Storytel this week announced it has crossed the 400,000 subscriber mark on its home territory, consolidating its position as the largest digital player in the country.
The report compliments the news in August that the company has reached one million paying subscribers globally in August, five months ahead of expectations.
The press release from Storytel Sweden country manager Åse Ericson is short and to the point, offering us no significant new insights into Storytel’s growth trajectory since August, other than to say said growth continues “unabated.”
Said Ericson,
We’re growing by leaps and bounds both globally and in Sweden, where the current audiobook wave started thanks to Storytel. With our passion for fantastic stories and technical solutions, we’ve created a unique platform for exciting, emotionally meaningful, and inspiring connections between authors and Swedish readers who want to enjoy their stories anywhere and anytime they want.
But just how many markets is Storytel now in? It seems Storytel isn’t too sure itself.
Explains the press release:
Storytel, founded in 2005 by CEO Jonas Tellander and Jon Hauksson, is Northern Europe’s leading audiobook and e-book streaming service and offers unlimited listening and reading of more than 300 000 titles on a global scale. Storytel operates in 18 markets around the globe and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.
All well and good, except we know Storytel is already live in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Germany, Russia, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, Turkey, India, United Arab Emirates, Bulgaria, Singapore and Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, which by any mathematical rationale is nineteen markets, not eighteen. In addition we have South Korea lined up for launch before the end of year, which will take us to twenty.
Lest we need further confirmation we need only go to the Storytel (dot) com international site where all twenty markets – the nineteen aforementioned live plus the imminent South Korea – are listed, and yes, there are live links to all nineteen Storytel markets, with only the twentieth, South Korea, returning a “coming soon notice.
Yet in at least two press releases since the Colombia launch Storytel has repeated that it is in only 18 markets.
Given the remaining time available this year it seems a certainty that the expected Thailand launch will be for 2020, and we can expect several Latin America and other SE Asia launches in 2020, and possibly further expansion in east Europe.
As reported here on TNPS, Storytel has mustered new funding to keep its expansion programme in aggressive mode.
Read the Storytel Sweden press release in full here.
