Report: AI’s Rising Role with Editing and Reader Revenue

Download Report: AI’s Rising Role with Editing and Reader Revenue

About a year and a half ago, the Germany-based consulting group Schickler approached WAN-IFRA about possibly collaborating on a research report to examine how Artificial Intelligence is being adopted and implemented by news publishers. Schickler itself had recently invested in data and AI expertise to meet the growing demands of their clients.

We decided to narrow the focus of the report to delve into the topics of how AI is impacting reader revenue strategies and some editing aspects.

The basis of the report is built around a global survey of data specialists at news media operations, commercial executives and editors. The survey features the most common use cases today for news publishers – restricted to reader revenue and editing – as we tried to gauge the current state of adoption, and the importance they place on AI within the next three years.

In the second part of the report, we present five case studies of news publishers who have implemented AI use cases such as dynamic paywall control, churn prediction modelling, automatic surfacing of archive content or automatic creation of soccer game reports. These cases, some curated and updated from our events, highlight not only the effectiveness of AI adoption but also its potential as most are looking at “What’s next” possibilities and developing projects and tools. Naturally, these also show some of the challenges with experiments or usage. That proves just as valuable as successes…

But what is absolutely certain is AI and automation are clearly on the minds of publishers today. Our survey, as well as other surveys from our World Press Trends project and events, bear that out. In general, more than 75 percent of publishers say AI will play a crucial role in the success of their business within the next three years. Here are just a few findings of the report:

Publishers banking on AI for its business: Despite a slow rate of adoption, nearly 77 percent of publishing executives responding to our global survey said AI will be important for the success of their business in 2024. Of that, 35 percent said it would be very important.

Algorithm allergies clearing up for editors: Indeed, the near taboo that was once associated with AI as it pertains to journalism is clearly fading, or even a moot point, as newsrooms and their editors lean into the benefits of automation. It doesn’t mean they are giving up on Einstein’s “The only real valuable thing is intuition” when it comes to having the final say.

Reader revenue use cases abound: Some of those benefits are clearly the role AI can play in reader revenue strategies: Helping to surface content, placement on home pages, predicting churn, propensity to subscribe, automated content creation like sports results that has a long tail play in retention and even triggers for subscriptions, dynamic paywalls, eliminating some of tedious, mundane tasks so journalists can focus on creating deeper, quality content.

Now the reality on the ground…: Actual adoption and implementation appears to tell a different story, at least when we conducted our survey nearly a year ago. That indicates that while there is enthusiasm to invest in AI in the near future, nearly 50% of respondents said they have not adopted AI usage thus far; 19 percent have implemented multiple cases and only 11 percent fully implementing one case.