Hürriyet leads thanks to Big Data, says Chairwoman Vuslat Doğan Sabancı

“Hürriyet World opened its doors to Big Data one and a half years ago to plan our promotion campaigns more efficiently. After two to three months of work, we managed to decrease our costs 40 percent without any drop in sales,” Sabancı said in her speech, stressing that the newspaper was “fortunate to see the material effects of Big Data quickly” and was starting to invest more.

Providing better content for the right reader has become the first pillar of Hürriyet’s Big Data strategy, Sabancı added, before noting that the second pillar is presenting a more efficiently targeted consumer base to the advertiser.

Hürriyet’s website, which now produces one billion page views each month, managed to decrease its bounce rate by 10 percent by presenting “the right content to the right person,” thanks to usage analysis based on Big Data, according to Sabancı. Similarly, a recent advertisement campaign for an automobile brand reached 20 percent more of its target audience on Hürriyet’s website.

“I think that Big Data is currently at the start of its voyage. There is still a long way to go,” Sabancı also said, arguing that journalistic “instincts” still have role in the game despite the rise of the numbers.

Hürriyet Dünyası, a media ecosystem that includes Hürriyet, Radikal and the Hürriyet Daily News, reaches 70 percent of Turkey’s Internet users with its newspapers, supplements, and websites and through mobile phones, tablets and social media applications.

At Smartcon 2015, organized by Smartcon and Analytics Center, participants agreed that Big Data, with the $51-billion economy it controls, is the “next revolution” after the Internet itself.

“Big Data is creating a new economy, changing existing business models, like what happened when the Internet was popularized in the early 1990s,” Teradata Director Dr. Frank Sauberlich said during the conference. But the concept affects daily life, too. 

“A person’s credit cart expenses are closely linked to the people around him or her. Banks analyze this data and all the information about your financial status can be formed,” MIT Media Lab founder Dr. Alex Sandy told the conference’s audience.