Personalization grants victory in the game of technology

“When you play the game of technology, you personalize or you perish, there is no middle ground, ” said Gyan Gupta, CEO of DB Digital, the second largest Digital Media Group in India.

Gupta was one of the speakers at the sixth annual Big Data & AI for Media  conference in Hong Kong from 7-8 December.

DB Digital has 102 million unique users and 371 million sessions, owning major news sites such as divyabhaskar.co.in and money.bhaskar.com.

The demand for online information is huge in India, Gupta said. For instance, the Indian internet user base stands at 409 million while 90 percent are accessing the internet with their mobile phones. The next wave of 200 million internet users will be Indian language users, with Hindi being the majority.

To satisfy the enormous demand, DB Digital relies heavily on their recommendation engine that helps publisher recommend relevant content, be it article or video, based on the content a user is consuming and his daily content consumption behaviour.

With the engine, their click-through rate on recommendation widget is 24 percent, four times the industry standards, Gupta said.

Gupta added that personalization also creates a persona of an individual user so that media can provide them with content based on his consumption behaviour. The four parameters of personalization are:

1. User Persona (User Reading Pattern)
2. Location
3. Likes and Shares
4. Follow

Advertising, which also requires personalization, is a major part of monetization. Personalizing advertisement helps deliver personalized advertisement targeted to individual users based on the user persona. With this model, advertisement campaigns sale increased by in a year, according to Gupta.

There are also four parameters for advertisement personalization.

1. Capture user click behavior on advertisement
2. Integrate User response on advertisement and User persona based on Content
3. User Segmentation based on content, ad response
4. Targeting advertisement based on above segmentation to drive ROI for Advertisers

DB Digital also uses tools like WisdomNxt and Social Decode to help schedule stories for Facebook and predict the future performance of the social media network, Gupta said.