How has SME changed since you joined in 2007? 

The online business has changed a lot. Initially, we used to do only news reporting, but as our traffic kept growing, we have been experimenting with different ways to monetize our audience. SME now reaches 50-60% of the Slovak online population. 

What business models have you tried? 

We run two popular portals, restauracie.sk, the largest database of restaurants and daily menus in Slovakia, and dovolenky.sme.sk, a travel agency that arranges tours from dozens of Slovak and foreign agencies. For 10 years, we ran a property portal until we sold it to a competitor. We also ran a discount portal aggregator for a long time but we shut it down last year because it was starting to go down. We also used to deliver pizza for six years and then sold it. 

It sounds like you've tried things across many industries! This reminds me of a book I’m reading right now called Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. It looks like SME is good at determining when to stick to something and when to quit. 

Yes, it’s an important life skill. If we want to be profitable, we have to do things that make money. We've shut down 15 mini-projects that didn't make sense from a financial point of view. If it were up to me, I would drop some more, but we’re still keeping them because they have a social impact. For example, the project knihy.sme.sk, which scans old books into digital form. 

Over the past two decades, the media landscape has changed tremendously. SME focuses both on print and digital. Is print still a profitable business? 

It is, but it has no future because it's in decline. 90% of people who subscribe to print are retired. That’s why we focus so much on the online site. In 2011, we were among the first publishers in the world to offer digital subscriptions. Until then, the online part of the business lived on advertising alone. Now digital subscriptions make one third of the revenue, and the remaining two thirds come from advertising.

In 2011, we were among the first publishers in the world to offer digital subscriptions.

Since 2011, SME.sk has collected more than 60,000 subscribers. Is the number still growing?

No, our subscriber numbers have stopped growing. They’ve been stagnating for two years. We had 62,000, but we currently have 58,000 subscribers. 

Why is that? Is the market saturated?

From what we're seeing in Slovakia, it looks like the market is saturated. We have seen an increase in sales due to higher prices and a different product structure, but the number of customers is not growing. There is a lot of political fatigue in Slovakia, so frustration is contributing to this. People are switching off. 

That makes it even more important to stay on top of things, maintain a strong brand and keep subscribers engaged. How can technology support this goal? Which tools do you use for managing subscriptions and what key features do you look for when choosing technology?

We decided to use a system called REMP because we needed an all-in-one solution for managing our subscription system, which would be highly adaptive to our needs. REMP offers a detailed management of subscription products and evidence of accounting and it also helps us manage our internal marketing campaigns on our websites, including email marketing. It allows us to automate many processes, which our employees would otherwise have to do manually.