Want Better Engagement? Give Portals A Of Their Own

Going back more than two decades now, often the first exposure consumers had with the internet was via a curated web portal. Maybe it was AOL in the very early days or more recently, a customized homepage offered by a broadband provider, featuring relevant news, games and access to services like .

As opposed to portals of the past, today’s advanced web portals are smarter, more customized to the visitor, and a source of additional revenue and subscriber engagement for the service providers that offer them. Keeping portal visitors engaging more often and for longer requires a continued pursuit of innovation that aligns with evolving consumer behavior trends. Lately, this has meant incorporating artificial (AI) and machine (ML) capabilities to offer more clickable content, faster.

Synacor has found two particularly interesting use cases for integration of AI and ML into portals.

A Smarter Way To Snip

Portals run to find the right content and present it to visitors. This often means pairing the right image with the right story and sizing it appropriately for the user’s device. Have you ever uploaded a photo to social media only to see faces or some other key element disastrously cropped out once the image posted? Sizing images perfectly can be time consuming when done manually, but using AI-based facial recognition and region detection, key elements of an image can be identified and sized based on the user’s device in the blink of an eye. That means visitors get content faster and it always looks great.

Non-Stop News With Natural Language Processing

When we make a decision to feature a certain news story and a user decides to click, they’re obviously interested in that content. So letting them leave the page without giving the more relevant content to engage with is a huge missed opportunity. By using natural language processing, a reader that clicks on a business story can automatically be served stock quotes relevant to companies named in the article or additional stories about people or companies mentioned. For a story about Yankee fan favorite Aaron Judge, natural language processing could be used to determine that he appears in an article with a sidebar featuring relevant news served up to site visitors hungry for more content.

We also expect AI and ML to play a key role in analytics. Real-time and detailed tracking of user engagement on the portal to understand what’s popular, what’s not and what will make users more likely to click and stick around longer means building complex algorithms. Initially, advanced algorithms will help guide editorial staff toward the right content decisions. Eventually, AI and ML will make it possible for these algorithms to build themselves and even change on the fly based on who is visiting.

With ever-smarter approaches to content, portals are sure to remain a revenue and engagement powerhouse for service providers.

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