Business Insider’s chief technology officer has said advancements in AI technology are helping the publisher “to do a bit more to punch above our weight class”.
This autumn Business Insider released an AI-powered search tool on its website based on its own archive.
Also this year, the site implemented a smart paywall which it says has increased subscription conversions by 75% compared to its legacy paywall.
And it created an AI-powered ad tool that allows advertisers to target readers based on their responses to stories rather than using standard contextual and keyword targeting. For example, advertisers could run campaigns only against content that has an optimistic tone.
Business Insider CTO Harry Hope told Press Gazette he views AI as “a technology like any other technology” but that it has brought opportunities to make big strides in product development.
“It’s a new, very interesting technology,” he said. “It gives us capabilities to build products and experiences that we maybe couldn’t quite build before, or maybe a much larger company could build if they had more engineers, more data scientists, but maybe a publisher like us didn’t have the capability to build.
“And I think the interesting thing about the technology, especially generative AI, is it creates more opportunities for a company and a team of our size to to do a bit more, to punch above our weight class.”
Business Insider: AI not about ‘shoehorning’ it into a product
With the search tool, Hope said the starting point was not “how can we shoehorn AI into a product?”.
Instead, he said, the questions his team asked included: “What are some of the product challenges that we have right now? What are some places where users aren’t getting the best experience?…
“Have any recent big changes in technology given us an ability to do something now that maybe wasn’t feasible, or we had talked about two or three years ago, but we didn’t have the technology or the experience or things like that to develop?”
The Business Insider search bar encourages users to “search any topic” on the website, with suggested trending searches on Monday including “Tiny house”, “iGaming evolution”, “Google layoffs”, “Emirates A350”, “Dream home” and “Affluent consumers”.
The results feature a bullet-point summary, links to relevant stories, other context such as company profiles from sources like Wikipedia, and more suggested searches. The summary has a label stating it is “AI Generated” with disclaimers that read: “Summaries are generated by an AI model trained on Business Insider’s articles.
“AI may make mistakes or provide inaccurate/incomplete information. Always cross-reference AI-generated content with provided sources.”
Others to have created similar AI-based tools based on their own archives include Forbes, the Financial Times and Future title Tom’s Hardware.
Hope said that “a lot of publishers, ourselves included, have really not put a big prioritisation on search over the past ten to 15 years, because you had Google, right? And everyone just used that as as the search engine. But I think all that’s changing.
“Google is also rolling out things like AI Overviews and trying to change the search engine to a little bit more of an answer engine, trying to keep people in their ecosystem. And I think that’s disrupting the maybe symbiotic relationship that they’ve developed with publishers over the years. So I think now is the time.”
He added: “It’s knowing the audience, it’s knowing the value of your reader, and it’s trying to really create a more valuable experience for them. And it seems to me like that’s what a lot of our colleagues in the industry are coalescing around.”
[Read more: How publishers are using AI chatbots to boost engagement]
Moving back from scale to serving core audience
Previously known as Insider, the title rebranded back to its original name Business Insider a year ago. Then-editor Nicholas Carlson explained this was “about recommitting to what we do best: our powerful, insightful, and unique coverage of business, tech, and innovation” with “a name that reminds us all that Business Insider isn’t some generic news website built for everybody”.
Hope, who has spent six years at Business Insider and previously held the role of director, platform engineering at Time Inc, said this approach is linked to the fact publishers’ relationships with aggregators, search giants like Google and the social media platforms are changing.
“I think a lot of companies that built up scale, they’re finding that this is a bit of a new world right now,” he said.
“So I think the approach that we’re taking is really going back to figuring out, okay, who is our core audience, who is our reader, who are our most loyal readers, users, customers, and making sure that when we’re talking about what are we designing for them, how are we building out a product that supports journalism, it’s really for that core group of users.”
Despite concern across the industry about the arrival of Google AI Overviews relating to the potential impact on traffic referrals if users get all the information they need from the search results page, Hope said: “Personally, I’m optimistic because I feel like any opportunity that we have to know our audience and our users and to build a great experience for them holistically, to create works of journalism for them that that they find valuable, I think ultimately that’s a good thing.
“I think it should be the way that the industry has always moved in. And if it takes a disruption to set us on that path, then so be it. But I think that’s really our goal right now, right? It’s to figure out who are our people, and not just try and be everything for everyone.”
Asked if Business Insider’s new AI search tool was aimed primarily at keeping readers on the site for longer, Hope said this was more of a secondary goal.
“I think it’s always important to remember that ultimately you’re trying to solve a problem or create some kind of value in people’s lives. I think that’s why all businesses exist in one form or another. That’s certainly why journalism and media exists.
“So I don’t think it’s so much about keeping people on the site longer, it’s about giving people a reason to stay with you longer by providing them more value. So we do track things like engagement, certainly across the search experience as well, but what we really want to see is, you know, for whatever people are searching, are they getting relevant results and content, and are they actually clicking through and was the suggestion or the result that we surfaced to them actually valuable to them?”
Business Insider ‘doubling down on great user experiences’
The AI-powered search tool on the site was made in-house “pretty fast” by Business Insider’s own engineering team. OpenAI was not directly involved despite its content licensing and tech deal with the title’s parent company Axel Springer.
Hope said: “We’re consuming an API, just like any other customer is whether or not they have some kind of global deal or anything like that.”
He added that Business Insider has not allotted any additional investment for AI development but that it allocates resources and time “based on what we think is going to make that impact for readers at the end of the day”.
Of the search project, Hope said: “We treated it as a bit of a Skunk Works type project, for a lack of better words,” referring to the phrase for an autonomous business or engineering project carried out by a small team.
“It was something that we wanted to try and improve for a long time, and we figured now is the time to give it another try.”
In a note to staff in October, Business Insider chief executive Barbara Peng thanked the product and tech teams for their “fast, smart work” on the release and said: “At Business Insider we’ve always embraced innovation and getting better every day. This launch is just the beginning. We’ll continue to iterate, evolve, and make the search experience better and more helpful to our audience over time.”
Looking ahead, Hope said the team would be looking at “doubling down on those great user experiences. I think there’s more that we can do to make search better and better, and to make it more of a bit of like a shortcut for our power users, so to speak, so that they can really access content.
“They can access if they have a favourite writer or editor or someone that they want to follow. Really making it a portal or a gateway to that, I think, is where we’re trying to expand the product in the future.”
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