We’re tracking native content teasers on over 20 of the bigger Swedish websites. These are our key stats from December 2019.

December 2019: a new key player in the market

The last month of the old year and indeed decade saw around 240 native articles from ca. 120 brands. As usual this time of the year, activity decreased from the middle of December already.

December brought an end to an interesting year 2019. In total, we tracked almost 3 000 sponsored content pieces in the Swedish market. Since we only keep an eye on native content on a number of bigger Swedish sites, this is definitely a certain understatement of the actual number.

Compared to earlier periods, December 2019 saw a somewhat lower turnover among the top 10 brands as seen below. Ozoneair, frequently recurring in our top list, and Swedbank rose a bit in the ranking while Jaguar lost a few places. All three brands have been active during the entire fall of 2019 or even longer, with Ozoneair being active throughout almost the entire year.

As in several previous months, Automotive was a key topic along with Business & Finance. One trending topic covered in sponsored articles during December was however also Science. This is mainly due to the increased native push by Preem, who led the list of most active advertisers again.

From what we can see, Preem have been running a few sponsored articles from time to time during 2017-18 and a few more in summer 2019. But during November and December, the fuel company ramped up its native activity significantly.

In line with the current market environment and the company’s vision focusing on sustainability and innovation, their native articles cover topics around these issues, with interesting articles like these:

Over 60 new brands (re)started running sponsored articles

The list of ost active newcomers in December was rather diverse – ranging from Schibsted-backed mindfullness app Mindapps to music app Spotify. Interestingly, with Acast another audio related company also ran some sponsored content.

Spotify ran a few native articles, e.g. on the most popular Christmas songs

A first summary of 2019

Based on a first look back on the data for the past year shows that the top categories have only changed slightly compared to the first half-year 2019.

Business & Finance remains the leading native topic. This includes both plenty of B2B articles, but also articles on B2C sites targeting decision makers or that focus their storytelling on e.g. the history or strategy and plans of a particular company. (A typical example would be ”This is how brand X revolutionized the market for hybrid cars”).

As expected, Automotive is the runner-up when it comes to native article topics, however tightly followed by Personal Finance.

Across all topics, there has been some rotation when it comes to the most active brands compared to our analysis of H1 2019. Visma has taken the throne in Business & Finance from Telia and Volvo took over the Automotive lead from Renault (who even dropped from the top 3). Huawei dropped to spot 3, with Telenor being most active when it comes to Tech & Computing related sponsored content.