Newsbeat analytics tool for news publishers to be available later this quarter
Content is king, goes the maxim, but someone needs to keep watch over the king’s activities. That’s where website analytics come in, and Tony Haile is confident his upcoming service Newsbeat will be extremely appealing to news publishers.
He’s already brought Chartbeat to content providers – since 2009, Chartbeat has accumulated 3,000 clients, giving them real-time data on their website traffic and demographics. For instance, Chartbeat can determine who is reading, writing or idle (based on the mouse’s movement). It could also tell which page within the site is being visited most often right now.
Clients range from the Boston Globe to Le Monde in France to the digital media blog TechCrunch to John McCain’s website. Even Groupon uses Chartbeat to find out which deals are popular. Customers pay a minimum of $10 a month, if there are 1,000 visitors on the site concurrently, and they pay an additional $10 for every incremental addition of 1,000 visitors at one time.
“Chartbeat is accessible to people who have difficulty looking at data, or who never got into it,” says Haile, founder of Chartbeat.
Now he’s adding another layer of analytics. Newsbeat will focus on news outlets (while Chartbeat was available to any website, such as politicians’ home pages). As much as Chartbeat is billed as a one-size-fits-all solution for analytics, Newsbeat will focus on what news providers look for. “We wanted to build something that spoke to specific needs of news publishers,” Haile adds.
The service has yet to be released. It’s currently in alpha with several testers and will be available sometime in the first quarter, Haile says.
Newsbeat, much like its predecessor, will help publishers recognize what content is popular and how they improve traffic by, say, adding similar content to the site. “So the sports section editor can see that his stories aren’t in the top 20 for the entire site, and he can do something about that,” Haile says. Editors can adapt their front page based on a certain page’s performance.
He assures Chartbeat regulars the new analytics tool will look and function differently from anything else in their portfolio. “We’ll also include some features we can’t discuss right now,” says Haile from his New York City office.
So how would Newsbeat be different than the ubiquitous Google Analytics? Haile says his products offer realtime data within 15 seconds, unlike Google’s offering which gives you delayed stats on your site’s traffic (from a few hours up to a day). Also, Google Analytics is in hot water in Europe because German regulators accuse Google of collecting IP addresses, which they say violate an individual’s privacy.
Haile assures us his company doesn’t collect IP addresses or even store them in any way; rather, his technology allows a small piece of Java code on your site to send “a sonar ping” back to his back-end system, telling them where and how someone is viewing the site.
The company is lean, only 11 people on staff, and Haile credits word of mouth for marketing success. “We actually have zero marketing and PR budgets, so clients tell other people, and so on. We think a great product sells itself.”
Chartbeat and the upcoming Newsbeat face stiff competition from other analytics companies. Beside Google’s popular product, Omniture is a major player and the UK’s GoSquared recently launched the latest version of its LiveStats tool. As this space heats up, and more content providers look for ways to boost their SEO and online presence, Haile says his company will be moving fast to accommodate the growing needs of clients. “We’re a startup, we have to move quick,” he adds.
For publishers interested in trying out Newsbeast, visit the site and add your email to the list of potential alpha testers