A focus on one simple multi-brand subscription package has helped Delfi Meedia to reach a fifth of Estonia’s population as digital subscribers.
This has made Delfi Meedia more resilient to the arrival of Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT for search, according to chief AI and innovation officer Ivar Krustok.
Estonia-based Delfi Meedia offers one combined subscription option to more than 20 websites (which include four newspapers and seven magazines). Krustok described this light-heartedly as “one subs package to rule them all”.
Krustok told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference in London this month that 21% of the Estonian online population, or around 200,000, are digital subscribers to its bundle. Estonia’s total population is about 1.3 million.
Asked about the threat to Delfi Media’s websites from generative AI search summaries, especially via Google, Krustok said he was “concerned” but that the “reality is that we have a huge percentage of direct traffic”.
The 200,000 paid subscribers make up around half of Delfi’s 110 million monthly page views “so we have a really active user base”, he said.
He suggested that therefore that even a a loss of 60% of Google traffic overnight would not be a catastrophe.
Some 88% of Delfi Meedia’s group revenue comes from digital.
There is one subscription deal of: €1 for the first month, followed by €5.99 per month for the next two months and then €10.99 per month. There is no annual subscription price.
The publisher has a monthly subscriber churn rate of 3.9% and Krustok is aiming for that to get down to 2.5% by the start of next year.
He said most of 2025 has been “stable” in terms of churn although “growth has slowed down”. However he does not believe they are coming up against a subscription ceiling yet.
Krustok said they have done testing but the monthly model “has worked” and “we’re not losing that many people” so they have decided to continue with the current system.
Just under half (45%) of Delfi Meedia’s content, about 216 articles a day, is behind a hard paywall.
The paywall is not dynamic, with certain articles instead chosen to be paywalled for everyone. This covers “premium” content as well as “relatively simple” AI-translated articles, which Krustok said also drive conversions.
The publisher has built an internal translation tool and serves content in four languages (Estonian, Russian, English and German).
The translation tool means that users accessing the website from Estonia can see all the Baltic news in their local language using AI.
Krustok said AI is also a “huge opportunity” to make “workflows faster, to make usage more personalised, to have better access to data”.
He highlighted an archive tool that can allow journalists much easier access to 25 years of articles from three countries. For example, Krustok said they could ask for quotes from a previous prime minister.
“Because it uses our data, it’s really easy for the system to search.”
Automated summaries are also increasing engagement on articles, Krustok said, and so is a recommendation system that proposes a follow-up article once the initial one has been read.
“We had a huge increase in actually driving traffic from one article to another.”
Krustok also said transcription was “the most successful” AI tool they had added. He had initially thought that all the journalists already had a transcription tool so “why should I build it?” But in fact, he discovered, they were “just using random websites everywhere” and creating a tool was “super easy to do”.
“The easiest tools have been the most successful tools actually because they do really complex or time-consuming tasks in seconds, minutes.”
Krustok said Delfi Meedia has put all of its data in Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, meaning that when staff want to ask questions like how a campaign performed for a client or how many subscriptions were driven by a certain article, they can find out via a chatbot.
Delfi Meedia also uses AI to summarise court cases, market data, and tax law updates, feeding information directly to journalists via Teams.
However, Krustok noted that AI has also highlighted a “huge gap” in the newsroom as some people “still have trouble” using the CMS whereas others are “really good” at using the AI tools.
He hopes to make the gap smaller by “building specific internal tools. So again, when you need the transcription, when you need the translation, when you go through hundreds and hundreds of documents…”
Asked about using AI to provide personalised content home pages and feeds, Krustok said. “Even if we are profitable, it’s hard to invest in something that might be really good for the users who are needing you, but in a service that might cost €10,000 a month.
“So that’s where we’re trying to figure out a really good cost-efficient way to achieve something that’s valuable for the user that we can maintain in the long run.”
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