What we’re talking about: the latest about news automation

As we near the end of an extraordinarily challenging year, the news industry is taking stock. Doing a retro, in tech development scrum speak. From our Scandinavian newsroom automation horizon, the data and insights we’ve gathered are what we expected them to be – a year or two from now. Where a year ago, robot journalism was seen as something of a futuristic abstraction outside our region, we’re now rolling out content automation projects with publishers across Europe and North America. And in Sweden, where 85% of local news sites now publish robot written articles, newsroom automation has become a matter of real strategic importance for many.

We're hugely proud and happy to be on The Sweden Technology Fast 50 list of fastest growing tech companies in Sweden! We're #37 with a 582% net revenue growth over the past 4 years.

Swedish sports data and media veteran EverySport Media Group have signed an agreement with us for automated content from the Sports Robot as well as the Transaction bot. The agreement covers match reports in ice hockey, football and floor ball as well as texts on player transactions in ice hockey. ESMG is a strategic partner to United Robots for sports data, and the two text types covered by the new agreement will be based on ESMG data from the Everysport database and Elite Prospects, the world’s largest ice hockey database, respectively. 

Swedish local media group Gota Media is the latest of a growing fleet of Scandinavian publishing houses who see the value of automating as much of their routine reporting as possible. Since we launched in 2015, with Mittmedia (now in Bonnier News Local) as our first partner publisher, newsroom automation has become standard practice in Sweden, freeing up editorial resources and driving business effects, including reader revenues.

We're soon launching our brand new Player Transaction Bot, in partnership with the world's leading ice hockey data provider Elite Prospects. The new robot will generate a text every time a player is drafted or traded.

In June, Schibsted’s regional title Bergens Tidende launched a completely new premium vertical on BT.no. Boligsalg (Home Sales) consists solely of robot written articles about house and apartment sales, tagged down to street level to enable hyperlocal segmentation (see image). The high quality of the articles and images combined with the accuracy of the geo targeting now drive 60–70 subscription sales a month for the Norwegian publisher.

New client. A second of Schibsted's Norwegian regionals, Stavanger Aftenblad, will start publishing robot texts. SA follows sister publication Bergens Tidende in setting up a Home Sales section on the site, publishing automated texts enriched with Google Streetview, satellite maps and drone video frames – with a view to drive subscription conversions. Live in November.

Pageviews & Programmatic. German regional publisher ZVW use traffic texts to support their advertising business. The texts are published to a Staumelder (traffic jam alerts, image right) section on the website, where users are presented with info on the latest disruptions aswell as an option to select just their town. ZVW is monetizing from two to three ad placements on each article page, sold programmatically. The result: this page view driving content + ad calls are completely automatically generated.

We're proud to announce the launch of a brand new golf vertical build on automated texts – Golfing.se. The Swedish Golf Association and sports publisher ESMG have joined forces to publish the site and our new golf robot write texts from every competition in Sweden – from the pro level down to local Tuesday night events.