How OU Daily Generated 94% More Traffic with One AI-Optimized Headline
When Seth Prince, the advisor for the OU Daily, the independent student newsroom at the University of Oklahoma, saw YESEO introduced on a call with the Oklahoma Media Center, he knew it would be a great way to engage students in trying tools.
"Parse.ly tells us that this was doing 94% more traffic than most posts published on our site in the past 90 days."
"Part of my mission, I feel like, is to help our students keep new developments front of mind and think about ethical ways to integrate them into their workflows," Prince said. "So when I saw this, I was like, alright, let's check this out. Let's see how it might work for us."
As soon as they started to try stories, they started to see results.
"I could tell when our editor in chief used it, and then very quickly, that headline was trending and we were getting alerts (in Parse.ly) for the number of readers on the story," Prince said. "He was like, 'hey, well, that's kind of cool to see it really did the trick. What else can I share?'"
Since then the Daily has shared stories it knew could be big traffic drivers and used YESEO in their workflow to give them the right information at the right time.
On June 13 when the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents met, OU Daily used YESEO to make sure their story hit the right keywords when the board was considering a 3% tuition increase and a 5% parking fee increase.
Since YESEO makes it as easy as hitting "Suggest Headlines" to try using AI models on your story, when the reporter clicked the button they received five headlines.
These are ideas that can help you get to your best work faster. In this case, the OU Daily headline is a mix between what AI generated for them and their own.
"I think it's a terrific tool," Prince said. "I wish there were more journalists helping shape the future of what AI may mean to our newsrooms, to kind of shape it for the forces of good hopefully."