'We are not in the business of abusing data, and we don't see it as a revenue-generating resource,' claims News UK COO

Chris Taylor explains how News UK knows 'infinitely more' about its readers but has to err on the side of caution

News UK's COO Chris Taylor has claimed that despite the newspaper publisher obtaining an enormous amount of data on its readers, it will not abuse that data, and does not see the data as a revenue-generating resource.

In an interview with Computing, Taylor said that the paywall that was put in place by News UK on The Times and The Sunday Times digital editions in 2010, and on The Sun in 2013, had left the publishing company with far more knowledge of its readers than ever before.

"From dropping newspapers at the doorstop of a newsagent with no real idea who the consumer is to a situation where there is a heavy focus on direct subscribers of which there is a large chunk using our digital offering... we know infinitely more," he stated.

The company has a team dedicated to managing the data, and is looking at new systems to help support it.

"We have a dedicated business intelligence team here who manage the data. It's run by the former Telefonica business intelligence head, and we have a project kicking off to refresh some of the systems we use to support that," Taylor stated.

The company has had an Amazon Web Services Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Hadoop data platform in place for a few years now which it uses to analyse the clickstreams of all of its products. This helps to inform product decisions, targeted advertising and gives the firm the potential for content targeting.

"We don't do content targeting because we believe in the idea of the edited edition but we have the ability to do so," Taylor stated.

Taylor described the date warehouse that manages all of the data as "very rigorous and tightly managed" because of the sensitivity over the data that it holds. The company executes hundreds of campaigns every month using that data set, and separately it also looks at the data at a more granular level to seek further insight, he said.

But Taylor claimed that because News UK members were paying for their subscriptions, the way the company uses data is different to other media companies.

"We have to treat it with a degree of caution," he said.

He claims the firm doesn't use "random web-like retargeting ads" but instead targets particular demographics.

"So, for example, BMW could take an ad for the 3-series in the newspaper and we translate that in the tablet version where we know who you are, and tailor it so that for a younger man the advert could be a Z4 or an M3, while if it is a 60-year-old woman we might offer her an advert for an X1," he stated.

But while the company is finding out more about its readers than ever before, Taylor emphasised that the data needed to be used in a way that "would offer additional value to the reader".

"We are not in the business here of exploiting data, we don't see it as a revenue-generating resource, we see it as a way to enrich and enhance our offering," he stated.

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