Despite starting its personalisation strategy in 2016, Schibsted Media Group is just now starting to see some really promising results. The company went the direction of building its own homepage personalisation engine to solve a key problem.

“We have these vastly different users — some users are here very frequently, some users might only visit a couple of times a week — and they have different interests. So we want to cater to that,” Karl Oskar Teien, director of product and UX at Schibsted, recently said during the INMA Product & Tech Town Hall.

To strike a balance between the stories everyone should know and ones that are of particular interest to specific users, Schibsted prides itself on being extremely dynamic. 

“Every day is different, therefore the share of personalisation should be different depending on what else is going on in the news,” Teien said.

Their front page consists of 80 different teasers, showing a picture and text that indicates what each story is talking about.

“What we do on each article is you set something called news value and lifetime to indicate sort of how important, relatively speaking, is the story and how long it is likely to be relevant for,” Teien said.

They then manually select three to six top stories, reserve some stories that help promote Schibsted’s journalistic mission, and put those up despite how they perform. Then most of the positions are optimised for engagement.

“We call it engagement, but it’s a combination of the news value and the time that it was published, the relative popularity of an article, the click rate, whether a user has seen it or not,” Teien said. 

To keep it dynamic, Schibsted has tweaked how they weight this to make sure there’s a mix of content on the front page that represents what the brand stands for. 

They do a non-subscriber feed, too, that looks different than the subscriber feed since it is optimised for conversion. 

“As we start trusting this algorithm more, we allow the algorithm to also rank a larger share of the front page teasers,” Teien said.

This is where personalisation is added to the mix, however it’s all dependent on what is going on on a given day. When it’s a really busy news cycle, they have more articles that they will want to show to everyone. On slower days, the feeds will show more personalised content teasers.

“It’s the type of content that if we did not personalise, it would be hard to justify producing that stuff in the first place when we look at the data,” Teien said. “But once we start distributing that content to the right users, it sort of feeds back into the newsroom priorities in a positive way as well.”

The results

Schibsted is seeing significant success, especially over the past year. Their subscriber click-through rates on the front page increased by 25% in less than a year.

“This may not sound like a huge number, but if you think of this being the average click-through rates every single day that someone visits the front page, it’s really hard for us to point to any other initiative that we have taken over the past few years that has lifted the engagement on all articles on the front page to that degree,” Teien said.

They’re seeing encouraging news as well for their journalistic mission. Looking at different segments, they’ve seen a 13% increase in engagement from female users 30-to 39-years old when they’re shown personalised content. 

“The more we personalise, the more we ensure that they find their way to the stories that might be of particular interest to them versus the stories that tend to be more optimised for the male 55+ user,” Teien said. “We are really trying to tie personalisation back to our journalistic mission with the stuff that we’re doing and not just looking at it as a way of maximising engagement and clicks.”

What’s next?

Schibsted will continue personalisation work with other formats. They plan to expand into audio and video, which is already seeing some promising results as they experiment with it.

The news company also is looking at helping users upgrade and downgrade their subscription tier based on their habits. And they want to optimise product experience based on how the user consumes the content, Teien said. They want a dynamic experience for readers based on the product they are using — like audio or video — in addition to the content they’re being served.

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