Providing high value-added expertise

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Founded in May 2019, the Swiss start-up Heidi.news managed to establish its expertise during the Covid-19 crisis and establish its audience. From January to April 2020, the site grew from 65,000 to 985,000 unique visitors. Traffic stabilized at 35,000 unique visitors after the lockdown period – 5 times more than at the beginning of the year. Subscriptions doubled from 2,500 to 5,000. Paul Ackermann , editor-in-chief, discussed the reasons for this success at the News Impact Summit Online 2020.

From its launch, Heidi.news has focused on information instagram database processing by "ultra-specialists". One of the keys to success during the crisis was the media's ability to offer forward-looking articles with high added value that create events and provide expert answers to the general public's questions.

"These articles often started with a "why" or "how" in the title and were illustrated with a graph, essential to help visualize complex subjects. Today, when we look back on some of these articles, they seem obvious, but even before the lockdown, headlines "why we should not hope for a return to normal in the coming months" or "Italy or Sweden, why there is neither a bad student nor a top of the class" when Italy was singled out and Sweden was praised was very surprising and even against the grain," explained Paul Ackermann.

Heidi.news has put this expertise at the service of as many people as possible by sharing some of these papers free of charge, highlighting their necessary nature in the public debate.

A year and a half ago, we started with a specialized site aimed at academics. Today, it is a media that uses university expertise to respond to the general public.