It is very common to see the mobile homepage of a news media site mirror the story order and arrangement of its desktop counterpart – and this seems irrespective of whether a native or web app is in place. We have unique audience and front page data available at Visual Revenue that proves this a suboptimal strategy.

I very much believe publishers can apply a more balanced content promotion strategy while continuing to be financially successful, simply by marrying the Editor with proper decision support, not by eliminating the editor all together. It seems naive to present, as we see so often, two polarized options only:

A) Machine learned personalization (which can only be achieved through 100% automation) and

B) Editors fueled by gut feel and diet coke (hand curated stories selected for the homepage).

We are constantly asked whether there is any reason to apply the thinking of a data driven newsroom – and that of progressive front programming in particular to media organizations using paywall’s in some way, shape or form.

Article selection and front page programming, whether that is a completely manual hand curated experience or one of sophisticated data modeling on audience and previous editorial tone, is very much something that impacts the paywall business case.

Back in December Visual Revenue was shortlisted for Econsultancy’s Innovation Award in Publishing and in our category were the likes of Random House Publishing, Sunday Publishing, The Sunday Times and Movellas. We’re very pleased to say we were the WINNER of the Innovation Award!

Modern newsrooms either need to reduce choices so dramatically that a human editor can easily and timely decide how to program the front page, or the organization must deploy technology that help reduce choice and calculate best performing outcomes within an editorial framework.

“It’s clear the current [personalization] platforms don’t get us there on their own. But by striking a balance between editors and code, Pariser thinks we can get the best of both worlds.”