New Media Trends

This weeks news in Danish online media is without doubt the Morten Lund take-over as majority shareholder at Nyhedsavisen from Baugur (press release here), with Morten Wagner of Freeway as a minor investor. Why? It at the same time marks the exit of the Icelandic money backing up Nyhedsavisen - and holds the promise of a yet more intersting development of the Danish online mediamarket.

Here’s the story:

Nyhedsavisen is the constituting part of what in late 2006 was known under the name “the Danish newspaper war”. Around two years ago, Baugur Group - a set of Icelandic investors - challenged the existing (subscription-based) Danish news-papers, by launching a free, and freely distributed (to the doorstep og “all” Danish households), quality-newspaper. The dominant players JP/Politiken and Det Berlingske Officin both answered back with each their own free and freely distributed newspapers - and spinned off very interesting initiatives from other players as well. Hopes were that Nyhedsavisen would be financially weared out in the face of some 3-6 competing newspapers, all of these being given freely to readers at home or in the traffic.
(I’ve covered this in a number of post, most notably Danish media revolution: New high-quality print and web-media to give news away this autumn, First blog-editor employed by Danish newspaper, The three drivers of the current media explosion, Sneak preview - now they’re really here - Nordjyske’s new newspapers and website)

Estimates of the net-costs of this “war” has been around 200.000 euro a day for each of the free newspapers - a significant amount for the involved players. Det Berlingske Officin backed out of the “war” rather early, and other players also renounced. Today JP/Politikens 24timer is battling Nyhedsavisen.

The sell-out of Baugur Group must have caused a celebration at the executive floor at JP/Politiken, as Mads Kristensen argues in a comment here. Since Morten Lund (who has earned his money from seed-investments in among others Skype) is belived not to have quite the financial weight as Baugur (however rich he might be). Rumers are, that if Nyhedsavisen doesn’t reach break-even in October, their forced to close down.

Others pays more attention to a potential channel-shift at Nyhedsavisen, bringing online to the forefront of the battle. Morten Lund is a New Media entrepreneurial investor, and Morten Wagner is a New Media entrepreneur, his group controlling the Danish equivalent of Myspace, arto.dk, the leading Dating portals and quite a lot of other higly focused websites. Is now the time where the website of Nyhedsavisen is re-entering the battle, full of new energy, new ideas - backed by traffic-generating efforts of the Freeway-properties?
Morten Lund seems to be focusing on the known corebusiness of Nyhedsavisen: “a second-to-none product to advertisers”, “a QUALITY PAPER and DISTIBUTION SERVICE” in this blogpost on his investment, not even mentioning the online-opportunities.

Morten Wagner, however, does seem to be in the Nyhedsavisen business for the sake of the internetopportunities alone. From this interview at Journalisten.dk (in Danish) it’s clear that it’s in online he sees the opportunities, and that he wants to realize them FAST. And that it is Morten Lund, a long-time admirer of the Morten Wagner ventures, who in a late-night meeting at a Copenhagen bar, finally convinced Morten Wagner to invest….

I think this is facinating… can’t wait to hear about what’s next!

Update, January 23rd: Should be mentioned that Morten Lund is not new to the Nyhedsavisen-game. He allready joined Nyhedsavisen as a small investor in the summer of 2006, and at that time it also roused a great deal of expectations of what this could mean for the online-part of the Newspaper-war (see my “Nyhedsavisen” in aggressive online-move - presumably). The website of Nyhedsavisen, avisen.dk, was created by a Morten Lund-venture, Hello Group, with a strong focus on blogging and commenting - and the ability for blogpost to hit the frontpage of avisen.dk. Marketing material boosted: “Now citizens take control”.
So what’s new is not the participation of Morten Lund in itself, but his “51 percent-shareholder” commitment to the project. And then off course the things Morten Wagner and his Freeway-consortium has to throw into the venture.