In this episode of the Media Innovatie Podcast, hosts Lars Anderson and Philippe Remarque speak with Christian Röpke, Chief Operating Officer of the Zeit Verlagsgruppe. Röpke is one of the architects behind the digital success of Die Zeit. The bookish, intellectual weekly from Hamburg has become one of Germany's digital frontrunners, with some 320,000 fully paying digital subscribers on top of 180,000 for print.

Röpke started his career in the music industry just as Napster turned it upside down. After 18 years at Zeit, including time as CEO of Zeit Online and as chief digital and product officer, he now oversees product, technology and data for the whole group. Much of the success, he says, came from experimenting, from owners who allowed long-term investment. And from luck.

In the podcast, Röpke explains why Die Zeit chose to sell podcast subscriptions through Spotify and Apple, the very platforms other publishers keep at a distance, and how that brought in almost 50,000 mostly new, younger and more female subscribers. He talks about building a dedicated TikTok team that made Die Zeit one of the most-watched German brands on the platform, the early experiments on Reddit, and the AI-powered NSDAP membership database that sent trial subscriptions to record levels. Finally, he looks at what AI means for the business model, and why readers may accept articles written by AI but won't pay for them.

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Hosts

Lars Anderson en Philippe Remarque

Over de makers

Lars Anderson is Manager Innovation at DPG Media. As a journalist, he has written for news outlets such asVrij Nederland, Het Parool, de Volkskrant, and the travel magazine Columbus Travel. He is also the co-founder of Fosfor Longreads, an innovative journalistic platform for long-form digital storytelling.

Philippe Remarque is acting editor-in-chief for the Dutch newspaper AD. He was previously the editor-in-chief of de Volkskrant, a political reporter, and a correspondent in Russia, Germany, and the United States.

Artwork

Lucas van Esch

Fotografie

Malou van Breevoort

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