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Schibsted Doubles Digital Subscription Revenue on the Zuora Platform

ZUO | December 14, 2020

Decision by Scandinavian media giant to consolidate and migrate multiple entities to the Zuora platform pays off as digital subscription revenue hits the 1 billion NOK mark in 2020

Zuora, Inc. , (NYSE:ZUO) the leading cloud-based subscription management platform provider, announced today that its customer Schibsted ASA (OSE:SCHA) has doubled digital subscription revenue to 1 billion Norwegian krone (NOK) from 2018 to 2020. In 2017, Schibsted, a Norway-based multimedia group that owns and operates newspapers, online classified advertisement websites, publishing houses, and other multimedia services, began migrating its brands to the Zuora® platform.

With newspaper ad revenue continuing its long decline , media companies are increasingly relying on subscription models to stay afloat. Schibsted, with a global reputation as a forward-thinking media company, has led the way , making digital subscriptions central to its business strategy. News-hungry consumers have responded, subscribing to Schibsted’s newspapers (with digital leading print) in ever greater numbers .

The challenge for Schibsted has been operational: how to maximize synergies across their large family of brands. Schibsted companies currently use four different platforms to manage their subscriptions. Each company manages payments, dunning, customer service, and marketing automation independently. This siloed approach is inefficient and makes it difficult to cross-sell across brands.

“With multiple platforms, we don’t have the control we need,” explains Fredrik Schjold, Head of Consumer Business Technology at Schibsted. “We need one unified platform that is flexible and scalable—and digitally native.”

Schibsted chose Zuora as that single platform to consolidate onto because it’s flexible and can work across brands, providing consistency while also allowing for differences in pricing and packaging. This customizability is crucial not only for the various newspaper types (daily, tabloid, business, etc.) but also for non-news services, like online marketplaces and consumer sites such as Vektklubb, Norway’s largest weight loss service.

Perhaps the most important benefit Schibsted finds in Zuora is how it functions as a single source of truth for customer data. Data from all brands is exported into Schibsted’s data warehouse and mined for insights to help them predict and lower churn and improve customer communications.

As of September 2020, Schibsted had migrated 494,586 active subscribers to the Zuora platform, a year-over-year increase from 2019 of 582%. As a result, digital subscription revenue grew from 500 million NOK to 1 billion NOK from 2018 to 2020.

“We needed three main building blocks: billing subscription management, customer service, and market automation,” says Carl Friberg, Product Manager of Subscriptions at Schibsted. “Zuora helped us achieve that and helped us deploy growth initiatives across brands.”

Read more about Schibsted in the case study here .

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora provides the leading cloud-based subscription management platform that functions as a system of record for subscription businesses across all industries. Powering the Subscription Economy®, the Zuora platform was architected specifically for dynamic, recurring subscription business models and acts as an intelligent subscription management hub that automates and orchestrates the entire subscription order-to-revenue process seamlessly across billing and revenue recognition. Zuora serves more than 1,000 companies around the world, including Box, Ford, Penske Media Corporation, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Xplornet, and Zoom. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices around the world in the U.S., EMEA and APAC. To learn more about the Zuora platform, please visit www.zuora.com .

© 2020 Zuora, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Zuora, Subscribed, Subscription Economy, Powering the Subscription Economy, and Subscription Economy Index are trademarks or registered trademarks of Zuora, Inc. Third party trademarks mentioned above are owned by their respective companies. Nothing in this press release should be construed to the contrary, or as an approval, endorsement or sponsorship by any third parties of Zuora, Inc. or any aspect of this press release.

SOURCE: Zuora Financial