TheDailyYou: Radio's Personalized Portal

In most U.S. markets, local radio stations have not approached the Internet in the same way that TV, newspapers or yellow page directories have. With their traditional business relying less on local content, radio websites have not aggressively pursued new content, audience or advertising online.

Don’t tell that to Archstream Media, which has launched personalized portals under TheDailyYou.com brand in two radio markets this summer. NetNewsCheck spoke with Vic Savelli, executive vice president of Archstream about TheDailyYou.

NetNewsCheck: Thanks for speaking with us, Vic. Tell us how TheDailyYou came to be – it's powered by Pegasus News, isn't it?

Savelli: Yes. At the end of 2008 we acquired Pegasus News from Fisher Broadcasting, and the reason that we acquired it is because it is without question the most successful independent community portal that has been launched to date.

It’s been around for a number of years and has grown its audience almost exclusively through search engine optimization. In Dallas, PegasusNews.com has never been associated with any major media player, so it never got the benefit of outward promotion, but the content management system communicates very effectively with Google and the other search engines. So over the first two years of Pegasus News with nearly no promotion, they attracted 300,000 unique users from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Pegasus News continues to operate autonomously without media relationships and it’s really doing better than it ever has. It's at the highest billing in its history, and this past month we achieved record-breaking page views and unique users, as a result of several hot stories and coverage of the State Fair of Texas. Things continue to go well for Pegasus News as a free-standing entity.

NetNewsCheck: You adapted the Pegasus platform to launch TheDailyYou in several markets this summer. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Savelli: Sure. Our pilot programs are launched in Tyler, Texas, and Shreveport, Louisiana, and we market it as TheDailyYou.com in those markets. We’re now attracting roughly 12,000 unique users in those two markets combined, and page views have been in the 40,000 a month range.

NetNewsCheck: And these launched with cross-promotion with the radio stations in those markets?

Savelli: Yes they did. There were already websites for the station clusters that use specific station call letters and names, but they haven’t had a community portal previously. This is a free-standing community portal that covers entertainment, dining and movie reviews as well as some local news.

We have one content person managing both of those markets from a content perspective, and then the databases were built for them by Archstream that pull in all of the restaurants, the theaters, all of the event listings. The database build-out was handled by our database team here, and the day that they were put live they were largest and most robust entertainment portals for the market. It’s complete listings - for example, all of the Happy Hours for each of those markets are available on the site, and there’s also an an iPhone app that works with the GPS of your phone and can pinpoint Happy Hours in close proximity to where you may happen to be sitting at the moment.

There are some other personalized traits about this site, as well. In the masthead, The Daily You logo resembles a driver’s license... When you register with the site and upload your photo, your name and photo appear within that logo. This is to give a greater sense of “ownership” to the user and give a bit more of a social media feel. So the customization begins and the sites technology starts to track you and the types of stories that you’re reading, and it will begin to customize content for you on a specific area of the site. As you continue using the site and you begin favoriting things by clicking on a small favoriting heart, you will begin to see story recommendations, information on your favorite bands or restaurants, etc.

The highest level of customization is found by clicking an index tab (off the home page) called “The Daily You”. When you click on This tab it takes you to a section that has lists of stories selected for you based on reading patterns, favoriting activity, stories based on your geography and neighborhood, etc . Based on your pattern of reading content, it begins to create pages of customized content. This also serves as a hub page for your profile that lists any contributions, stories or comments that you have made on the site.

There are other things that happen in the background of the technology that is also based on your user profile -- it builds what we refer to as the “DNA” of each of our users, and we’re able to serve targeted advertising based on that DNA. So once the sites have been live a while and they increase their registration database, we’re able to target individuals who, say, have looked at a lot of healthy-eating type of stories, or they seem to be engaged in outdoor activities or sports, or they may be looking at content on cars, for example. This is one of the few content management systems that also has a built-in ad server, and it’s a sophisticated, targeted-advertising ad server. In Dallas with Pegasus News which is a mature market for the technology and we have lots of users, we can target up to 3,000 different criteria with that ad server. Every story is tagged with metadata, and so every time you click on a story every one of those traits of that metadata automatically carries over to your profile.