We have a unique position, Aftonbladet is the first digital habit in Sweden. www.aftonbladet.se is in the backbone of many swedes and we are very grateful for that. We have worked hard for it in over 20 years. My friend Anders did put it well.
”When the Internet runs out, I allways goes back to Aftonbladet”
We have a very strong first page and the users looks at that to get updated. But you can think about the different users/readers/customers (I prefer users) visit our site. We have some that visit Aftonbladet nine times a day and some that visit us ones a week. Both very loyal but what we can do is to optimize that experience for everyone.
Personalization
One of the biggest differences we see going from a newspaper to an online publication is that we actually know what the users are reading. We can see a lot of interesting stuff, one thing we see is the long tail…
This is how many people are reading each article, if we have the article on the first page it will be in the top of the articles.
The long tail we see here is how many page loads an article gets on one day. With personalization we want the users to read more of what they are interested in. We have some of the best journalists in Sweden and we are not able to put all the brilliant stuff we produce on the first page.
The main challenge here is to present the content that the users are interested in, to give an example. If my favorite artist releases an album and Markus Larsson writes a review that I´m really interested in, I will most likely miss it if there is a big news story that day.
Think of Facebook, there feed is based on importance for you. If you are a frequent user you will be up to date with almost every thing that happens in your network. If you are a once a week user you will just get the most important updates from you closest friends.
When it comes to personalization, it is hard and we have not seen so much from established media houses so far. We see a lot when it comes to news aggregators like Yahoo, Google, Prismatic, Flipboard, Zite and so on. But they do not create their own content yet…
The question is: how do we do it as an established media house? As a newspaper we need to value the top news like, here is the things you really should know about.
Personalized Is The New “Normal”
If we can make a distinction between “things you really should know about” and “good reading if you are interested” on a scale. We can make some personalization really easy..
- Take away the news that you already have seen
- Find your interest in the category “good reading if you are interested”
- Filter out specific type of content sports, gossip, health, cars etc. that you are not interested in
Collect data
To be able to collect all the data, we need to know what we are looking for. Traditionally we have done analysis like how many page views or how many clicks we get on something. We need to track every user on what they click, share, comment, bump out from and a handful a more signals on what is interesting to this user, all the time in order to give the best experience possible.
If you look at google that introduced personalized search in 2009, that means everyone gets different search results depending on who you are. Going deeper on that like:
- where you live
- where you are at the moment
- search history
- browser history
- gender
And the list goes on and on. Read more about it here.
We at Aftonbladet need to keep in mind that we should collect data that will enhance the experience for the user, without creating a filter bubble experience.
