The Washington Post and why technology is key to its growth

Since the take-over Bezos has employed key digital savvy execs most notably Corey Haik, who left the paper at the end of last year, who have driven, among other things an aggressive mobile strategy, widespread distribution of content on social media (it was the first media company to take Snapchat seriously and it publishes every single story on Facebook) and key tweaks to the paper’s user interface and CMS. Bezos now has apparently more than 250 people working on technological innovation at the paper.

Washington Post screengrab ()

The tightly focused digital strategy appears to be working too. For in late 2015 the paper finally eclipsed its great liberal rival The New York Times in terms of online readership. About 71.6 million people visited the Post’s sites in November, about four percent more than the Times’s audience of 68.8 million. To give those figures perspective when Bezos bought The Post in 2013 it was attracting 25 million visitors per month – so that’s almost a tripling of its readership in little more than two and half years.

The Post also boasts that as many as 35 per cent of its readers are millennials, a figure that would have seemed incredible just five years ago. The shift to mobile has been seamless too with more than 70 per cent of The Post’s readers coming to its website on small screen devices.

Technological innovations

The emphasis on technological innovation has lead to the creation of the RED, the ad research experimentation and development group, which works on delivering practical uses of technology for the paper and its readers.

The emphasis on technological innovation has lead to the creation of the RED, the ad research experimentation and development group, which works on delivering practical uses of technology for the paper and its readers.

One of its most significant developments so far has been the launch of the Clavis personalisation system in Spring 2015. Originally developed to improve native advertising targeting, Clavis (Latin for key) recommends articles to readers based on keywords that appear in their reading history. It powers the ‘Post Recommends’ section which appears at the bottom of posts and clearly has been influenced by the recommendation engines that were pioneered by Amazon.

Now that system has been used to power another innovative editorial tweak that The Post unveiled last week.

Re-Engage is a technology that The Post hopes will keep readers on its site clicking through to other pages. Re-Engage is alerted if a person stops reading a page or swipes through it too quickly to be taking it in on a mobile device. It then presents the reader with a pop up box at the bottom the page, which suggests a cluster other articles that it thinks that they might be interested in reading.

The platform is powered by Clavis, so rather than just offer articles related to what the person has just been reading, it suggests stories that are based their personal reading history.

It is a very clever use of technology which should definitely keep readers on the Post’s site. It can also deliver important information in other ways too. In a blogpost last week The Post’s Director of Ad Product and Engineering Jarrod Dicker said: “While “Re-Engage” is a product created by the business side, because it gives us information about user behaviour, the newsroom will release it on various sections for a/b testing and performance. “Re-Engage” will then be available for sponsorships and branded content promotion.”

Of course attracting a growing  readership is only half the story. Whether The Washington Post’s digital revenue eclipses The New York Times, which includes fees from over a million subscribers, in the near future, remains to be seen. For the time being though innovations like Re-Engage, are certainly giving it an competitive edge over its rivals.

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