Personalization's ROI comes into question

Publishers at the Digiday Publishing Summit split into two camps on personalization, with one exec seeing a 20% click-through lift from automated local briefings while another saw engagement flat after swapping human curation for an algorithm, raising the question of whether personalization differentiates at all.

The crux

If personalization does not move the needle on revenue, it becomes table stakes every publisher is "kind of doing" and the real value shifts to using it to move registered readers toward paying.

Sell-side read

The clearest signal is at the paywall, one publisher is testing email as a personalised conversion channel that doles out free links by where a reader sits in the funnel, because the threshold of free content before someone pays "is very key."

Watch

Whether anyone nails that free-to-paid threshold, and the backdrop, search-driven discovery is cratering with click-through rates from Copilot down 83% to 93% versus Bing and Reach's Google traffic down 46% year over year.