Spotify
Spotify curates a customizes listening experience for all their premium users through a variety of methods. When listening to a user-curated Spotify playlist, one can select the “enhanced shuffle” button, which allows Spotify to add songs to the playlist queue that match the musical vibe of the playlist and fits the user’s preferred songs. Additionally, when a user goes to search for and play one song, Spotify personalizes the songs that are queued after this song to, again, fit the musical vibe of the first song as well as the user’s typically preferred music. Finally, Spotify creates a Spotify Wrapped for each premium user at the end of each calendar year, which highlights trends in the user’s Spotify activity and includes a custom playlist of their most listened to songs of the year.
With this common trend of anticipating and queueing the songs a user would likely enjoy hearing (both based off the vibe of the current music playing and the user’s overall listening habits), Spotify is optimizing for longer listening time. The more the user enjoys the songs playing at the moment, the longer the user will listen for. In the image below, notice that Spotify personalizes recommendations for me.
LinkedIn also utilizes customization to optimize its key metrics. For example, LinkedIn customizes the order of the content it shows the user, including job openings, network connection suggestions, and others’ announcements. If the feed is organized in such a manner that the user stays engaged and is motivated to continue scrolling and browsing, the users’ session time is increased. In the image below, notice that we have a customized top stories feed and friends’ post feed.
TikTok
TikTok also customizes the feed of each user, selecting and ordering specific TikToks that they anticipate a higher likelihood the user will interact with. Along with this feed customization is ad customization, where TikTok similarly selects ads for each user that have a higher probability of engagement. The more personalized this algorithm is, the more likely these ads will be successful in gaining new customers.
