In my recent visit to Vienna, met a lot of interesting people from Norway. My initial impression of Norway's online market was that of a small and passive market with few clones of popular global sites like Facebook, Digg, Craigslist catering to the local audience. But after interacting with my Norwegian friends, I realized not only Norway has a mature online marketplace but have aggressive online players pushing for audience share. Norway also has one of the highest ad spend per user of around US$207.

Comparison with US

norway usa ds3fx 3

The market size both in terms of online users and advertisement of Norway is extremely small in comparison, and one might dismiss it at a single glance. But on analyzing it closely, one can see few brownies embedded here and there.

Strong online presence by newspapers

While in most other countries newspapers take away very little share of total online time spent, Norwegian story is entirely different. Top newspapers sites of Norway like Vg.no, Dagbladet.no , Nettavisen.no, e24.no, Aftenposten.no etc constitutes a huge portion of total online spent by Norwegian users. Norwegian newspapers have been extremely aggressive from pre-Google era in building their online presence. Dagbladet.no and Startsiden have been publishing news online from early 1995 and 1996 respectively.

Norway also has the highest newspaper readership in the world and most of its top online media properties are owned by big media players like Schibsted, Eddy Media etc giving them ample space to push content to their existing offline readers.

Top online sites in Norway

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VG Nett

Online site charges around $30,000 for a day long banner on its homepage - which is more than a full-page color ad in its printed paper.

E24

Launched in mid 2006, the site started making serious money within few weeks. Today it makes more than $5million from only banner sales.

Finn.no

Popular Norwegian classified portal generates as much as 30-35% of revenue that its parent company Schibsted does from its offline channel, but profit margin is around 65% high.

Design

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One unique aspect of most of the sites in Norway is their use of big pictures, bold headlines and long pages. In average it will take 7-10 scroll to reach bottom of the page. Mobile sites are also very functional, maybe because Norway is the birth place of Nokia.

Counterparts of popular global sites in Norwegian

1. Facebook, Myspace

Nettby, founded in late 2006 is the second largest Internet-based community in Norway (after Facebook) with more than 1 million users and profiles.

2. Digg

MSN Reporter was launched only in three markets, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. MSN Reporter more or less works like Digg where news gets promoted to the frontpage via 'Diggs'. On MSN Reporter you have to "Kick" or "Dump" an article. But, unlike Digg, you do not need to be registered with MSN Reporter to start voting.

3. Yahoo

There are numerous portal trying the Yahoo act, but the most closest is Startsiden.

4. News aggregator

Overblikk

5. Craigslist

Finn

6. Weather Channel

Yr.no

7. Blogger/Wordpress

blogg.no

Ad Networks

Since most of the large media sites are owned by big media houses, these sites employ their direct market sales team. But few ad networks have been successful for catering to small to medium sites or filling up unsold inventories for big groups. Adpower.no owned by Edda Media, powers over 50 publishers and is a leader in the contextual space (after Google) in Norway. Another company NetAd SA was acquired by Germany's 1&1 Ad Network.

All in all Norway has a small but mature online ad market. For a foreign publisher to establish itself will mean taking away share from already present media sites. Most of the big sites targets a general audience and there is definitely room for niche verticals.