South China Morning Post uses AI to track reader loyalty

In today's competitive and crowded news market, finding and retaining loyal readers is an essential component of sustainability for news organisations. After all, with so many competing ways to access news, reader loyalty is hard to come by. The data team at the South China Morning Post (SCMP) recently set out to understand how readers develop loyalty to specific news outlets and how to nurture that loyalty. In January 2019, the team began to build an algorithm using machine learning to predict reader loyalty. We've named our predictive engine Bluefin because: While the ability to predict reader loyalty has many applications, we were interested in using the prediction to optimise our marketing campaigns.