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Kauppalehti attracts 24k players

In just 5 weeks, Finland’s leading business newspaper attracts thousands of new audiences with risk-free stock market game Fantasy Funds

Case study

Kauppalehti is Finland’s leading business newspaper and part of Alma Media, one of the largest media and digital service business in the country. The reputable newspaper is in circulation since 1898 and is considered quite tech-savvy as Kauppalehti was the first media outlet to implement paywalls when Finnish media companies transitioned to digital.

The challenge: Attracting the younger generation

Attracting a younger audience segment of 18-34 years old as well as more female readers has been a major challenge for Kauppalehti – one that many face in the news industry. As part of a long-term strategy to win over this target audience, Kauppalehti partnered up with Norkon to run the stock market investment game, Fantasy Funds.

The Solution: Gamification as a First Milestone

Gamification is a concept that Kauppalehti had already started to explore in an attempt to bring a fun and engaging element to their news site. Having tried various small games such as puzzles or daily quizzes that relate to the financial news being covered, Kauppalehti was able to achieve only limited results in attracting their desired target audience. This led Kauppalehti to take a step further and look at the game-changing solution Fantasy Funds to attract and engage with a younger audience as well as a female audience.

Kauppalehti launched its first stock market game in January 2023 and saw immediate results.

10,000 player registrations prior to game launch

During the soft-launch period that leads up to the start of the game competition, 10,000 players had already signed up to participate in Kauppalehti’s stock market game. The pre-game period, typically 3-4 weeks long, allows the news publisher to promote the upcoming competition and enables players to access and experiment with the investment tools and dashboards they would be able to use. Once the game starts officially, portfolios are reset to give everyone an equal head-start.

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For Kauppalehti, Fantasy Funds is the starting point to the user journey and lays the foundation for them to engage with users. From there, the next step is to nurture those generated leads, building reader habits to return to the site and ultimately show the value of becoming a subscriber.

“It’s great when a young reader comes to our website to play the game, but we know it is not enough yet to get him to subscribe. We need to get them to our website many more times, over and over again” explains Laura Keskinen, Product Manager at Alma Talent Media.

 

<- Regular newsletters are sent to players that tie specifically to the game. Here, Kauppalehti reminds players of the price that is at stake and the rules of the game.

Fantasy Funds Stock market game metrics

The Result: 24k players in the first game season

Overall the game brought a solid amount of traffic back to the main site from users that came from Fantasy Funds’ featured news feed to the main Kauppalehti.fi news site.

The level of player engagement activity during the 5 weeks the game lasted represented good results and Kauppalehti was able to maintain a high level of activity through in-game incentives, such as weekly prizes.

The publication counted a total of 24k players. Out of these new registrations, 76% were men while 24% were women. It is worth putting those numbers into context, where the user base of the average European financial news outlet is less than 10% female.

Tying the game to editorial content

Kauppalehti’s strategy was to tie as many news elements to the game as possible in order to generate traffic to content. One example was the weekly newsletter that was created for game players specifically. During the duration of the game, one editor focused on covering just the game and produced around 3 articles per week, purely on the competition. Those articles were then featured in the player newsletter and drove engagement. This is just another example of how players were introduced to Kauppalehti’s brand and its covered content.

The news platform reported having reached a high amount of pageviews of news articles from users that came from the Fantasy Funds news feed to the Kauppalehti news site. The conclusion can therefore be drawn that the stock market game connects new users to a newspaper’s editorial content.

“It is very unlikely that a young person will subscribe on his/her first visit. If we want to win over young subscribers, we know we have to start with building returning reader habits and creating an inner motivation to subscribe.” – Laura Keskinen, Product Manager at Alma Talent Media

Kauppalehti nurture plan

Looking to the future

The primary goal for Kauppalehti with Fantasy Funds was to bring a younger audience to register on their site as well as a greater female audience. Having met both of their goals, Kauppalehti is now putting their nurturing process in motion to rank high in their newly gained readers’ habits when browsing the internet who are looking for business news sources.

Just two months after having wrapped up their first game, Kauppalehti planned their next Fantasy Funds game season to experience similar success rates as during their first game.

Why Choose Gamification in Media?

A game changer for user interaction and audience growth

Integrating gamification in media is a recipe for success to drive engagement, strengthen your brand, and increase subscribers over time.

 

Keep Users’ Attention

Collect first-party Data

Grow subscriptions

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Game on!

5 European companies, Kauppalehti among them, leveraged Fantasy Funds to attract and engage thousands of new readers. Read up on the strategies and unique game elements which the different publications chose to focus on.
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