Axel Springer executives talk about digital transformation, learning from Silicon Valley, international plans, investments in Business Insider, Airbnb, more
An Old-Media Empire, Axel Springer Reboots for the Digital Age — BERLIN — When Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer … Tweets: @dvg , @rafat and @nytimesbusiness . See also Mediagazer Tweets: Dirk von Gehlen / @dvg : “Digital activities now generate more than 60 percent of Axel Springer's revenues” NYT über Springer http://www.nytimes.com/... (via alle) Rafat Ali / @rafat : Are analysts quotes useless fillers in stories? Yes, always. This is a ridiculous quote. http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/... @nytimesbusiness : Inspired by Silicon Valley, a German old-media giant invests in digital and English-speaking readers. http://www.nytimes.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2015, CEO Mathias Döpfner was recasting Axel Springer from a German print empire into a Silicon Valley-styled digital group — digital activities already generated more than 60 percent of revenues, funded by stakes like its investment in Business Insider and a position in Airbnb, with international expansion aimed at English-speaking markets. The strategy reads differently eight years on: the publisher's archives and titles became bargaining chips in the multiyear OpenAI deal that now pays for ChatGPT summaries and model training on Politico and Business Insider.
First-order effects
- Business Insider becomes Springer's US beachhead — capital plus a digital playbook aimed at English-speaking readers, exactly the market Döpfner said he was targeting.
- The Airbnb stake pulls the company beyond publishing into platform-economy bets, diversifying revenue away from classifieds and print advertising.
Second-order effects
- German rivals were forced to answer with scale rather than imitation: by 2019 Axel Springer joined Funke Mediengruppe, RTL, and Gruner+Jahr in pooling ad inventory to counter Big Tech's grip on the market.
- The New York Times ran its own parallel reinvention — luring subscribers through Beta Group's vertical apps, chatbots, live video, and VR (inside NYT's digital transformation) — validating that Döpfner's Silicon Valley borrowing was an industry-wide template, not a one-off.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the endgame of this transformation is licensing: content shifts from something sold to readers or advertisers into [[a:/concepts#content-as-inference-input|inference input]] that AI companies pay for, turning decades of archives into a recurring revenue line.
- Publishers who completed the digital pivot earliest hold the strongest hand in negotiating with AI platforms; late movers risk their archives being trained on without equivalent leverage.
The trend: Legacy publishers are completing a two-stage conversion — from print to digital portfolios, then from digital audiences to paid data partners for AI platforms.