Danes soaked in information

Last week (33, 2009) was outstanding for Danish financial sites. The financial sites of Danish printed newspapers Børsen, Berlingske and – particularly – Jyllandsposten experienced a substantial lift in user activity. Users visited the financial site of Jyllandsposten, epn.dk, a total of 1 millon and 57 thousand times – an increase on more than 30 percent vis-a-vis the previous week, while the number of visits on Borsen.dk og Business.dk increased by 13 og 16 percent respectively – approximately double the growthrate of the average Danish website in this first week after cessation of schools summer vacation.

Not only did the three sites rush into the race after the somewhat more quiet summermonths. They also turned out figures well ahead of pre-vacation figures.

Find the data, methodology and background in “Digital view: Life on the Danish internet august 10-16 2009″, which I’ve just published.

Comedian Finn Nørbygaard made the difference
Massive problems for Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) and the closing of the last major Danish Shipyard, Lindø, was among the financial news which broke last week. But the instant succes of the sites wasn’t caused by neither of these two stories, according to the editors of Jyllandsposten og Børsen. Two other stories made the real difference: the charging of golf star Søren Hansen with tax evasion, after claiming a false adress in Monaco and – particularly – the confessions by Danish comedian and former millionaire Finn Nørbygaard, that he’s now personally bankrupt following his involvement in the IT Factory’s scam. High involvement stories in the crossing of hard finance news and pure gossip.

The Finn Nørbygaard-story emerged from an interview on DR P4 “Cafe Hack”-radio program wednesday morning and was soon picked up by epn.dk resulting in epn.dk breaking the curves and making its way to the very top of the FDIM realtime traffic-charts for a few hours, untill the story eventually was spread to other Danish media.

Danes soaked in information
The instant succes of epn.dk after taking up the Finn Nørbygaard-story points not only to the importance of news-journalists acting fast in a world of free-flowing information. The success also bares witness to how Danes’ relationship to information has changed as the internet has gotten hold of Danish society: Ordinary Danes are themselves in charge of their news-consumption, actively seeking the information they want, when they want it.

The sudden huge influx of users to the epn.dk site is this way mirrors a society in which people have gotten so acquainted to the notion of information being right at their fingertips, they’re able instinctively to find their ways to the news, when or where they break, if the news are deemed important enough. When your’re used to being soaked in information, you learn yourself actively to navigate it. And you can find and access information so swift, you can do it in business hours without interfering negatively with your regular business tasks.