Case Study: New York Magazine achieves 2.5x higher engagement with Shaped

New York Magazine boosts page views per session 2.5x with Shaped

New York Magazine, a publication with 25 million monthly readers, faced the challenge of creating a personalized homepage experience that matched the depth and quality of its diverse editorial portfolio. The goal was to move beyond a generic trending feed and increase reader engagement by delivering content tailored to each individual's interests. To achieve this, its parent company Vox Media partnered with Shaped to build a new personalization layer.

Using Shaped, Vox Media implemented a personalized article feed powered by embedding vectors and a custom query language (ShapedQL). The solution balanced personalization with recency by retrieving articles similar to a reader's interaction history while applying a time-decay factor to prioritize fresh content. This approach, which relied solely on embeddings without training ranking models, resulted in a 2.5x increase in page views per session. The personalized feed also led to a higher rate of conversion to paid subscriptions, functioning as a top-of-funnel driver for the publication's paywall.

New York Magazine