When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, many wondered what influence the technology executive would have on the historic newspaper. One answer is now evident – data.
The lid was recently lifted on Clavis, a software project at the Post in which algorithms analyze, understand and categorize the content of news articles. That can make it easier for the Post’s systems to recommend and link between related stories. But it also has a commercial pay-off, according to programmatic advertising sales head Rohan Stevens.
“It’s a collaboration between the newsroom and the sales organisation,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It helps our advertisers pinpoint readers down to the topic of interest that they might have.
“This is one example of many where you can see the influence of Jeff Bezos in our engineering culture in the company.”
Stevens says Post web traffic has doubled since January 2014.
We spoke with him earlier this month at the Teads conference on video advertising
