Will Artificial Intelligence and Personalization save the Newspaper?
For nearly 2 decades newspaper industry experts told us we an “industry in transition” – in fact we were an industry in decline, but many refused, and some still refuse, to recognize this reality. The decline of newspaper mirrors the challenges faced by the music recording industry as it transitioned from a manufacturing/format distribution model to a content creation/delivery model. In an industry where the cost of the medium is borne by the user, in the form of digital devices – users place little value in the format of delivery and are unwilling to pay for content they are unlikely to consume.
Alternatively, users will pay a premium for content they feel is relevant and useful, as services like Netflix and others have proved.
Attempting to apply traditional editorial practices to digital content presentation has proven to be a costly and ineffective way for newspapers to get content to users. While newspapers shrink their newsrooms in the relatively higher margin traditional operations, staffing up at the much lower revenues and margin digital operation is seen as a necessary evil. But the result is higher costs and lower margins across the enterprise, impacting content, readership and profits.
Pew Research shows us in 2015’2016 nearly 2/3 of digital ad revenue went to five companies – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft. These companies have two things in common – they rely on traditional media for much of the content they distribute, and they fully embrace scalable artificial intelligence personalization technology to automate, curate and target content to users.
Youneeq’s customers who have embraced our full site content personalization and automation have benefited from our AI and personalization. By adopting Youneeq’s machine learning, real time, data driven content presentation technology our customers can emulate the automation and delivery of the tech giants in a simple, cost effective manner.
The real time personalization of content improves audience engagement KPI’s building programmatic ad performance while at the same reducing the cost of human resources required to curate and maintain relevant content. In a low margin business like digital content, embracing technology to increase yields while reducing cost is the only road to success – its how big tech does it.
The future of newspapers depends on innovation and the innovative technology that runs the tech giants is available today to any publisher willing to employ it.
