The digital twins take the lead

"Corona may not have triggered a turning point for us, but at least a change in perspective," says Walther Wuttke, Managing Director of Autoren-Union Mobilität, commenting on the results of the latest reach study. "Meltwater", the global service provider for media analysis, found 14,242 articles in 215 media outlets from 31 countries last year, all based on material from the network of freelance specialist journalists.

"Our figures were already impressive in the past," says Wuttke, who has been managing the GmbH since 2021, whose shareholders had already been working together for years in the predecessor medium "Auto-Medienportal.Net". "But Meltwater has now found a new dimension with us." Wuttke emphasizes the shift away from traditional print media and the now conventional internet media towards a completely new user behavior. "In 2023, more than 70 percent of our reach (394.4 million) was generated directly by users via their smartphones and tablets and only 158.7 million or around 30 percent indirectly in the internet or print publications that have adopted our material." Wuttke likes the new situation: "We are in the fortunate position of having been fully involved in the previous communication models right from the start and now also being able to serve queries from mobile devices across the board."

The previous business of Autoren-Union Mobilität was already multi-layered. It starts with a product whose usage is still most similar to that of a printed special interest magazine. Our database identifies 300,000 readers (unique users) for this group every month, who generate seven million page impressions. This is quite an impressive figure for a specialist medium today.

The Union currently offers four specialized online news agencies: the Auto-Medienportal.Net, the e-Medienportal, the English version Car-Editors.News and the content hub Car-Editors.Net. Editors of all types of media regularly, sporadically or occasionally take on texts, photos, videos or parts thereof for their medium. These are the more than 14,000 articles documented by Meltwater last year. In the value scale of the media analysis, the company calculated a net reach of 158.7 million.

Each of our Author Union desktop news outlets also has a mobile twin, which provides all of the news outlets' materials for retrieval via mobile devices. Meltwater is observing rapid growth in this market and has certified that our mobile versions have a total reach of 394.4 million. This is more than 71 percent of the total net reach of 552.7 million.
Guido Reinking, Editor-in-Chief of Autoren-Union since September 2023: "Auto-Medienportal.net and Car-Editors.net and our other portals are now both reliable sources of information for end consumers and news platforms for multipliers. We are therefore a public and specialist medium in one." The increasing reach proves how great the demand for good, unbiased journalism is. "We don't influence our audience, we inform them. Of course we have an opinion on many topics, but we also call it commentary," says the editor-in-chief.

Reinking also sees his own network of specialist journalists as a response to the efforts of many large publishing houses to bundle specialist editorial teams. "So in both cases, it's about accurate reporting and diversity of opinion," says Reinking. The interest in individual mobility, in cars, is also unbroken among the young audience. "Never before have more young people owned their own car. This market should not be neglected by the media."

For Managing Director Walther Wuttke, this results in a growing demand from many national and international media for news and reports from the automotive industry, mobility and transport policy from a German editorial team. Wuttke is therefore planning to expand the company's range of mobile services in particular. "This strengthens our claim to be the most important source for the automotive scene." (aum)