08 Jul 2019

How To Get Lede Al To ROI

Of all the questions we’re asked, this is the most frequent. “This stuff is incredible. How do we use it to make money?”

In partnership with ScoreStream, we built an awesome AI engine that produces coverage of thousands of high school athletic contests at scale, buuuuuut…. we haven’t figured out how to get it to print actual money yet.

So, barring that, there are a number of paths to ROI for Lede Ai customers. Let’s walk through a few of the most common scenarios our customers use.

1. Use Lede AI to create a compelling content vertical. You know you are missing tons and tons of game coverage. Your competitors are too. This is what is known as an opportunity. Combine Lede Ai briefs with your feature coverage to create the most comprehensive sports coverage in your region. There’s no reason to go anywhere else if you have it all.

2. Engage your revenue team. With a compelling mix of feature game coverage by your experienced staff and Lede Ai doing the rest, you’re in a position to dominate high school sports coverage and be ROI positive on day one. Leverage this by creating a direct-sale sponsorship of your school sports coverage. Sell it across your entire coverage area. Online, print, television… this applies to all of them.

3. Use Lede AI to free up time for high value sports journalism. An Athlete of the Week feature is a complimentary content vertical that you already have the assets to produce. Free yourself from tracking down scores on Twitter and write the damn thing. It has all the elements to generate great interest and eyeballs, and can be sold as a separate sponsorship.

4. Optimize for out-of-market traffic. Once you’ve built out your Lede Ai-powered sports vertical and leveraged your local ad dollars, optimize for programmatic. The wider you go, the more out-of-market traffic you’ll generate. One customer saw theirs jump 455%. By optimizing for out-of-market, you’re CPM’s will jump and you’ll be monetizing every visit.

5. Think about your reader revenue. With Lede Ai, your sports department is now the authority in your market. Consider how that can be leveraged. Is there a newsletter to be developed? If you run a paywall for your site, is there access to analysis or complete scores for the region something you can create a subscription for?

The bottom line is this: Lede Ai does more than just produce hundreds of stories you would’ve never written. It gives you access to audiences you would never reach. It creates scope of coverage that was previously impossible. And when that happens, it opens the door to revenue opportunities you hadn’t imagined because they just weren’t there. Time to fire up the imagination!