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
The Independent incorporates Facebook ‘Like’ button to let readers subscribe to journalists, topics
By Chris Hogg
As news sites become more social and adapt to new content discovery platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, innovation is flourishing. With readers suffering from content overload and media outlets being pressured to drive more pageviews, news organizations are turning to targeting capabilities to develop a solution to both problems.
Enter: The Facebook Like button. We’ve covered this in the past, when ESPN used the Like button to create custom news feeds for people based on their interests around specific teams.
Now, The Independent is following suit and allowing readers to subscribe to specific reporters.
“Starting with a few key areas of the site, we’ve been developing the tools to let people get their news from The Independent through social networks in tighter categories, designed to better reflect the parts of our editorial output you particularly enjoy,” Jack Riley wrote in a blog post. “To that end, you can now ‘like’ all of our commentators on Facebook, and if you do then when they publish a story it’ll appear in your news feed.”
A Like-button subscription option is a great way for media outlets to bring in new readers. And because content is so specific to their interest, those readers are more likely to be happy with the content they consume.
In today’s media-saturated landscape, people don’t always go to a site to check daily news. Furthermore, just because a reader was interested in one article from a sports or business section doesn’t mean they’re going to read everything from that section.
Today, when readers visit a news site, they may follow a specific journalist, or perhaps a particular topic. But getting someone spend hours on a site to find information they care about just isn’t going to happen across the board.
Categories once worked as ways to organize content by interest, but they can be too broad in today’s age where there is a plentiful supply of content.
The Independent‘s use of the Facebook Like button is innovative because it’s targeted and users opt-in. Riley gives examples using key writers such as Robert Fisk and Johann Hari, saying readers can “Like” them on The Independent‘s website and when they publish readers are notified via Facebook. The news organization has built similar functionality around football clubs so readers can get targeted news about their favourite teams.
Welcome to the era of personalized news where publishers build-in features outside of their own websites.
Twitter CEO says 40% of all tweets created on mobile
By Chris Hogg
If you ever needed a bigger sign of where content consumption is heading, look no further than Twitter. The micro-messaging service that saw more than 25 billion Tweets in the last year says its users are increasingly moving to mobile platforms.
In an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed nearly half of all Twitter posts are made from a mobile device.
“Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices,” Costolo told Kara Swisher of All Things D. “That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago.”
Costolo also said 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile, indicating more and more people are consuming media on platforms other than a computer.
Costolo credits the increasing mobile usage to the launch of apps launches for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry.
According to a 2010 blog post from Twitter’s co-founder former CEO Evan Williams, Twitter’s mobile website, SMS, Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for BlackBerry are the most-used Twitter apps after the company’s website.
Twitter recently announced a new round of funding with investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as well as existing investors. Swisher revealed the round brought in $200 million with a valuation of $3.7 billion.
In his interview at CES, Costolo said Twitter now has more than 350 employees, 100 of whom were hired in Q4 of 2010.
Mobile usage is on the rise across the board, and companies like Google are betting their future on it. According to Search Engine Land, Google’s AdMob unit is reporting more than two billion ad requests on a daily basis (more than quadrupling over the last 12 months).
Recent data released by comScore also indicates big mobile growth; 234 million Americans aged 13 and older used mobile devices for the three month average period ending in Nov. 2010 and 61.5 million Americans were said to own a smartphone (up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period).
The following is a breakdown of the most popular mobile operating systems:
For more on the future of mobile, check out how media companies are harnessing the mobile space or the 11 key elements for the future of mobile.
NPR: British newspapers flaunt their bias, labelled “comment-papers”
The first part of an NPR investigative series looks at the blatant bias showing up in many British newspapers. Reporter David Folkenflik interviewed several editors and politicians in London to probe the newspaper industry’s long-standing view of telling readers what political party they support.
As the articles states, “….Britain’s big daily newspapers are pretty clear about what they favor. And that inversion offers some insight into the debate over media bias here in the U.S.”
Nick Boles, a Conservative member of Parliament from England’s East Midlands, goes on to cite examples from the country’s big-name newspapers: “If a Guardian journalist were to interview me, I would definitely assume that they would be trying to penetrate into areas of weakness in what the government is doing … or particular policies that they are very worried about. Whereas with The Telegraph, they’d probably be more likely to be … looking for ways in which the government was betraying the Conservative cause.”
Anne Begg, a Labor member of Parliament, says she’s not happy with British journalism. “One of the concerns I have with some of the print media is that it’s almost all comment, which is always partial and is always partisan,” she says in the NPR article. “In that respect, I don’t know if you could call them newspapers anymore — they’re perhaps comment papers.”
The article concludes by stating BBC is well known for being balanced and fair compared to its newspaper counterparts.
Firefox pulls ahead of Internet Explorer in Europe to become most-used browser
By Chris Hogg
According to StatCounter, Firefox is now the most-used Internet browser in Europe. The Mozilla Web browser has overtaken Internet Explorer (IE) to claim the Web thrown in Europe.
According to the report, Firefox took 38.11% of European market share, compared to IE’s 37.52% in December.
“This is the first time that IE has been dethroned from the number one spot in a major territory,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter in a news release. “This appears to be happening because Google’s Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share.”
The report also indicates Google Chrome is in third place but gaining market share rapidly; it grew from 5.06% in December 2009 to 14.58% in December 2010.
“We are probably seeing the impact of the agreement between European Commission competition authorities and Microsoft, to offer EU users a choice and menu of browsers from March last,” said Aodhan Cullen in a statement.
Across the pond in North America, IE is still dominant with 48.92% market share followed by Firefox (26.7%), Chrome (12.82%) and Safari (10.16%).
The numbers are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample greater than 15 billion pageviews/month (4.9 billion from North America).
Blog Categories
Recommendations
Future of Media Sponsors:
