The success of Die Zeit has been shaped by a unique spirit, which has a somewhat unexpected counterpart in the animal kingdom:
“Our ‘dolphin culture’ is our biggest asset. It is the foundation of our continuing success,” said Dr. Rainer Esser, Die Zeit’s CEO.
Esser was part of a panel at our World News Media Congress that explored how news organisations have built successful, sustainable business models and the choices they have made along the way.
Dolphins, he said, are animals that “exemplify social connectedness. They are playful, curious and innovative. They support each other. And they even have a sense of humour.”
“You may have guessed it, but these qualities echo in the ocean of Die Zeit Publishing Group,” he said.
When Die Zeit’s current owner, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, acquired the newspaper in 1996, Esser said the German weekly was “in a pretty messy state”.
“It was losing circulation. The editors didn’t care about their readers. Sales organisation did not exist. We were in deep red figures.”
A couple of years later, in 1999, he took over as CEO – “the perfect situation for a new CEO to start, because there was so much upside potential.”
Over the past 25 years, the publisher has successfully seized much of that potential, having more than quadrupled its revenues from €74 million in 1999 to €311 million in 2025.
Principles of success: ‘Innovate and grow – or die’
Expanding on the publisher’s “dolphin culture,” Esser outlined five key principles that have underpinned Die Zeit’s strategy and enabled it to achieve its current success.
1) Innovation: a commitment to constant creativity and growth
“This is the most important one. Innovate and grow – or die,” Esser said.
Deeply related is the way changes are communicated within the company. “With which alternative can you excite your people more,” he asked:
- “This year will be a great year. We will cut our costs by 20%. We will lay off 20% of all our people.’”
- “This year we will innovate. We will grow, we will launch new exciting products. And if we need more people for this, we will hire them.”
The latter, of course, will be received more enthusiastically, Esser said, as the positivity will help bring people along – even if it is understood that there will be cost cutting.
2) Corporate culture: Close collaboration between editorial and commercial
“In many media companies there is a Chinese wall between the editorial and the commercial sides of the business. They have a certain suspicion concerning each other,” Esser said.
Die Zeit takes a different approach: “We very early started to have mixed groups when we start new products. There are editors, there are salespeople. And the success is a common success.”
3) Investments: Consistent commitment to organic growth
Rather than chasing acquisitions, Die Zeit focuses on investing in editorial, and its newsroom has increased in size from 100 to 600.
This has allowed it to expand coverage and introduce new sections, on psychology, family and finance, as well as ramping up its data journalism.
Growth in audience revenue has followed: the publisher is at an “all-time high,” Esser said, with a circulation of 636,000. He also said that 60% of their subscriptions are now digital. In addition, the group’s magazines have 350,000 subscriptions.
4) Culture of failure: Rapid implementation that favours quick learning
“In a lot of companies, when something doesn’t work out, they nail you against the wall, pinpointing who is responsible,” Esser said.
Not so at Die Zeit: “If somebody is not successful, we embrace him. We give him a hug. And then we try all together to make his story a successful story,” he said.
“There are no failures. There are no mistakes. There are only procedures which finally lead to a success. Sometimes it takes a bit longer.”
“The only failure is to do nothing. Stagnation – this is a failure.”
5) Investing and empowering talent: Getting the best minds in editorial and publishing
“What we do at Die Zeit is not rocket science. It is just skillful work. So we need skilled people who are ambitious, and above all, who are very good team workers,” Esser said.
“To attract and keep young talents is to give them very soon new projects for which they are responsible.”
Swimming into new waters
One area where these principles have been beneficial is podcasting. When Die Zeit began working on podcasts in 2015, both the editorial and commercial sides of the company collaborated closely.
As podcast production costs are relatively low, almost anyone in the company who wanted to start one could do so.
“A lot of them succeeded, some did not,” Esser said.
Today, Die Zeit runs a formidable podcasting operation: it has 27 podcasts that taken together are downloaded 20 million times a month. Zeit Verbrechen (Zeit Crime) is one of the biggest podcasts in Germany.
Die Zeit was also the first German publisher to introduce podcast subscriptions “to monetise the big reach of all these podcasts,” Esser said.
This is another addition in Die Zeit’s growing product portfolio, which includes verticals (on games, podcasts and soon cooking), 19 magazines and 130 events.
“We have built an ecosystem around our brand and our core values of trust and quality,” Esser said.
All of this is laying the groundwork for the publisher’s next big challenge: to grow its subscriptions to 1.2 million within a few years, Esser said. Part of this growth will come from broadening the audience to include more younger people.
“Germany is a big market, and we want to accompany our readers from the cradle to the grave,” said Esser.
TikTok plays a major role in this: Esser said Die Zeit has 12 people making “these funny 90-second videos” for the platform, and the publisher receives about 20 million views per month, a figure that rose to 30 million during the recent elections.
The goal is to get TikTok users into the funnel, Esser said: “Folks who are never on [our] news portal, they learn on TikTok that there is something called Zeit Online, and they come to Zeit Online.”
The publisher covers a lot of stories that are relevant to young people, especially new university students. It also has “very good conditions” for student subscriptions, Esser said. “So we try to follow this path to get them from TikTok to Zeit Online to paying subscribers.”
Wrapping up his presentation, Esser returned to what he had started with – dolphins.
“They are a metaphor for how we see ourselves,” he said.
“To summarise our philosophy: Stay curious. Stay humble. Stay together. “
“And, it’s great fun to swim into new waters.”
