Mediatech startup Dailyhunt, InShorts and ScoopWhoop -through its latest acquisition Touchfone -amongst others are increasingly leveraging machine learning capabilities to improve personalisation and interaction for the end user.
From InShorts introducing quizzes to Dailyhunt’s personalised news feed, they aim to increase end users’ monthly time spent on the app, ultimately targetting higher ad revenue potential.
InShorts recently integrated a quiz into its app, which is in its beta phase and has been introduced to 10,000 users. While the user swipes through news content, the quiz emerges as an option. The user can play with a random opponent or share an invite with a friend through WhatsApp.
“It’s a quick game and keeps attention levels high: the players have 10 seconds to respond to every question. Out of our sample size, more than 10% play the game on a daily basis and play two to three games in a row. It’s important to innovate and keep engagement levels high,” said Azhar Iqubal, Co-Founder of InShorts.
While InShorts has only recently begun experimenting with an ad revenue model, Dailyhunt expects to see an massive increase in digital ad spends in 2017.
The curated news platform is using machine learning to understand user behavior in order to construct personalised news feeds based on their interests.
The platform is also generating feedback from the end users through flag items on articles, which gives the user an option to indicate whether they like or dislike the source of an article.
“One of the biggest challenges for us is generating tags in local languages and then mapping that content to user preferences. We have to build a dictionary of tags in local languages, so it’s a mix of machine learning and manual intervention on the backend to create personalized newsfeeds for these readers,” said Virendra Gupta, CEO of Dailyhunt.
InShorts, which has over 5 million downloads, finds users spending 14 minutes a day on the app, while Dailyhunt which has a larger market share with 30 million users, sees them spend an average of 3 hours on a monthly basis.
News and content creator ScoopWhoop recently acquired tech startup Touch fone and recruited co-founder Mahesh Subramanian as the CTO of the company. The company wants to increase its focus on personalization and improve ad revenue potential by maximising brand reach among the users.
“We need to look at more concrete performance metrics like do the users go out and buy the product after viewing them in a ScoopWhoop video? Need to get that kind of data out,” said Subramanian.
ScoopWhoop presently has over 30 million users and aims to create profiles and target ads to those users based on the kind of handset they use to their age, gender and the kind of content they view.
Source: Economic Times
