Associated Press Case Study

Monetizing Media Content Online

The Associated Press is the largest and oldest news organization in the world, providing news, photos, graphics, and audio and video content viewed by more than one billion people per day. AP generates content in five languages across 240 worldwide bureaus.

The Challenge:
The Associated Press, like all publishing and digital media companies, must work rapidly to meet the demands of a shifting media landscape. To survive in a digital and increasingly online business climate, it needed to push the envelope and innovate revenue streams. 

An exploding wave of free content on the web meant that AP not only had to deliver more content online, but needed to create more relevance and niche content in order to update traditional ad revenue models with targeted web-based products and more potential for advertising dollars.

The Solution:
AP moved toward delivering new, vertical products for customers, responding to the demand for timely information and more specific subject matter.  It consolidated its news databases and distributions with a new model: one digital platform to enable better search.

Using SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite (SES), AP boosted its search capability exponentially, laying the groundwork to create those new products easily, to match the urgency of its industry. 

It also gave AP a system to create such niche products that search engines, such as Google, can connect the most targeted advertising impressions with those products.

How It Works:
For the Associated Press, SES implements Tagging Vocabulary Management (TVM), a system allowing the organization to build and maintain a tagging vocabulary of labels and relationships to describe its digital content.

The ability to describe and name content and information with precision and consistency empowers AP to leverage the tagging vocabulary and continually bundle content into new categories.  It can also reuse and enhance existing products, as well as classify news articles with greater granularity.

With TVM, AP can search all digital assets and respond to customer requests for new product categories.

Challenge Met:

This level of specificity allows AP to exploit the full value of its content with faster turnover and deployment.

AP positioned itself to create a highly beneficial correlation between relevant, customer content and potential ad dollars. Customers receive niche content, quickly, which allows them to offer targeted content and boost revenue.

The ability to hyper-target content and advertising within vertical, as well as general, search frameworks positions the Associated Press to:

  • Generate revenue for itself and its customers
  • Keep pace with evolving content distribution
  • Monetize its products more effectively
  • Stay relevant in the media marketplace

With SchemaLogic providing the infrastructure, AP can now design the kinds of products and services that retain its long-standing competitive advantage, maximize revenue across the board, and create new ways to boost customer satisfaction.