As Romania Insider celebrates ten years in 2020, co-founder Volker Moser shares some insights into how our media works: the positioning of an online newspaper, its stakeholders and how Romania Insider balances between them, while helping brands reach out to a powerful niche readership.

In a recent text, my business partner described our decision to launch community memberships for our readers. In this new article, I will share some insights into online media and how we work with brands and companies from all over the world, on a niche media business that serves millions of decision makers.

The online news business is a complex one. There are several stakeholders that need to see the added value of working with an online newspaper business.

1. For a reader (technically sometimes called a user), the content needs to be unique and informative, and its presentation should also be up to certain standards. It needs to be shown in different formats: inside an app like ours (IOS and ANDROID), inside newsletters, or any other format, like classifieds.

In our case, we offer business insights - market reports on different industries in CEE, exclusive press review services for corporates and within a membership model, executive learning and networking events, and premium content for our Romania Insider community members.

2. For a brand that needs to “get out there” to its potential customers, the type of readers and the number of such specific types need to clear. Companies want to be able to target different reader groups with a clear advertising target for their brand.

3. Somewhere in between these two types of stakeholders, there are the search engines like Google, multiplicators like news aggregators and Social Media Platforms.

The description above reflects the main stakeholders in a very simple way. The reality is more detailed, and more complicated (especially the role of social media platforms and search engines), but I will spare you the details in this article.

We at Romania Insider have always focused first on our readers. Independent, objective and reliable content, quoting sources, following the ethical rules of journalism. Retrospectively, the key to us delivering more texts to more readers than ever today is that we stuck to this principle since our launch in May 2010.

It has helped us build a unique audience of readers and to grow it significantly since 2010, with little to no investment in content marketing.

The second type of stakeholders are the ones which have been helping us support our independent media for years, and receiving in return visibility in Romania and abroad, from our niche yet powerful audience. Romania Insider may not have the highest traffic online newspapers in Romania (although it clearly outranks some big, old names), but is by far the most read English language content source dedicated to Romania.

As we’ve been focusing for 10 years so much on our content and our readers, we have a super premium readership (spread across the globe as you can see in the chart below). Just to name a few: 

• We reach the top business decision makers in Romania (23 % are top managers, and 21 % are investors, and 45 percent of our readers have a university degree);
• We reach the headquarters of multinationals dealing with Romania and the CEE region;
• We reach diplomats and investors from all over the world that are interested in Romania; they read us either from Romania when they travel here, or from their home base, wherever in the world it may be;
• We reach foreign journalists from large international publication.

What usually also helps the companies we work with is the fact that we are locally extremely well connected and happy to help our corporate clients with our local network suggestions as well.

Objective info on our site-traffic can be seen on the BRAT Romania website, which provides an independent audit service in Romania.

The companies that want to make the local top notch people and business influencers aware of their brand, work with Romania Insider. Our ratecard can be viewed here.

I always look forward to helping these companies achieve success, and our entire team does: from offering advice on campaigns, to tailoring according to needs, coming up with innovative solutions.

Volker Moser

Co-founder & Partner, Romania-Insider.com