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

Live sports is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to driving reader engagement as well as subscription and advertising businesses. However, managing video content publication is often a resource-intensive workflow for news publishers, making it hard and expensive to create substantial video consumption volumes. 

We're now working with Bonnier News Local and their video provider Flowplay, to solve this issue. We have set up an automated workflow whereby we provide every single live stream or video clip with its own robot text before and after the match. The video/article page includes graphics, widgets, images and links for all of BNLO's 40 titles.

Live sports is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to driving reader engagement as well as subscription and advertising businesses. However, managing video content publication is often a resource-intensive workflow for news publishers, making it hard and expensive to create substantial video consumption volumes. We have now developed an automated solution to address this issue.

The collaboration between Norwegian publisher Bergens Tidende (Schibsted) and United Robots around automated real estate content – a huge reader revenue success – has now generated nominations in 3 categories of the 2021 INMA Global Media Awards. Five percent of all article conversions at BT now happen through the real estate articles.

Automating sports content gives publishers a much broader scope for audience engagement than simply publishing match texts for top leagues. With automated sports content you can engage readers in different ways before, during and after match day. You can in effect publish content along a separate timeline for every league, every match, every reader – all generated automatically. This is where automation comes into its own – this type of timed targeting at scale would be unviable in a manual newsroom workflow.

Swedish local media group Gota Media use automated real estate articles as part of their reader revenue strategy. With a conversion rate of 2%, the Real Estate Robot is currently the best converting byline across the group's ten news sites.

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.

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 as well 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 excited to welcome our first German traffic client, Zeitungsverlag Waiblingen. In July they went live with automatic traffic alerts for their audiences in and around Stuttgart. ZVW use traffic texts to support their advertising business.