Digitalisation has changed how we communicate with one another, how we search for information, how we use media and, not least, how media are financed. This report focuses on media financing, specifically the portion of financing that comes from advertisers. Global companies such as Google and Facebook are increasingly chal¬lenging domestic media companies’ position in their national advertising markets. The growing influence of foreign advertising platforms is an expression of a more far-reaching transformation that encompasses both audience and advertisers and is being propelled by technological developments in the media area.

This book presents an analysis of how the digitalisation of the advertising market has impacted the business model of Nordic news media companies. As the competition for the advertising investments has been increasing, many media companies have been forced to see their ad revenues decline, in some cases dramatically. Is the financing model that has supported Nordic commercial news jour¬nalism for at least 150 years breaking up? Or are there differences between the Nordic countries that mean the situation is different in different places and in different media?

Ad Wars builds on a rich empirical dataset from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, which includes both industry statistics and interviews with a large number of actors on and around the Nordic advertising markets. The study has been commissioned and financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. The data collection and the analysis have been conducted by Jonas Ohlsson and Ulrika Facht at Nordicom.