Politibot

Politibot’s product will allow journalists, companies and news outlets engage with their audiences, personalize their experience and extract value from them. The Global Editors Network asked us a few questions for their Startups For News competition, ahead of the third pitch battle we will be taking part in this week. To vote for Politibot, please do it here.

GEN: What problem are you solving?

Politibot: The advertising business is no longer a monopoly of the media organizations. The industry is suffering from the influence of intermediaries and from the rise of the ad blockers, born from the terrible user experience that most of the news outlets give their audience on every device.

Chatbots on messaging apps are very interesting in this context because they allow us to enter the most intimate environment of our audiences: the one where they talk to their friends or their family. They spend more time on those apps than on any news website and this offers an opportunity to build trust. You can use a chatbot to engage with a younger audience or to give an exclusive service to your subscribers.

Could you describe your solution to these problems?

Audiences are increasingly mobile and time is a scarce commodity. That’s why it is so valuable to set daily routines with your readers and to establish a link to build a community through their smartphones.

Politibot attracted a loyal audience throughout the Spanish election campaign: 60% of its users talked with the chatbot at least once a day. That loyalty is extremely valuable in a time where engagement is so important for any news outlet. It is also valuable to be able to know more about your audience by asking them questions every day.

List 3 reasons why you are better than your competitors:

1. Our natural language procressing system provides a tool for a more personal communication with the audience. The chatbot is able to conduct a basic conversation and its ability is going to improve even more in the next few weeks.
2. We offer our partners many options to personalize their content and to target different clusters of users with different advertising.
3. We give our partners analytics tools to track the behavior and interactions of their users and features to easily process and examine their answers. The chance to ask your users questions about every topic could help you as an editor to give them content that is more relevant for them.

How does your company make money?

Our company offers a platform that can be used on a subscription basis. We adapt our pricing to the size of the audience and the needs of the outlets we are working with.

What are your next steps? Future developments or features to be added to your product?

Our platform is now available on Telegram and Facebook Messenger. In the next few weeks, it will also be available on Slack. In April we will add new features to the platform regarding analytics, automation and natural language. A few companies in Europe and United States have expressed an interest to work with us and we have been featured in publications like Digiday, Xataka, Journalism.co.uk or Nieman Lab.

To vote for Politibot, please do it here.

More about Politibot background:

Politibot was born in June 2016 as a chatbot covering the Spanish election. Its voice and quirks established an immediate connection with its audience. Its followers received a daily digest with charts, audios and curated links on the election campaign. They could also talk to the ‘robot’ thanks to our natural language processing system and ask him for results in their constituency on election night.

Politibot got 8,249 users on Telegram and generated more than 100,000 sessions. One-third of those sessions lasted more than five minutes. The success of that experiment encouraged us to create a Bot Management System (BMS) so any company or news outlet could create a chatbot in an easy way. This is precisely what we have been building in the last few months with the support of Google’s DNI Fund.