Artificial Intelligence Startup And Ohio Newsroom Provide High School Sports Results To Over 200K Readers During Pandemic

25 Mar 2021

Artificial Intelligence Startup And Ohio Newsroom Provide High School Sports Results To Over 200K Readers During Pandemic

Editor’s note: This blog post was updated in July to provide a comprehensive look at the 2020-21 high school sports season in Central and Southern Ohio.

The mind-bendingly weird 2020-21 high school sports season is over. What did our founding newsroom — and crash test dummy — Richland Source learn about the performance of Lede Ai content during the 2020-21 school year?

Several interesting things, it turns out.

Premise

Across the board participation on our crowdsourced data partner, Scorestream, was down as much as 50% from the high points of 2019. This makes a lot of sense. There were less people at the games, fewer games overall, and people had other things on their mind during the pandemic.

The same trends held true in the Richland Source market. Fewer games, fewer attendees, other priorities.

You would think audience numbers would be down too. They weren’t. Here’s what happened with AI generated content published on Richland Source between late August and early June.

But first, some table-setters…

No art on any of the content
All reporting published automatically with no human intervention
Published in the Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and surrounding markets.
No organic or paid promotion of any kind. In other words, if people weren’t searching for this information, they weren’t going to bump into it.

Results

Trends from early in the season largely continued. Traffic to Lede AI content was way up on every key metric in the face of a 35% decrease in content volume.

Users up 46%
Sessions grew 54%
Sessions / user up 6%
Pageviews up 45%

FEWER ARTICLES, MORE VISITORS

Users up 46% and sessions up 54% over 2019, while number of articles was down 35%

Why is this happening?

We think there’s a number of factors.

Deep linking to previously published content is creating tens of thousands of back links every season, elevating article value and driving better SEO.
Over two years, Richland Source has built a well of high school sports results tens of thousands of articles deep. Search results on-site and on Google are now mining a deep, rich content well.
COVID-19 might have driven higher search volume for high school sports results.
The rise of aggregator apps like NewsBreak is a huge factor. NewsBreak alone saw a 1,750% increase in referrals that led to nearly 75,000 sessions.

What’s next?

The team here is squarely focused on getting clients ready for August 2021, when high school football kicks off across the country once again.

We’ve radically simplified pricing, tied it to DMA, and made room for unlimited content.
For smaller newsrooms that don’t want to auto-publish, we’ve built an HTML update that lets you cover your market in 60 seconds.
Anyone can set up a free 30 day pilot right now to evaluate workflow, content, and reserve a space on our integrations roadmap. No obligation.