DRIVE
Welcome to DRIVE, the Digital Revenue Initiative by Highberg in collaboration with dpa!
DRIVE leverages the power of data science and the strength of community. Over 25 regional publishers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are already working together to increase their digital revenue. Only by working together can so many insights be derived from data in a short amount of time. Thus, DRIVE is a success factor in the digital transformation of every publishing house. This unique and bold teamwork by DRIVE was awarded the "Best in Show" as the world's best initiative at the 2021 INMA Global Media Awards.
DRIVE: A Catalyst for Data-Driven Publishing Excellence
Strong Community
Everyone shares everything: data, insights, and experiences. Members work together to improve their content performance and develop new products for subscription acquisition. We've succeeded in having 30 publishers collaborate on one project, exchanging their data and best practices, supported by our moderation and project work.
Shared Data Space and Competent Data Team
Publishers collect their data in DRIVE's data warehouse. This allows us to perform cross-publisher analyses, benchmarking, and provide recommendations for personalization, chat-bots for better article creation, or audience segmentation. Based on approximately 8 million data points processed daily, we continuously develop and improve our algorithms. Members benefit from experienced data scientists and data engineers. The expert team supports each publisher, ensuring top-quality data, algorithms, and AI tools.
Data-Driven Change
The DRIVE initiative has enabled 5,000 editors from participating publishers to work data-driven in their daily routines. We support them with dashboards, topic suggestions, chat-bots, best practices, and our project work in their transformation.
Our DRIVE participants
Dig deeper
DRIVE supports the editorial teams of regional publishers in aligning their stories with the needs of their readership and increasing digital subscriptions. This is achieved with the help of proven user needs models and a special implementation program.
Data analyses show: The more time readers spend on the website or in the app, the more likely they are to take out a subscription. Over the course of the implementation program, it became clear that individual needs categories generate an above-average amount of media time.
The new editorial approach is paying off. Publishers gained an average of 75 percent more subscribers with needs-oriented stories than with conventional articles
The decision to subscribe to a digital subscription rarely happens immediately and certainly not due to a single story. Readers often take months to decide. We analyzed the path to a digital subscription on more than 50 regional portals to better understand the importance of specific topics and the localization of stories. In topic-based personalization, a user is shown articles that match their reading history, while in geo-based personalization, the locations they have shown interest in are key.
However, the data now shows more than just this. It shows that location is more relevant than topics like politics, economics, and crime. To improve the user experience, we have developed geographic personalization algorithms that suggest articles from places and regions users have frequently read about. This led to a significant improvement in performance.on the homepages of several news portals.
Every user is different. And yet today, everyone sees the same articles - either freely accessible or behind the paywall (plus). This leads to a poor experience for most people: low-engaged users can't even get to know the service because too few articles are freely accessible. At the same time, heavy users can read enough free articles so that they do not take out a subscription.
To break out of this dilemma, we at DRIVE have developed algorithms for individual paywall control. They decide individually for each user which articles are freely accessible and which are Plus articles. The decision is based on the usage behavior of the individual user, the characteristics of the article and the origin of the user. Our goal: to turn bad conversions into good conversions. For example we encourage heavy users to take out a subscription by gradually restricting the free content available to them. Because we know that: Conversions from heavy users are much more durable.
Artificial intelligence for more efficiency in the editorial department is at the heart of DRIVE. We are developing four AI tools to optimize editorial processes
CoDriver is our tool for editors: revising, shortening, lengthening texts, changing style, generating headlines.
DriveLocal is our tool for the efficient processing of material that arrives in editorial offices by e-mail. DriveLocal automatically converts the information into messages and feeds them directly into the editorial system. A massive increase in efficiency.
DriveMixer will be our extension of Drive-Local. We will use it to make content and knowledge from the archive available. Editors can use the tool to enrich articles with knowledge from the archive.
DriveCoach is - as the name suggests - our coach for the editor. The tool knows the best practices from DRIVE and brings them to the editorial team.
