strategy. News-hungry consumers have responded, subscribing to Schibsted’s newspapers (with digital leading print) in ever greater numbers.
The challenge for Schibsted has been operational: how to maximize synergies across their large family of brands. Schibsted companies currently use four different platforms to manage their subscriptions. Each company manages payments, dunning, customer service, and marketing automation independently. This siloed approach is inefficient and makes it difficult to cross-sell across brands.
“With multiple platforms, we don’t have the control we need,” explains Fredrik Schjold, Head of Consumer Business Technology at Schibsted. “We need one unified platform that is flexible and scalable—and digitally native.”
Schibsted chose Zuora as that single platform to consolidate onto because it’s flexible and can work across brands, providing consistency while also allowing for differences in pricing and packaging. This customizability is crucial not only for the various newspaper types (daily, tabloid, business, etc.) but also for non-news services, like online marketplaces and consumer sites such as Vektklubb, Norway’s largest weight loss service.
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Perhaps the most important benefit Schibsted finds in Zuora is how it functions as a single source of truth for customer data. Data from all brands is exported into Schibsted’s data warehouse and mined for insights to help them predict and lower churn and improve customer communications.
As of September 2020, Schibsted had migrated 494,586 active subscribers to the Zuora platform, a year-over-year increase from 2019 of 582%. As a result, digital subscription revenue grew from 500 million NOK to 1 billion NOK from 2018 to 2020.
“We needed three main building blocks: billing subscription management, customer service, and market automation,” says Carl Friberg, Product Manager of Subscriptions at Schibsted. “Zuora helped us achieve that and helped us deploy growth initiatives across brands.”
