Oct 2018–Oct 2019 Mittmedia's automated real estate articles generated 7.4 mi logged-in pageviews (17.6 mi pageviews in total) and some 900 subscription sales.
Who: Mittmedia, Sweden. Local media group in mid / north of country with 22 local sites
Why: For Mittmedia, the strategy post 2015 has been all about growing the digital subscriber base. The robots came about after analyses of the journalism produced in relation to demand for certain topics from readers showed that there was an unfulfilled need for more stories about all types of local sports as well as local property sales.
Objective: One goal was to drive up subscription sales by offering granular hyperlocal – hence hyper relevant – stories that would convert loyal readers into paying subscribers. This level of granularity and volume of texts would not have been possible using reporter time only. The real estate texts were put behind the paywall from the start in 2017 (the automated sports texts were open until autumn 2019).
What: Mittmedia has their own sports robot and real estate robot (i e robots are built by United Robots, language and editorial styles & rules set by Mittmedia’s newsroom). The property texts include images from Google Streetview. The texts include articles on individual sales as well as lists such as “10 most expensive houses sold in city x this year”.
Result: With the real estate bot, the average number of articles (per local site) went from 2/month to 480/week. In the 12 months between October 2018–October 2019, the property bot generated 61,800 articles (automatically published). These articles generated 7.4 mi logged-in pageviews (17.6 mi pageviews in total) and some 900 subscription sales.
Read more about how to leverage automated real estate content: Download Real Estate Playbook