Advance Local is one of the largest media groups in the United States. They operate 10 leading news and information organizations and reach 55 million people monthly across multiple platforms with their high-quality journalism. They are dedicated to unrivaled local journalism that improves the lives of millions of people.
With a passion for innovation, Advance Local wanted to see how far they could go by introducing artificial intelligence into their newsroom. They started using Sophi Content Paywall Engine on one of their largest sites, cleveland.com. The technology uses advanced natural language processing to analyze every piece of content and select which articles to put behind a paywall. It picks only those articles where the subscription revenue opportunity outweighs the advertising revenue forgone.
An experiment was setup so Advance could see how Sophi performed side by side with their existing paywall, and the results confirmed they’d made the right decision. Sophi generated a more than 40% increase in subscribers, and uncovered pockets of content that their editors didn’t anticipate would generate subscriptions.
“We wanted to see how much farther Sophi could take us, so we tested Sophi Content Paywall on one of our largest sites. The results were transformative. We were hoping for a 10% lift in conversion rate and Sophi delivered four times that result. We’re continuing to roll out Sophi solutions across more of our sites as we speak.” - Neil Katz, Chief Customer Officer, Advance Local.
See the complete list of Digiday finalists here.
