Startup shares secret in topping the millennial market

Being one of the five largest independent media in Hong Kong, Joey Chung, CEO and Co-founder of The News Lens shared tactics to reach millennials using data analytics by building up big data with limited resources in the Big Data.

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

Founded four years ago by three people, the company gained their market shares through successful target of their marketing segment, the Chinese millennials.

Aiming at “the most impatient audience group”, Chung pointed out three characteristic of Chinese millennials’ reading behavior.

1. They do not visit news site, read print news or watch television news
2. They spend more time of social networks, often from mobile devices
3. Gather their news from Facebook (88 percent), YouTube (83 percent), and Instagram (50 percent).

To meet the needs of the targeted audience, The News Lens focused on data supported User Interface design, Content production and to understand their digital native readers.

According to their Google Analytics data, 98 percent traffic were directed to their content page, while only 2 percent would direct to their main page.

Chung elaborated on how they utilize the collected data to revamp their user in UI design annually, for example, they have created a clean and simple content age with the menu bar at the end and changed the main page design to a showroom design for the latest layout.

Increasing advertorial traffic is a main task for running a online-based entreprise, Chung shared his experience on increasing the traffic by ten times using infinity scroll.

With the data science team, the News Lens studied their audiences through experiments on different strategies to track behaviors and increase the traffic and completion rate.

They would analyse the time on site by comparing reader’s time on site to the length of articles for content release planning.

Chung said, they mapped out the pattern of readers’ behavior and would have shorter articles for the morning while publishing longer articles during lunch and evening time.

Another tool which they use is the Facebook monitor, which updates them every 20 minutes on the trending topics on the platform.

He said the data tool helped the social team to monitor trending topics and editorials deciding whether they would follow up on the issue or if any of their articles have covered the topic already.

Summarizing on the startup’s success in utilizing big data to get a scoop in the media market, Chung gave three tips to the audience:

1. Understand your strength and weakness
2. Use data analysis to find problems and make quick decision
3. Experiment