Mass Media Deploying Digital Personalization: An Empirical Investigation

The digitization provides mass media with various means to personalize their online offerings. By better meeting user preferences, personalization theoretically allows mass media to counteract declining circulations and revenues. While past research has extensively addressed approaches to personalization, it is unclear to what extent mass media use personalization - a gap we address in this paper. Against empirical evidence from a one-week experiment simulating browsing behaviors on five German newspaper websites, we find little personalization. We discuss this counter-intuitive finding and derive various suggestions for future research. We conclude with a summary and an outlook on personalization systems in mass media.