Want 250k€ to develop your media company?
Last night Helsingin Sanomat Foundation held an event where they launched Uutisraivaaja, a competition where participants can win up to 250 000 euros to develop their killer media product, with a few "ifs" on the side. While the event was held completely in Finnish leaving English speaking out of the equation at his point, the fantastic part of all this is that the competition is open to everyone, be it companies, individual people or non-Finnish citizens for that matter. Creating an innovative media product isn't easy. Helsingin Sanomat Foundation is obviously looking to speed up innovation in this sector and I applaud them for it.
However, there are a few terms to the deal that I didn't like too much. While the 250 000 euros is up for grabs, the criteria to win it are partly debatable. There are basically three criteria participants must meet: 1) the idea should be groundbreaking, 2) the idea must first be tested in Finland on a national level or a local level and 3) (the part I don't like too much) if digital technology is used, it should be open source in such a way that anyone is able to use it afterwards.
Is There An Online Future For Old Media?
The two big Finnish “old media” companies, Sanoma and Alma Media, published their 2009 results yesterday and today, respectively. However, as seems to be the common policy, neither of them was too open about the state of their online business. But luckily Alma still offered some nuggets of information for constructing a picture of what’s going on.
The two online legs of an old media company are typically classifieds and editorially driven news sites. Alma’s classifieds segment, which includes such assets as the housing site Etuovi.com and jobs site Monster.fi, posted a loss of €0.7m with an €27m revenue. Sanoma doesn’t give out any information on its online classifieds.
On the online news side, Alma publishes Iltalehti.fi, the biggest website in Finland by unique visitors. Although the full year figures for the asset were not disclosed today, the Q1/09 report from April states a revenue of €1.2m, so the annual income is likely to be around the €5m mark. Given that Iltalehti.fi relies mainly on journalistic content, the site is – after full allocation of editorial costs – most likely loss-making or, if they’re lucky, posting a very small profit.
