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As one of Finland’s largest media companies, Sanoma Media Finland reaches nearly every household with the country’s leading daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, as well as a number of regional papers, radio and TV stations, online news sites, and magazines. Based on analysis conducted in 2020, however, they discovered that account misuse was rampant, with some subscribers sharing their login credentials outside their households. Not only was this affecting Sanoma’s bottom line; unauthorized account activity was resulting in some user profiles displaying content that didn't align with user interests, diminishing the personalized user experience (UX) that Sanoma strives for.

“We knew that some digital publishers take a hard line in solving the account misuse issue by restricting accounts, but this can have adverse short-term effects since the users might just churn,” Sanoma Media Finland’s Head of Data Valtteri Vartiainen explains. Instead, Sanoma wanted to take a softer approach, developing features to make the UX more personalized. When users created their own personalized experience, they hypothesized that personalization would increase user engagement and boost subscriber retention, and – ultimately – decrease account misuse.

Having collaborated with the Google News partnerships team since 2018, Sanoma turned to the Google News Initiative (GNI) in 2023 to help them launch a set of personalization features called My News Service. The features included a personalized profile menu and account page for each user, as well as a Year in News feature, which Vartiainen compares to Spotify’s annual user wrapup. “My News Service looks at subscriber usage and purchase data, processes it, and then provides insightful ways to increase user engagement and retention,” he says.

In the early stages of development, GNI reviewed Sanoma’s proposal and provided feedback on planned features, and they continued to support Sanoma throughout the project with monthly reviews. “It’s been really efficient,” Sanoma Media Finland’s Vice President of Digital Development and Customer Experience, Timo Rinne says of the partnership. “We’ve learned a lot, and hopefully, we’ve also given Google some nice examples of how to solve this particular problem.”