AI-Powered Tools Boost Reader Engagement at The Quint, Driving Subscription Value

Chennai,India – The Quint,a leading digital news platform,is seeing significant gains in reader engagement and subscription conversions thanks to its innovative “NewsEasy” suite of AI-powered tools. These tools, developed in-house, are designed to make news consumption more accessible, focused, and efficient, leading to a nearly five-minute average session duration per user. This was revealed by Tarun Jain, Product Head at The Quint, during WAN-IFRA’s Digital media India conference in Chennai in mid-June [[1]].

NewsEasy: A Suite of Engagement-Boosting Features

NewsEasy is a collection of features embedded across most articles on The Quint’s website. These include concise summary modules, content highlights, interactive formats, and audio playback options.The goal is to create a more intentional and engaging reading experience.

• In Short: This feature provides a brief summary at the top of each article, capturing the editorial essence and prompting further reading. Editors review the text for clarity and factual accuracy.
• Big points: This section lists the main takeaways from the article, including key headlines, supporting examples, and additional context, reducing reader fatigue.
• Question and Answer Section: this highlights selected questions and answers extracted from the article, guiding reader reflection and comprehension.

Did You Know? The “In Short” feature, initially met with skepticism, has proven to increase reader engagement, with users more likely to read the full article after reviewing the summary.

Interactive Formats Drive Return Visits

To encourage habitual reading, The Quint offers a weekly quiz based on stories published in the past week. Each quiz features six objective-format questions verified by editors. The quiz contributes an additional 45 seconds to the average session time.

The site also includes an audio article player developed using ChatGPT, allowing users to listen to full articles with controls to pause, skip, rewind, or navigate to specific sections. This caters to users who prefer audio formats or want to revisit specific points without re-reading the entire text.

these tools are consolidated within a Swift Access Panel at the bottom of the website.Roughly 5 to 6 percent of the audience uses this panel as their primary mode of interaction.

Gamified Features Enhance Subscriber Value

The Quint has also built several gamified formats to attract and retain users, using in-house AI development. The Word Jumble Game, featuring multiple difficulty levels, currently engages between 10,000 and 15,000 users, with each user spending about 10 minutes interacting with the game.

The Keyquest campaign was launched to ease users into paywalled content. by spending time on the website and interacting with specific features, users can earn a key that unlocks one premium article of their choice. This approach helps explain the value of paid journalism in a tangible way and encourages exploration of the newsroom’s subscription model.

The Spin the Wheel campaign offered a chance to win a discount. The interactive format resulted in a 20 to 25 percent increase in conversions, as users felt they had earned the reward.

Pro Tip: Interactive elements like quizzes and games can significantly boost user engagement and encourage return visits to your news site.

Balancing Innovation and Editorial Integrity

Before the rollout of NewsEasy, there were concerns about how opinion writers might respond to AI-generated summaries and highlights appearing alongside their work.Though, the response from authors was largely positive, with many welcoming the additional context and requesting that the features be activated for their pieces.

Jain emphasized that building AI features within a newsroom depends on trust and cooperation between editorial and product teams. He added that such tools must serve the journalism, not replace it, and that this alignment is only possible when both sides work closely throughout the development process.

The development of these tools internally has not only reduced licensing costs but also ensured the products were shaped around editorial priorities from the outset.”The initiative demonstrated how collaboration between editorial and product teams can shape AI solutions that complement journalism rather than dilute it,” said Jain.

Key Metrics of The Quint’s Engagement Strategy

what strategies do you think are most effective for increasing reader engagement on a news website?

How can news organizations best balance the use of AI with maintaining editorial integrity?