Social media is fundamentally changing. Algorithms focusing on our interests will make us more passive, and influencers are in for a challenge.

We have now entered the third era of social media algorithms. This new development has major implications for some of the tech world’s leading players and for our personal well-being, and is one of the trends that will affect us most in the coming years.

Time is money

The first era of algorithms was simple by today’s standards. We as users decided for ourselves what interested us and which accounts we would follow. Then posts from those accounts began appearing in our feeds in chronological order.

During the second era they were shuffled up so that posts from accounts we already followed were mixed with posts our friends commented on and with accounts that resembled the ones we already followed.

Now we have entered the third era, where we don’t even need to tell social media what we’re interested in. It doesn’t matter which accounts we follow. Recommendation algorithms are now becoming so accurate that they always give us what we want without us having to actively tell them what that is.

Just like before, it’s all about consuming as much user time as possible. Time is money or, to put it more precisely, the more companies can hold our attention, the more advertising they can sell. They earn more money – and therefore more value – for their shareholders.

This era also goes to show that we ourselves don’t know what we want. The companies can figure that out for themselves and then get us to spend our valuable time on them.

The principle isn’t new, but the amount of money being invested in developing it is. And it’s TikTok that’s leading the way. Its parent company Bytedance spent SEK 163 billion on research and development in 2021 alone. Developing a market-leading algorithm is expensive.

Algorithm development is also transforming how we use social media. Previously, users would interact with friends and acquaintances and share their everyday life with them through photos and status updates. The apps served as extensions of our social lives.

Now the focus has been shifted to entertainment. Here, too, TikTok is the one driving the change and is sitting in the driver’s seat. On its platform, it’s not who you follow that determines what content you view, but rather the type of content you like. The social function has been peeled away. And its competitors are following suit.

Video is the new gold

For the social media giants, video is the new gold. Instagram and Facebook are fighting to get Reels, their TikTok clone, to take off. YouTube is investing heavily in the very similar Shorts format. It’s about reversing a trend where, for example, Instagram and Facebook owner Meta is seeing its first ever decline in user growth and revenues.

This trend is also redrawing the map for influencers who enjoyed huge success and earned large amounts of money on those platforms. For many years now they could sit back and enjoy growing audiences and engagement, which guarantees collaborating advertisers a certain amount of exposure. But what happens when followers cease to be so important?

The fact that TikTok’s algorithm is based on interest rather than audience size means that anyone can go viral. This summer Instagram tried to roll out similar changes in its algorithm but faced fierce pushback from the most established influencers, from Kim Kardashian to Swedish Rebecca Stella. In SvD, one influencer described the new reality on the platform as “Russian roulette”.

Instagram had to admit they were wrong and withdrew it, but it’s probably only a matter of time before the new algorithm returns. Instagram simply can’t afford not to keep up with users’ changing behaviour, and has declared Reels as the future for the platform.

Influencers need to start over

For many of the leading influencers around the world, this means they will have to start over, learning new tricks and understanding user behaviour on a new platform. Those who built careers on generating engagement by posting nice pictures will suddenly have to learn how to make videos and create a different type of content. Not everyone will survive the transition,

And perhaps that’s the natural process of succession; after all, it’s normal in most industries for new skills to emerge and for old ones to die out, and for companies to change their strategies.

So how are the platforms’ new, advanced recommendation algorithms affecting us users? We’re becoming less active and more passive. We’re using the platforms less and less for keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances. And instead we passively scroll through infinite feeds over which we have no control. One aspect of it is how it makes us feel.

Research on psychological well-being and social media use is still in its infancy, and it’s very difficult to say anything about cause and effect, but there are some indications – and they’re pointing in the same direction. A study conducted in the United States found that individuals who passively consume social media content run a 33% higher risk of developing symptoms of depression, while the same risk for active users is 15%. A study conducted in Iceland on more than 10,000 adolescents found that passive consumption correlated negatively with anxiety and symptoms of depression. The same correlation was not found in active users, even after controlling for other factors.

As already mentioned, the relationship between cause and effect is not easy to establish, but we can be pretty certain that development of the algorithms has more to do with enriching the social media giants’ shareholders than it has with making life better for us users.

Could AI make us care about the climate? Or will it just bring a flood of auto-generated disinformation? It’s Victor Galaz’s job to find out.

Next year, Routledge will publish Victor Galaz’s book Dark Machines, an essay on the impact of artificial intelligence in a future of climate change. As deputy director and associate professor at Stockholm Resilience Center (and a writer for Svenska Dagbladet), he spends a lot of time pondering resilience and sustainability. Over Zoom, from his home in Stockholm, he explains what makes for a resilient society.

“It’s a society with the capacity to predict, adapt to and recover from shocks. In that process, it also innovates and renews itself. For instance, the war in Ukraine and the pandemic pose huge challenges for global food systems, energy systems and so on. However, we shouldn’t strive to get back to normal from this point, because we need to change these things anyway. Our societies need to evolve.”

How resilient is our society?

“Different societies have different levels of resilience. A country with weak public institutions and little money is always more vulnerable than a country like Sweden. However, one difference between the world today and the world twenty years ago is that we’re much more global and interlinked. A disturbance in one part of the world rapidly spreads to other parts.”

Do we have the resilience needed for future challenges?

“We can never take that for granted. Climate change and loss of biological diversity pose massive challenges. Over time, our drive to optimise and maximise has created huge values for a lot of people. But we have never lived in a time of climate change like this one, and we simply don’t know yet if we can handle it.”

In his upcoming book, Victor Galaz explores how AI is cause for both hope and concern among climate scientists. He talks of a “silent tsunami” of AI seeping into
all aspects of our society – more or less unnoticed.

Is AI a threat in itself or is it a matter of who controls it?

“Technologies are not neutral. Some AI systems are explicitly designed to harm us, for instance through surveillance and discrimination of ethnic minorities. That said, it is a matter of control and of fair distribution of the enormous gains these new technologies bring.”

Regulating new technologies is a notoriously tough task. As the British academic and writer David Collingridge once pointed out: “When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult and time consuming.”

The challenge, then, is foreseeing the future. If we fail, AI will bring unintended and unwanted consequences, according to Victor Galaz.

”There are some direct climate effects of AI, such as energy costs, social costs and environmental impacts. We are coming to terms with these. But then there are indirect, long-term effects that are even bigger, and much harder to manage. Take digitalisation of agriculture, for instance. As we use technologies to optimise and maximise food production, we get enormous monocultures, as these are the most efficient, and we see the end of small-scale farming, loss of local job opportunities and more vulnerable ecosystems. And these are just some examples. Another is mass-scale climate disinformation through social media bots.”

If we do solve the problem of control, how can AI contribute to a resilient society?

“In two ways. Firstly, it will give us a better understanding of how our planet is changing, and how dependent we are on it. Secondly, it could help expand our empathy with other people and even with other species. Just as algorithms can exploit negative emotions to drive engagement in social media, they can encourage empathy and connection.”

“These and other emotions are important to bring about change. Just look at the mass appeal of Greta Thunberg. She is sad. She is disappointed. She is angry. These emotions make people care.”

The way we travel is changing. During the pandemic the few opportunities left for travel were local and in nature, away from crowds. With tourism now back in full swing, the industry is signalling that this trend is here to stay. And Norwegian start-up Campanyon is at the forefront of it.

With over 10,000 bookable stays across more than 20 countries, the online booking platform Campanyon has already established itself as the leading platform for outdoor stays across the Nordics – only a year after launch. It’s now aiming to strengthen its position across Europe.

Talk to any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that timing is critical in terms of both when to launch and to succeed with a new business. The same held true for Kristian Qwist Adolphsen and Alexander Raknes, the two founders of Campanyon, when they decided to explore Campanyon as a new business idea in spring 2020.

A passion for sports and the outdoors

The two originally met while studying at Copenhagen Business School, where they quickly became friends due to their shared passion for entrepreneurship, sports and the outdoors.They ended up working together at the digital marketing agency Precis Digital, and eventually, they both joined Google. It was there that the first ideas around Campanyon were formed.

After being sent home from the Google offices shortly after the Covid pandemic hit, the pair spotted some new and interesting trends emerging across various industries, as a direct result of the lockdown. One of the trends that captured their attention was the increasing appetite for being in nature, as people were longing to escape isolation but were banned from travelling abroad. This resulted in new records for nature-focused and camping-related search terms and overnight stays.

Alexander and Kristian decided to do more research on this budding market and quickly realised it was extremely difficult to both find and book places in nature in a seamless way, mainly due to it being a very fragmented market consisting of small platforms with limited supply. At the same time, they couldn’t find any platform in the Nordics that attempted to unlock unused private land for campers to book and stay.

“It was very clear from early on that the market and appetite for local, authentic, and nature-focused stays was growing. At the same time, there were very few established players offering user-friendly solutions – which we found interesting,” Kristian says.

Being an avid skier, surfer and mountaineer, Alexander could relate to the trend they were observing.

“I, too, had been longing for cheaper and more sustainable options to spend the night in nature, get local tips and meet like-minded people.”

Teamed up with former colleagues

Those insights led to the early-start of Campanyon, which began during late spring of 2020. A few months later, the two teamed up with former colleagues Aline Nieuwlaat, Sven Röder and Werner Huber, who all are very experienced with product engineering and UX design, and they quickly became Campanyon’s co-founders, too.

Aline was just wrapping up her work on a food app when Alex called her to let her know about the idea for Campanyon, something that immediately resonated with Aline.

“I’m a passionate camper so when Alex called, I was instantly committed to join the journey! Just before that I saw an ad from another player in the market and thought to myself how smart the idea was to offer private land to campers.”

Funnily enough, the five co-founders are based in five different countries. The first time they met in person after they started working on Campanyon was in December 2021 – the day they signed the deal with Schibsted Ventures in Oslo and around one-and-a-half years after they began working together on Campanyon.

Being born out of Covid and having a fully remote setup from day one, the team knew this would come with both opportunities and challenges. They have been fortunate to learn from leading companies, such as Google, on how to approach and adapt to working remotely and they have introduced some of the things that worked well directly into Campanyon, while skipping the things that weren’t quite as efficient.

In the early days, it was clear that too many initiatives were being launched all at once, to make everyone in the organisation comfortable with the new setting of working remotely. This meant almost daily check-in meetings, coffee huddles, shared lunch breaks and other attempts at creating a shared working experience – which to some extent had the opposite effect.

The tech team is the perfect example of Campanyon’s effective teamwork.  For Sven, hiring and scaling has been a fantastic challenge and opportunity as the CTO. His team consists of a healthy mix of employees and freelancers from all over Europe.

“We have some incredible talent on board that is motivated to work in an ‘always on’ start-up environment. Open communication and cloud tools that support our development flow allow for rapid iterations of UI/UX and continuous updates of our services.”

Crucial to have local people on the ground

Campanyon has people working from nine different countries now, and nowhere is that more palpable than in the sales team. Kristian sees it as crucial to their success.

“Having local people on the ground across our key markets has been instrumental in growing both supply and demand. The local presence gives us the opportunity to establish relationships with key stakeholders and offer customer service at a different level, something that is particularly important in the Southern European markets we operate in.”

Campanyon got off to a great start since its launch in 2021. Or as Kristian puts it, they’ve been extremely busy growing since the launch.
“Since we launched the platform last year in April, we have grown from around 100 host listings in Denmark and Norway to more than 3,000 host listings across more than 20 markets.”

Alexander, who embodies the companionship that is core to the company’s ethos, visits many of the newly onboarded hosts to get feedback and foster a sense of community.

“I’ve already met a lot of campers and great hosts in unique places, and all of whom have stories that I want more people to hear.”
Campanyon experienced a huge appetite for joining the platform early on and they have used various channels to create awareness and grow the number of hosts in efficient ways.

“We have also seen a large number of organic signups from hosts in locations we don’t actively target, which is really funny and also inspiring, as we see the project resonates across so many different countries and cultures,” Kristian says.

Going forward, the focus for Cam­panyon will remain on growing in key markets in Europe to further establish their position as the leading platform for stays in nature, while continuing to enhance the user experience to become “campers’ best friend”.

While companies around the world are engaged in an intensifying battle for users’ screen time, the rise of audio might be the next frontier in winning user attention.

Fuelled by wireless headset adoption and an ever-growing selection of content made for listening, the audio trend represents a major opportunity for any company that aims to be relevant during all those moments that users are away from their screens.

Although we cannot accurately predict how much total screen time (and news publishers’ share of it) will grow in the coming years, we clearly see that time spent on audio is growing rapidly. Around the world, more and more people listen regularly, and each person listens for a longer period of time.

In Norway, the share of users listening to podcasts per month has nearly doubled, from 24% in 2017 to 43% in 2020, with Norwegian-language podcasts leading the charge. Users aged 16 to 24 show the highest adoption rates, with listeners in this group averaging nearly two hours per day on podcasts or audiobooks. Among Swedish users in general, average time spent on podcasts and radio daily already matches that of digital news consumption.

Different from radio

While audio as a product is nothing new per se, there are many ways in which the current move to audio is different from traditional broadcast radio:

• It is fuelled partially by hardware adoption, led by AirPods’ exponential growth, having captured more than one-third of the wireless earbuds market. And several other wearable devices have also seen double-digit sales growth over the last few years. A 2022 report estimates that three in four US teens now own AirPods. The convenience of these new devices means people now wear headphones more often and in situations they previously wouldn’t – even while talking to their friends!
• Our mobile devices are always connected, enabling users to listen to any topic, any time, while doing other things. The ability to multitask is, as one would expect, one of the main reasons users turn to audio in their busy lives.
• Lastly, the sheer volume of content is growing rapidly, with an entire publishing industry transitioning to audio books, and all-time-high investments from tech- and media companies going into the podcast industry.

As users move to airpods for consuming content, we also see that several audio-first start-ups have emerged over the past few years. In addition, industry experts talk about wearable audio as the first mass market adoption of augmented reality devices. For many young users, audio is their primary channel for news. Clearly, publishers who want to stay relevant must find their place in the audio domain.

For news organisations, understanding the opportunity that comes with audio starts with acknowledging how the newspaper landscape has changed. We’ve gone from a world of physically distributed newspapers, where there was little competition and a general scarcity of information, to a world of unlimited digital distribution and global competition for attention. In this world, news organisations are not just competing against each other, but rather against any company distributing their product on a screen. Those other companies include technology giants with massive budgets and a world-class ability to get users addicted to their products.

News attracts users attention

We know that tech and streaming giants dominate users’ visual attention, and it seems unlikely that news publishers will turn the tide on that anytime soon. But in the audio world, news as a category gets an outsized share of users’ attention, accounting for 30% of top podcast episodes despite comprising only 7% of podcasts.

However, increasing audio content production for news organisations does not come without its challenges:

• The cost for voice actors and studio time remains high
• Recording and editing takes several times that of actual audio output
• There’s a risk of spending significant resources on content of low interest

The nature of news as perishable limits the types of content that can be produced without becoming outdated as stories evolve. Today, publishers mostly accept the fact that investments in the audio domain are expensive, and that it will be worth the effort in the long run. But there are also ways that technology can enable production of more audio in smarter ways.

Firstly, the need for studios may soon disappear, as cheaper and more mobile recording setups hit the market. Companies like Nomono (which Schibsted recently invested in) are challenging the existing workflow as well as the costs associated with high-quality podcast production.

Secondly, for narrated articles, we might soon get rid of the need for both studios and narrators entirely as text-to-speech technology matures. A synthetic voice that can read any text input out loud offers some unique advantages. It allows for unlimited production of narrated articles with near zero marginal cost, as it converts a written text into audio within seconds. Since it is connected to the publisher’s CMS, it also enables flexibility to update and edit published stories, without ever needing to step into a studio. The fact that it can be scaled across the entire daily article output of a newspaper also means that users can rely on the feature to listen to any article they prefer and do so while commuting or cooking at home. Since many users cancel their subscriptions because they simply don’t have enough time to sit down and read all the articles they pay for every day, solving this “bad conscience-problem” for subscribers might be a key factor in reducing the churn rates most newspapers are seeing.

Listeners complete more of a  story

Early results from text-to-speech experiments in Aftenposten show that the gap between human and synthetic voices is closing in terms of listener retention, and that users opting for audio consumption complete more of each story compared to text. Plans for enabling users to save stories for later listening, as well as the ability to queue synthetically narrated articles after premium flagship podcasts, may all lead to more widespread adoption of audio as a mode of news consumption. The result might be a significant increase in the total time users spend engaging with Aftenposten’s journalism each day – read more about it on the next page.

Looking back at the battle for users’ screen time, as described earlier, could it be that by focusing on users’ eyeballs, we miss an emerging behaviour change that may one day account for most of our time? The next frontier in winning user attention might in fact be about sonic attention, and those who make the right investments now may be on a course to become the giants of the audio world.

Why limit the audio presentation of journalism to podcasts? Aftenposten’s cloned voice will be able to present all the newspaper’s content – and by doing so, give everyone access to the same information.

Today a large part of society is left out when it comes to consuming journalism. It is, in fact, a democratic problem that media prevents people from getting information about society because much content is only accessible as text. This is also a big risk for news companies, as they may be missing out on a market opportunity by not offering an audio alternative to the huge amount of written journalism produced every day.

According to Dysleksi Norge, between 5 and 10% of all Norwegians suffer from dyslexia. This means that as many as 270,000 to 540,000 children and adults in Norway are reluctant to consume written journalism. This is not the only group who have challenges with reading. People with attention deficit disorder concentrate better when listening instead of reading. Refugees and asylum seekers who are in the process of learning Norwegian also find it very helpful to be able to listen and read Norwegian simultaneously.

Students struggle to read

When Aftenposten started looking into this, we primarily had our newspaper for kids in mind – Aftenposten Junior skole. Since this is a news product for use in public schools, we are obligated to fulfil all accessibility requirements.

We learned from teachers that 92% of them have students who struggle to read in their classroom, and we were even told that schools were not interested in buying our product if we could not offer text-to-speech.

Two important observations and findings from our research also convinced us that adults in the future will have needs quite similar to today’s users of Aftenposten Junior skole.

Firstly, we observed that many kids, beyond those who struggle to read, actively chose to listen to the text. And today’s kids and teenagers are potentially future subscribers who tend to bring their media habits from childhood into adulthood. After observing how popular listening is when given the choice between sound and text, we are pretty sure that we need to have a sound alternative ready for them before they grow up.

Secondly, dyslexia and attention deficit are lifelong problems. This means that people who suffer from it will probably still prefer to listen to a long article instead of reading when they grow up, and they will not find our news products worth paying for unless we can offer more than text-based journalism.

A voice you can recognise

Our primary goal was to make an artificial voice with the highest possible quality. That is why we offer a cloned voice and not a purely synthetic voice. A synthetic voice is an artificial voice that is not meant to sound like a specific, real person. A cloned voice, on the other hand, is created in the same way as a synthetic voice but simulates the speech of a real person. That means that if it is a voice that is familiar to you, you will recognise the voice and may even struggle to understand that it is not a real person but rather an artificial cloned voice that’s reading the news for you.

To build an artificial voice we needed speech data. Speech data in this context is recorded sentences from our newspapers. Using our past articles, our collaborator, BeyondWords, extracted 6,812 phonetically rich utterances. These sentences were recorded by Anne Lindholm, a podcast host in Aftenposten, who is now also the voice behind our cloned voice.

After processing the speech data and training a neural network, the first version of the voice was ready – and it was impressive. Anne herself could not believe how similar it had become to her own voice. Still, as with all other AI-features, we needed to train it to improve it. By training we mean that a person listened to a huge amount of sound files that were converted from articles and reported mistakes.

A linguist from the company that developed the voice technology then made corrections to the phonemic dictionary that served as the foundation for the quality of the cloned voice.  When a mistake is corrected in this way, the correction will affect all future articles in which the same words occur. Over the last few months, the voice improved a lot and we are soon ready to scale up so that you can hear the voice on many more Aftenposten articles.

Many benefits with a robot

When it comes to the quality of the voice, a real voice still beats the robotic one. But we have done A/B tests between the real voice and the artificial voice, and the results indicate that the quality difference is not very high and that the benefits with a robot voice outweigh the disadvantages.

One of the benefits has to do with the nature of digital presentation of news. When a dramatic incident first occurs, like the start of the war in Ukraine, the news gets updated from minute to minute, and it is impossible for a real person to compete with the speed of updating audio files with the cloned voice.  Not to mention the cost of having a real person doing multiple recordings of an updated article, as well as the time saved for the journalists, who can instead focus on the next news article.

Artificial intelligence and our cloned voice have the potential to be revolutionary and make a hugely positive impact for large groups in our society who now can access journalism they could never access before.

This is why we believe that offering a robot voice based on artificial intelligence is an important bet on the future of journalism. It shows that new technology can contribute to a more open and inclusive society where everyone has access to the same information.