Rate uplift

A small insight into 'personalisation' at the BBC from Chief Product Officer Storm Fagan to MPs on the Public Accounts Committee. Not sure they'll all get it...  

"We use an ‘adaptive’ approach to personalisation which incorporates both algorithm recommended and editorially curated content, in line with our public service mission. This allows us to signpost BBC users both towards content which we know they will enjoy based upon previous viewing habits, and towards curated, public service content which we wish to promote.... 

"Evaluation testing demonstrates that our strategy is working. We recently, for example, reconfigured the homepage of BBC Sounds to feature two new ‘algotorical’ podcast and music recommendation rails across all platforms. We tested the new configuration through an A/B experiment with the original which demonstrated an 8% click-through rate uplift, indicating users are more engaged with our clearer and more relevant offerings."

The first spotting of 'algotorical' I can find is in an academic paper by Tiziano Bondini in 2019, looking at services like Spotify:  "We argue that music streaming platforms in combining proprietary algorithms and human curators constitute the “new gatekeepers” in an industry previously dominated by human intermediaries such as radio programmers, journalists, and other experts. The paper suggests understanding this gatekeeping activity as a form of “algo-torial power”.