Vartti.fi, a Finnish online site offering local news at the Metropolitan area, is now among the top 20 of the most visited sites in Finland with its 270,390 unique visitors (week 17/09). In the last six months, the site has doubled its visitor numbers and is now the sixth most read news site of the country. Vartti.fi first passed the quarter million visitor mark on Easter.
"Vartti.fi is clearly the largest local news medium in Finland. We have also been able to be the first to report some of the latest headlines," Senior Editor-in Chief Janne Kaijärvi reports happily.
Vartti.fi's success online is based on its close co-operation with its readers. The amount of reader-generated content keeps growing: The joint editorial office of Vartti and Metro, the other free sheet in the portfolio, receives hundreds of news item ideas every week, both pictures and SMS.
"The pictures and SMS sent by the readers give us unique sources of information, ones that we could never find through traditional methods. And all this even faster than we could ever hope," Kaijärvi explains.
"We want to continue to support our readers' need to share and participate. The new radical need to feel local creates new and surprising ways for people to meet around our news items," Kaijärvi continues.
The free sheet Vartti is part of Sanoma News, the newspaper division of the Sanoma Group.