Zee Media
Zee Digital Uses Taboola Newsroom to Inform Content Decisions and Assign Stories
ZEE MEDIA IMPROVES STORY ASSIGNMENTS FOLLOWING TABOOLA INTEGRATION
- 15-20% of Total Stories Per Day assigned based on Taboola Newsroom data
Company
Zee Digital is the digital offering from Zee Group which is comprised of 20 brands across 12 languages with a user base of over 125 million.
Challenge
Build loyalty among their readers and ensure that all coverage is relevant and in-line with what their readers expect from them.
Solution
Partnered with Taboola Newsroom to monitor topics trending among their readership and among competitors on the Taboola network.
Results
With Taboola Newsroom, Zee Digital assigns up to 30% more stories based on data from Newsroom.
Introduction
Zee Digital is one of the largest news publishing businesses in India with 20 brands across 12 languages with a user base of over 125 million people. With multiple iconic brands under its umbrella, Zee Digital creates innovative content for a discerning audience.
Zee Digital has partnered with Taboola to build more relevant content and optimise audience engagement and revenue. Since the launch of the partnership, Taboola has become an important revenue contributor for Zee Digital.
TABOOLA NEWSROOM IS INTEGRATED DIRECTLY INTO ZEE MEDIA’S EDITORIAL WORKFLOW
Powered by Taboola’s predictive engine and massive data set of over 1B internet users, Taboola Newsroom helps writers, editors, and section teams make informed decisions to increase readership. When Zee Digital began working with Taboola Newsroom, the Taboola team conducted multiple and ongoing training sessions, coaching and audience development support for editorial staff in both English and Hindi.
With Taboola Newsroom, the Zee Digital editorial team is able to compare and contrast their planned daily articles with what is trending among readers. They also keep a close eye on their highest performing articles in Taboola Newsroom to ensure that they’re placing those articles in the most impactful positions on their homepage and within their website.
“We actively ensure that upon seeing the metrics Taboola Newsroom is showing us about a certain article being read more or outperforming in its position on the homepage, we try to keep those such articles at that position for the maximum duration possible,” said Priyarag Verma, Digital Editor, Zee News and DNA India.
Zee Digital reports that between 15-20% of the total stories they assign each day come directly from Taboola Newsroom Insights.
ZEE MEDIA SWIFTLY IDENTIFIES OPPORTUNITIES WITH TABOOLA NEWSROOM
When the Zee Digital editorial team receives an alert from Taboola Newsroom about a trending topic, they act quickly. They’ve built trust over time in Taboola Newsroom, and feel confident that these trending topics are worth moving swiftly on. “We ensure that those topics or alerts are acted on very quickly, because if I don’t act, my competitor will, and they will be able to get much more traction than I have,” Verma said.
In November, Zee Digital’s team wrote a story about a public figure based on a trending topic alert they saw in Taboola Newsroom’s Insights. As a result of acting promptly, the story was one of the site’s top stories for the day and generated 4% of the site’s traffic for the day.
According to Verma, the additional coverage on one such trending topic “resulted in a phenomenal growth in pageviews on those particular stories… it was almost 10 times growth in pageviews on that topic within a couple of days.”
“Integrating data and technology in content development workflow is the key to building the right content. Taboola Newsroom has been one of the important tools that have helped us in this journey towards integrating data, technology and content”, says Zee Digital’s CEO Rohit Chadda.
Taboola Newsroom is an important alert system for us. Previously, we would be actively going and checking out stories on other websites, which of course we still do to some extent, but having this alert system significantly narrows down our search.
- Priyarag Verma, Digital Editor, Zee News and DNA India