Personalising the home page: Could editors be out of a job?

What would happen if newsrooms relinquished control over their home page, gave up on editorial curation and just let an algorithm decide what’s front-page news?

Charles Ho, General Manager for Cxense — a company built on personalised analytics, data and algorithms, came down to The Straits Times Innovation Lab to talk about just that — and how some news organisations are going against tradition to great success.

Take Polaris Media — they reverted to an automated homepage personalised according to user behaviour. Albeit they did retain some editorial curation, but no two home pages will display the same content. It resulted in a 2.8x increase in the click-through rate and a 28% increase in reading time.

But, is personalisation too good to be true?

Personalised content is something everyone seems to say they want but the second they know it’s happening, it scares them.

The benefits of personalised content are seemingly obvious — if a piece of content is relevant to you or about something you like, you’re going to click on it, engage with and share that content.

But, Mr Ho erred on the side of caution because unfortunately there has been a lot of bad personalised targeting done, and yes we are talking about those shoes you viewed on Amazon magically appearing in-between posts as you swipe through your Facebook feed.

Combatting this has been difficult but when done right, it could potentially be used to “make home pages relevant again”, said Mr Ho — something most newsrooms would relish by being able to move readers back to their websites and out of social media.

So, how can it be done?

Throw away everything you think you know about personalisation because it has nothing to do with age, gender or location — some of it has a part to play but the data gathered should be around user behaviour over stereotypes.

Let’s face it — just because a reader is a 54-year-old woman who lives in Singapore, doesn’t mean she doesn’t like watching English Premier League. Gathering data this way is slower, and gets better over time. If you regularly click into football stories and spend a long time reading them, then it might seem obvious to serve up those articles directly to the homepage — something Cxense says its technology is capable of doing.

But, we are yet to see this in effective action and not accompanied with that eery feeling of somebody watching your every move. Although users can opt out of Cxense’s personalisation tracking, not many do, only 0.5% did with Polaris Media’s implementation. It’s not clear if this is because they are ok with being tracked or were too lazy to go and turn it off.

Mr Ho also suggested newsletters are fertile ground for personalisation because readers have already opted-in so to receive relevant content directly in their inbox might be less confronting than seeing it as they casually browse the internet. SPH’s AsiaOne vertical has been using this for their newsletters and it seems to be working.

Personalisation done right could bring back relevance to the home page, but it doesn’t mean editors are out of a job.

What do you think? Will editorial curation always be relevant or will personalised content delivery trump it all? Maybe a mix of both, but what’s the right balance?

The hour-long lunchtime talk was held on June 27 and around 30 SPH staff and Singapore Press Club members attended.