Most publishers license their analytics tools from a third party. DN Media Group decided to build their own, and gave themselves four months to do it. With Cefalo's developers and Claude as an engineering partner, they delivered a first-party tracking platform that cut latency from one hour to less than a second – and has already lifted click-through rates by 27%.

A news publisher lives by knowing what its readers are doing right now. An hour's delay in the data makes the insight lose its relevance.

Almost everything DN Media Group knew about reader behaviour came from a licensed third-party platform that delivered one-hour-old data at best, and priced to match someone else's margins. Third-party scripts were increasingly blocked by browsers and ad blockers, making personalization, modelling and recommendations unnecessarily difficult. DN Media Group wanted full control of their own data, and ideally to save money on licence costs in the process.

With the new in-house solution, DN Media Group can now see consent respected, and all their data stored within Europe. The new platform is owned and operated by DN Media Group and staffed by the Cefalo-team, in close collaboration with DN's product, editorial and infrastructure teams.

– Just in licence fees, we are saving 1.5 million NOK annually, says Marianne Gade Gørbitz, Chief Product & Technology Officer at DN Media Group.

The fast facts:

• The in-house platform was delivered in four months, from April to August 2026, against an estimate of around 12 months.
• Events reach the warehouse in less than one second at the median, delivering real-time data.
• The platform handles 7.3 million events and 1.7 million page views a day, across all titles and native apps.
• Because DN Media Group owns the pipeline, they can fix and reprocess history when they find an issue, which was not possible with a licensed tool.
• The personalized front page uses first-party tracking data. In an A/B test against the generic front page, it increased CTR by 27% (4.54% versus 3.56%). It performed better on 33 of 37 days, and 24% more exposed readers clicked.
• DN Media Group saves 1 500 000 NOK annually in license fees.

The team had four months

DN Media Group publishes Dagens Næringsliv, D2, Magasinet, and a number of trade publications, including Upstream, TradeWinds, IntraFish, Recharge, Europower and Fiskeribladet. In April 2026, they decided not to renew the licence with their third-party solution.

Before the license expired in August 2026, the new in-house tracking platform had to be ready. That gave the team a four-month window to build something that with traditional estimation would have taken close to a year:

Data collection across all of DN's titles and native apps, a shared data contract, a reliable pipeline, warehouse models, dashboards, and documented parity with the old solution, title by title, before anyone trusted the new numbers.

The task of building the replacement fell on DN's Product and Tech team, along with the Data and Insights Engineering team. The teams are staffed by developers from Cefalo, five of whom hold the demanding Claude Certified Architect certification. That expertise would prove decisive in delivering the project on time and within scope.

– We set a hard deadline and held firmly to it. There was a real collective effort alongside Cefalo's consultants, with an extraordinary commitment from everyone involved to make this happen. For us, it was an advantage that Cefalo's consultants work through the summer, and some of our people in Norway postponed their holidays to get the solution in place on time. It was a great collaboration across several teams, says Gørbitz at DN Media Group.

A CLOSE PARTNERSHIP: DN Media Group and Cefalo have worked together for over 15 years. In the summer of 2026, they built an in-house tracking platform that is already delivering results.

– We could not have made it this fast without Claude

Shihab Rahman is a technical architect who has worked at Cefalo for over six years. Shihab is clear about what made it possible to deliver the project on time.

– Without Claude Code, the estimate would have been too high and the risk too great for the project to get started. Not everyone involved believed it would work, but we pulled it off, with a lot of help from Claude who makes our day-to-day work much easier. We can focus on the architectural decisions and leave the implementation to Claude. That lets us build prototypes at a very fast pace, Shihab Rahman explains.

The editorial team at DN is now very enthusiastic about the in-house platform. They are running experiments on the front page and on the ad-site.

– The platform is the foundation for personalizing our content in different ways. The goal is to make the user experience even better than it is today, says Gørbitz.

How the new tracking solution was built

It was decided early on that the platform would run on Google Cloud. All data is stored securely within Europe and owned by DN Media Group, with no third-party access. A first-party API collects events through Cloud Run, Pub/Sub streams them to BigQuery within minutes, and dbt transforms the raw data into the models the business actually uses. Superset delivers the dashboards.

The developers had a capable, but different kind of colleague on the team. Claude Code served as an engineering partner across all the repositories, and the team used it to design, validate and implement changes that crossed multiple system boundaries.

On his new colleague, Shihab says: – Claude never sleeps. It just works. And it's incredibly smart, as long as you give it the right constraints and context.

To make the collaboration with Claude work as well as possible, three things proved particularly important:

First, the codebase was made readable to an agent. Every repository contained written instructions, a change-safety matrix, validation commands and reusable task definitions. Both the software engineers and Claude worked from the same understanding of the system. Documentation was no longer something written after the work was done, it became a continuous part of how the work got done. The same files that onboard a new developer also instruct the agent.

Second, Claude was used to verify against production rather than rely on assumptions. Before a model went into production, results were always independently recomputed: An alternative route through the raw data, and a separate statistical calculation, with the result accepted only when both approaches agreed.

Third, Claude was put to work on the tasks teams typically put off. That included infrastructure cost analysis based on live telemetry, data quality investigations that traced a single reader complaint back to its exact cause, and documentation kept in sync with the code by CI.

CERTIFIED CLAUDE ARCHITECTS AT CEFALO: A key factor behind the solution was Cefalo's team of software engineers holding the Claude Certified Architect certification.

The result is a better user experience

The platform went live in the summer of 2026. It now carries DN Media Group's full event volume at operating costs significantly lower than the previous licence fee.

The tracking platform has already become the foundation for much more than reporting. It powers the editorial team's daily dashboards, subscription analytics and the company's recommendation engine. Product work that was impractical on a licensed analytics solution is now built directly on the company's own first-party data. The new solution allows continuous improvements, which was impossible with the third-party solution.

Readers get a better experience too: The personalized front page surfaces content matched to what they care about, and ads that follow.

– The personalized front page uses our own tracking solution with real-time data, and we see that users who get the personalized front page have higher engagement and CTR. We are rolling it out to more users every day. This is part of our strategy to grow our subscriber base, Gørbitz at DN Media Group concludes.

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