While INMA Benchmarks reveals that most national news brands capture just 1% of households with digital subscriptions, Delfi Meedia in Estonia leads with 18% penetration. Ivar Krustok, chief AI & innovation officer at the company, revealed the secrets behind the company’s high digital subscription rates, streamlined internal communication, and AI-driven content strategies at the INMA Subscriptions Summit 2025 in Amsterdam.

Involve all decision makers in the team

With a 60% daily reach of Estonia’s national internet population and 88% of its revenue derived from digital, Delfi Meedia holds a dominant position in the market. Yet, as Krustok put it, the real competition comes from within — inefficient internal communication remains a major challenge for many news organisations.

“Most people don't know what's happening inside the company,” Krustok said. “If an editorial makes a change, will it affect advertising? Will it affect marketing? But if everybody is in the room, they will know they can at least say it out. So that means it's a really wide knowledge base, and what we can do is then to use this knowledge. During our weekly meetings, all stakeholders — involving editorial, business, ad sales, subscriptions, IT and analytics — are at the table. We argue, challenge, and confront; this is where things happen.”

One package to rule them all

Delfi Meedia operates 12 brands across newspapers, magazines, live streaming, and events. Instead of adopting a dynamic paywall model, the company has found success in bundling everything into one subscription package.

“With all of these different newspapers, magazines, and packages, internally, it will take so long for the team to understand what we are working on,” Krustok said. “Eight years ago we bundled everything, but now we just have one package to discuss about during our meetings: What are we going to do with this package? How are we going to sell this package?”

He also argued against removing ads for subscribers entirely: “If you're a subscriber and you were in a product that didn't have advertising, they would forget what they're paying for. But of course you can take a few placements away.”

Scale up, don’t scale down the premium content

A wide content selection, Krustok argued, is key to attracting subscribers. In the case of Delfi Meedia, it gets a lot of subscribers from the so-called low-quality content – such as the random translation of some superstars in the U.S. – and niche sports.

“Don't scale down your content,” Krustok said. “If you go on Netflix, there are probably 20 new shows that have just come out. The consumers — even if they're not watching them — get a lot of content. Now a lot of new publishers are scaling down [the content] because they're seeing that's not value. But should we do less? I think, no, we should scale it up actually.”

The outlet has conducted a test on its coverage of the Ukraine war, finding that the audience should be the one to decide what the premium content is.

“We had a lot of staff reporting on the ground [in Ukraine] and creating daily posts on Facebook,” Krustok said. “We took their content and put it behind a paywall. We let users choose: go to Facebook to search for the person and find the content for free versus subscribing to read it with us. On average, we got 10 subscribers one day, 20 the other day, 40 the day after. Our audience tells us what’s premium.”

Deliver text-based reports with digestable data

While data dashboards are invaluable, Krustok warned that they often overwhelm teams with too much information and get lost in data.

“Dashboards are like a fabric-based system,” Krustok said. “We’re trying to get in all the data that we have on third-party platforms or all platforms. We cram everything into one place and build a language model system.”

Krustok believed this would become the highest value for generative AI in the coming years. To simplify insights, he delivers text-based summaries with clear, customised figures to stakeholders.

“Dashboards are like fabric — we cram in everything from third-party platforms and internal sources,” he said. “But people get lost in the data.”

To simplify insights, Delfi Meedia uses AI-powered reports. Instead of complex dashboards, Krustok delivers text-based summaries with clear, customised figures.

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