In partnership with
Hi, I’m media innovation journalist Ulrike Langer and you’re reading News Machines. If this newsletter was forwarded to you becoming a subscriber means you will never miss an issue. If you want to support my work please spread the word, become a paid subscriber or click on the ad.
Left: kompreno founder and CEO Jochen Adler (photo credit: Olaf Hermann). Right: Window dressing with IJF insignia in a store in Perugia
Last week I met kompreno founder and CEO Jochen Adler in person for the first time. Four years ago I had written about the launch of the translation network's pilot phase for the German journalism magazine Medium Magazin. Then Adler crossed my path at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. A lucky coincidence, because a few days before our conversation, kompreno announced a partnership with The Atlantic - the first US publisher in what had been a purely European network. Kompreno subscribers now get access to German, French, Spanish and Italian translations of select Atlantic pieces. I talked with Adler about how the deal came together, how kompreno is positioned in the bundle market, and where the model's limits lie.
Kompreno has been on the market since summer 2023. Adler and his team launched after a pilot phase with seven publishers from five countries, including Brand eins and Belgium's Mo Magazine. Today the platform works with 40 partners from over 15 countries - among them Le Monde, Die Zeit, Prospect from the UK, Eastwest from Italy, and the German political review Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik. Since launching, kompreno won a German federal government innovation award and the European Press Prize uses the platform as its official translation partner.
Adler deliberately does not disclose subscriber numbers. A monthly subscription costs 19 euros, an annual subscription 190 euros. Access is free for anyone under 25.
Left: The English language homepage of kompreno. Right: A story from The Atlantic translated into German in the kompreno app
How kompreno works
The model differs from algorithmic news aggregators on three points: curated text selection, professional translation into five languages, and direct revenue sharing with publisher partners. No exclusives, no breaking news, no same-day releases - kompreno only picks up texts that have already been published and that the publisher explicitly clears for translation.
Giuseppe Menditto leads curation as Chief Content Officer. His team selects both partners and individual pieces. Translations are produced through a combination of DeepL and several language models, including Claude and ChatGPT, which Adler says he pits against each other. A human correction step sits at the end of the pipeline, managed internally through a traffic-light system: Some language pairs run through green, others are flagged red and fully reworked. "We need humans not just in the loop, but in the driver's seat," Adler says.
Alongside its own app, kompreno offers a white-label model. Publisher partners get their translated texts back and can publish them on their own domains. Belgium's Mo Magazine, for example, produces in Dutch but uses kompreno translations to build French- and English-language versions of its site. The footer carries a reference to kompreno.
And now The Atlantic, too. Why would a respected 169-year-old US magazine choose to work with a German startup? Adler doesn't really know. But a pattern is emerging: "The core interest was really the Spanish translations in the first round," he says. The German, Italian, and French versions, he suggests, are "more of a bonus effect." The focus is on the roughly 45 million Spanish speakers in the US and the Latin American market - a focus Adler also reads geopolitically.
Sponsored
Tech moves fast, but you're still playing catch-up?
That's exactly why 200K+ engineers working at Google, Meta, and Apple read The Code twice a week.
Here's what you get:
Curated tech news that shapes your career - Filtered from thousands of sources so you know what's coming 6 months early.
Practical resources you can use immediately - Real tutorials and tools that solve actual engineering problems.
Research papers and insights decoded - We break down complex tech so you understand what matters.
All delivered twice a week in just 2 short emails.
What sets kompreno apart from its competitors
At 19 euros a month, kompreno is not an entry-level product. Readly costs $12.99 in the US and £12.99 in the UK. Apple News+, another competitor in English-speaking markets, runs at $12.99 / £12.99. Many news apps are free. For kompreno, the question isn't whether the product is better than Readly or a free app - it's whether readers are willing to pay for news at all, and if so, for what.
Counter-models on one side (at least in English-speaking markets) are Particle News, which I wrote about in November, and The News Movement. Particle aggregates articles from AP, Reuters, AFP, Time, and Fortune for free, synthesizes them via AI into a story, and offers translation at the push of a button - according to co-founder Sara Beykpour, the app's most-requested feature. The News Movement (now part of Caliber) is a Gen Z-focused short-form video news platform featuring content from vetted creators. It's built for intentional news consumption, with daily summaries, community notes for fact-checking, and no rage bait.
Readers who just want to stay quickly informed don't need kompreno. Kompreno sells something different: the full original text of a curated publisher, professionally translated, with revenue sharing back to the source. Two different products for two different audiences - but in the end, they compete for the same willingness to pay.
The second competition is a workaround: Readers who only occasionally read pieces from foreign-language sources often don't hit the paywall and can run those pieces through DeepL or ChatGPT themselves. Adler considers this a fringe phenomenon. Kompreno positions itself in a niche: for readers who want to actually read multiple quality outlets, not just skim them, and who care about the source and the publisher's brand. That audience is smaller than the one Particle serves - but more willing to pay.
The AI question
What happens if AI translation one day becomes perfect? Adler thinks that's plausible. But he doesn't see kompreno's value in the translation itself: "Our source network is worth protecting, and we actively protect it. That human selection at the beginning is really what makes the product valuable - more than the translation at the end."
On this point, Adler draws a sharp line between kompreno and startups that "have done nothing but build a robot that crawls the web and grabs every text that isn't nailed down. Probably without asking first, either." Kompreno signs a contract with every publisher up front, guarantees revenue sharing, and gets explicit consent. "That also defines the product."
Adler's second AI-related thesis is more fundamental: "Democracy dies at the paywall if we're not careful." That's the logic behind the free under-25 offer and a library pilot currently running in the German state of Hesse - users there can log in for free with their library card. For now, the project is limited to Hesse. Expansion, Adler says, is held up by German federalism: Each state has to negotiate separately.
Five takeaways for media companies
Translation as a product core, not an add-on feature. Kompreno treats language access as a business model in its own right. For publisher partners, that means access to new audiences in markets where running their own marketing wouldn't pay - and no cannibalization risk, because the original language never appears in the kompreno app. Le Monde runs its own foreign language version Le Monde in English. But building reach in the US, UK, and India has its own costs. Kompreno takes that lift off publishers' shoulders.
Revenue share beats flat licensing. If you're handing content to a platform, you should be sharing its success. Kompreno splits revenue directly and gives publishers a veto over target languages. Bundle apps that license once and then aggregate algorithmically don't offer that kind of alignment.
The product sells on curation, not on technology. As machine translation improves, translation quality fades as a competitive advantage. What remains is access to selected sources and the publisher's permission to use them. Neither can be automated. Platforms betting purely on better models might be left behind.
Price defines audience. 19 euros a month isn't aimed at casual readers. Kompreno targets subscribers who are willing to pay for curated quality journalism in multiple languages - and who care about where their reporting comes from. That's a deliberate positioning, not an entry barrier that will be lowered later.
Two-sided platforms only grow when supply and demand pull each other along. That's the hard part of kompreno's model: it has to keep attracting readers willing to pay 19 euros a month, and publishers willing to license their best work - and each side becomes easier to convince once the other has momentum. Kompreno deliberately doesn't publish subscriber numbers. Adler cites the mix of paying subscriptions, free under-25 access, and library users, and the fact that kompreno hasn't yet hit the milestone moment when those numbers would play well externally. That last point is telling. A platform that had clearly taken off would say so. The silence signals a company that's growing, but still working on reaching critical mass on both sides of the market.