Audience Prism: Segmentation and Early Classification of Visitors Based on Reading Interests

The largest Media and Entertainment (M&E) web portals today cater to more than 100 Million unique visitors every month. In Customer Relationship Management, customer segmentation plays an important role, with the goal of targeting different products for different segments. Marketers segment their customers based on customer attributes. In the non-subscription based media business, the customer is analogous to the visitor, the product to the content, and a purchase to consumption. Knowing which segment an audience member belongs to, enables better engagement. In this work, we address the problems: 1) How can we segment audience members of an M&E web property based on their media consumption interests? 2) When a new visitor arrives, how can we classify them into one of the above defined segments (without having to wait for consumption history)? We apply our proposed solution to a real world data-set and show that we can achieve coherent clusters and can predict cluster membership with a high level of accuracy. We also build a tool that the editors can find valuable towards understanding their audience.