With consumers increasingly expecting content and experiences to be tailored to their individual preferences, media outlets can take notes from other industries on how to shift to user-centric business models. 

At the 2025 INMA Latin America Conference, Santiago Arieu, media tech and advisor at Argentina-based media consultancy Diagonalminds.com, advised outlets to maintain relevancy through personalising their content.

Leveraging first-party data to target users

For Arieu, the e-commerce sector is a great example news companies can learn from. 

E-commerce companies have unique visibility into the behaviour of customers, with information like purchase histories and browsing habits enabling these platforms to strategically advertise products to consumers based on their interests. 

“This is their leverage now,” Arieu said. 

Similarly, digital news platforms have a treasure trove of first-party data to take advantage of. These outlets have access to what mediums each user prefers to engage with — be it audio, video, or text — and what content topics they have shown interest in.

So just like how e-commerce companies can resurface a product to a user that had added it to their cart but never checked out, media outlets can target consumers with news articles on subjects they have engaged with previously.  

“We can contact that user with a little more content on that same topic, or maybe some promotion, or anything we can offer them related to that article they already manifested their interest on,” Arieu said.

It can be just as important to know what users are not interested in, too. 

Arieu brought up media outlets that deliver national news as well as local news tied to a specific city and how they need to differentiate between these two audiences to present each with the content they are looking for. 

The potential risk here, he warned, is in frustrating a user with content about a city that they do not live in.

“If we show users a table that they’re not interested in 10 times, and then they leave, we know why,” Arieu said.

Newsletters are a key tool for bolstering user engagement 

Moving to a user-centric model means media outlets must do more to bring content straight to consumers. Newsletters offer a unique opportunity to directly reach consumers, Arieu said. 

Because newsletters are something users have to intentionally sign up for, they are more likely to be interested in and engage with its content,” Arieu said: “It’s a very specific, niche audience. They’re very loyal users.”

Newsletters are also a great conduit for serving advertisements. Many newsletters are focused on specific topics, such as technology or business, which allows branded content about those subjects to be seamlessly integrated. That means users get more content they are interested in while also driving revenue for the media outlet.

Personalisation can further add value to newsletters by surfacing different advertisements tailored to the time of day that the user is reading it, Arieu said.

“If they open it in the morning and they didn’t finish reading it, then get back to it in the afternoon, the server can identify that and adjust.”

Reducing friction between media platforms and users

Arieu explained why media outlets need to make it as easy as possible for users to subscribe. If a user is interested in subscribing to a publication, the last thing they want to deal with is filling out a long form with invasive amounts of their personal information. 

Instead, news media should lower the barrier to entry.

“The trend of one-click is generating great results,” Arieu said.

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