How publishers are using robot journalism to drive engagement
Dutch regional publisher NDC said earlier this year that it plans to cover every single local match for the whole season. That’s 60,000 football games – a commitment far beyond the capacity of the newsroom and something no one else in the country has attempted. To get more news about
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The match reports will be generated with the help of artificial intelligence software that combines Natural Language Generation (NLG) with regularly published sources of structured data. Photos and comments from coaches will be collected through a crowdsourcing platform.
In a soccer-playing country—1M of the 17M inhabitants of the Netherlands belong to a club—this initiative can significantly boost engagement.Thanks to automated journalism, we’re able to write about every single local football match, coverage that’s not provided by anyone else,” said Boer. “That, combined with the crowdsourcing element, will drive inclusivity and engagement in the local sports communities, and by extension create value in our news brand.”
The returns are not just limited to engagement. While the local matches will be free to read, the publisher will also combine automated content with premium sports journalism to drive people down the funnel.
Schibsted’s Norwegian regional site Bergens Tidende is another publisher using automated content to drive revenue. It has created a home sales vertical populated entirely with robot-generated real estate content. 12,000 automated articles have been published in a year since launch in the summer of 2020 generating 3,000–4,000 pageviews a day.
The publisher uses real estate robots from United Robots. The texts delivered are generated through an NLG process applied to structured data sets from Statens Kartverk (public data in Norway) as well as some secondary data sources and Google Streetview + Google Earth.
There are 15–50 sales of houses or apartments in Bergen every day, and for buyers, sellers, neighbors, or people moving into the neighborhood these texts are highly relevant,” explains Jan Stian Vold, Project Lead, Bergens Tidende. “So we assumed they would generate subscription sales – and we’ve been proven right. The high quality of this real estate content, combined with the fact that it’s automatically generated, provides a net value for us – and our readers.”
The automated texts alone drive 5% of BT’s total article conversions of new paying readers. The publisher has sold about 1,000 subscriptions at €24 per month in a year with this content. The number of conversions has stabilized at 60–70 a month, which is satisfying for the team. “These are not extremely high numbers, but they play an important part for our overall subscription business, and we’re pleased with the results,” says Vold.
Going forward, the publisher expects to publish 10,000 automated articles a year that can drive 600–800 subscription sales and a million page views.
Without automation, the home sales section would not have been viable though, as the newsroom resources required would outstrip the value of the content. “If we’d had to employ 5 journalists to do this job, the gain would have been canceled out by the cost in newsroom hours,” says Vold.
