Ritvvij P.

Handling Local news in personalization models can be challenging.

Medium will de-amplify Generative AI generated content from its platform and will actively evolve its personalization system to spot and de-amplify AI written content.

Driving factors: Differentiation

Differentiation typically comes from building authenticity on your core product, i.e., editorial product. This involves owning more of the value chain:

Owned Identity

• Are you a trusted brand or voice for a well-defined topic?
• Are you able to set the agenda for a well-defined audience segment?
• How strong is your recall among that well-defined audience segment?

Owned Network

• Have you stitched the most active members of that audience segment into a tight knit community?
• Is the community co-building with you or via you?
• How are you ensuring that you are not only building but also retaining 1:1 relationship within that community?

Owned Media

• What’s your information architecture and content strategy?
• How deep are you serving that vertical?
• Is your website (yes! a website even after GenerativeAI) representative of who you are?

Amplification factors

While the above gets your driving factors in place, the next aspects define how much you can amplify. This includes:

• Distribution
• Ability to sell advertisements, subscriptions, or events
• Ability to market and develop audience

There are various fundamental aspects of an editorial product business. Most of these businesses have been edged out of the amplification factors:

Distribution: We’ve lost distribution to SEO, Social, platforms like Substack, etc. The only owned media channels that exist now are: website, mobile app, and newsletters.

Selling advertisement: Companies find it more efficient to buy advertisements from ad-networks on search and social than directly via publications.

Advertisements in print and TV give much more revenue than digital.

When Steve Jobs returned back to Apple in 1997, he famously cut the product line by 70% down to 2 desktop devices and 2 portable devices!

Rule of thumb: If you can’t explain it and choose for yourself, then surely your customers wont!

• Don’t put dollars behind scaling to scale until you’ve completed value proposition discovery.
• Don’t put dollars behind marketing until your communication is so simple that everyone understands.
• Often we overcomplicate stuff that no one really understands.

Avoid phrasing decisions as binaries. Reality is nuanced. Hence, it is better to phrase decisions as “We want to do X while maintaining or growing or reducing Y.”

It is always advisable to have one major source of revenue and then diversify by having multiple minor streams of revenue that de-risk you from that major source of revenue. For example, YouTube’s revenue split is 1:3 between subscriptions and advertisements.

Why it matters:

• It protects against risk of ruin.
• It protects against ups and downs. For example, revenue from advertisements is seasonal.

Allocate 5% to 10% of the content on which Artificial Intelligence algorithms and multi-arm bandit can test out different SEO hacks and observe causality, i.e., is it resulting in an improvement in the SEO score of those pages.

Why it matters: Currently, SEO is a cat and mouse game with Google.

• Once someone tests a new rule once and it works, no one returns back to it and validates if that rule is still valid. Over a period of time, you’ll end up with a dead set of rules that may or may not be valid.

Model performance metrics

• accuracy
• precision
• recall

Determine important attributes

Identify the most influential rows

Reduce variance