The problem for a paper in DAN's position isn't recognising that digital matters. It's building a digital business that adds revenue rather than replacing print revenue with a fraction of it.
Getting a print reader to open an app
A reader who has bought a newspaper every morning for twenty years has a habit, and the habit is physical. Replacing it with an app means giving them a reason to open it at the same point in the day.
That's why Portal DAN carries things that look peripheral and aren't: the weather, the daily horoscope, and a live radio stream that keeps playing while the reader browses or locks the phone. None of these are journalism. All of them are reasons to open the app before you've decided you want to read the news - and once it's open, the journalism is there.
The content itself is organised the way the paper is: Podgorica, Montenegro, Serbia, Globus, culture, entertainment, magazine. A reader who knows the sections of the printed paper finds the same structure on a phone.
Building the revenue side
Digital advertising for a publisher of DAN's size means competing for inventory against platforms with vastly more data. Portal DAN runs on Google Ad Manager and AdSense, giving DAN access to programmatic demand it could not sell directly, managed from the same platform as the rest of the operation.
The integrated radio stream does double duty here: it extends session length, and time in the app is the raw material of advertising revenue.
The platform behind it
Portal DAN runs on our publisher platform - native iOS and Android apps with content managed through mPanel CMS alongside the website, and ad infrastructure, radio and reader personalisation configured in the same system.
For a publisher moving from print to digital, that consolidation matters more than any individual feature. One place where content is managed, one place where advertising is configured, and one editorial workflow rather than a print process and a separate digital process running in parallel.