Yerevan Web Meetings: The story of success of Delfi leading Lithuanian portal presented

Yerevan/Mediamax/. The fourth master class within Yerevan Web Meetings project implemented by Mediamax was conducted by Aiste Zilinskiene, Communication Director of Delfi.lt, Lithuania’s leading information portal, on November 5.

Delfi portal has been operating in Lithuania since 2000. In 1999, Delfi was launched in Estonia (www.delfi.ee) and Latvia (www.delfi.lv) and the Ukrainian version of the site (www.delfi.ua) has been operating since 2009. All Delfi portals are owned by Estonian Ekspress Group.

In Lithuania, comparable to Armenia by its population, internet penetration reaches up to 65%.

There is rather a high competition among news portals in the country - 9 universal and a number of specialized news portals are operating and Delfi is the absolute leader among them by 300 thousand unique visits a day. Delfi.lt average visitor spends about 24 minutes a day on the portal.

Aiste Zilinskiene said that Delfi.lt generates about the half of content by itself owing to 50 staff correspondents and editors (the portal overall employs 80 people) and freelancers and visitors.

The portal publishes about 400 news on a daily basis and 20 of them are written by visitors. These reports undergo obligatory checking by Delfi editorial staff.

Readers’ comments are the visit card of the portal - they make over 10 thousand a day on average. Online conferences with participation of famous politicians, economists, stars of show business and experts of various spheres are another Delfi.lt “brand”. Delfi.lt holds online conferences from 1 up to 4 times a week. Politicians, sportsmen and famous figures of culture also have their columns and blogs on the portal which are very popular.

Delfi.lt is constantly developing: it implements partner programs with TV companies, launches new specialized portals and develops the mobile version of the portal. Average volume of investments in a new internet project makes about EUR 80 thousand.

Aiste Zilinskiene said that the portal doesn’t have a direct advertisement on TV but it attracts TV audience by integrating into various TV shows which viewers can “save” this or that participant of the TV-show from sending away through voting on the portal.

The portal also benefits from the fact that it is read by Lithuanians living outside Lithuania as well. “About 1mln of our compatriots live and work in the U.S., England, Ireland and Spain and our portal is the main information source of the events going on in the motherland for many of them”, said Aiste Zilinskiene.

Advertisement banners ensure 95% of the income of Delfi.lt.

Yerevan Web Meetings project aims at introducing the best foreign practice of building and promoting web content in Armenia. The project is implemented by Mediamax owing to general sponsorship of VivaCell-MTS, Armenia’s leading mobile operator.

The last master class within the project will be conducted by Facebook Representative in Russia and CIS countries Ekaterina Skorobogatova on November 12.