Real Time Analytics Matrix

The end of every year brings about a chance to reflect on what has happened and what you want to have happen moving forward with your company, products and customers.

As a software company focused on bringing real time data into the hands of online media publishers, it has been an amazingly interesting year of trying to get our pitch and service correct for various types of online media organizations.

I dusted off this Analtyics Matrix diagram today (from the book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris, and Robert Morison), which we as a company use to remind ourselves of where we are playing in the broad space of "Analytics".

Highlighted in yellow are the "information" and "insight" blocks we focus on with our service publishflow™.

What is happening right now? AND What is the next best action?

2010 was very much about perfecting the "information" side of our platform and services. 2011 will be about working with media publishers to determine what "actions" to take with the all of the real time visitor, content and revenue information they now have using publishflow™.

The problem with Newspapers

The problem with newspapers may not be the 'news' maybe it's the 'paper'.



'For the Wall Street Journal's 10th annual Tech Innovation Awards, Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute received the Gold award for its technology to make paper-thin computer screens with a twist'.

These new flex screens once brought to market, could replace the 'paper' in newspaper.

Full Story

Publishflow API Upgrade

We just released the latest version of the publishflow™ API - version 1.2.

Our new and improved API will now give you the tools you need to access your publications audience trends, behaviors and revenues. You can connect to our API using a simple HTTP POST or HTTP GET. The data is then returned to you in either JSON or XML format. This gives you the most flexibility to connect to us however you like and get data back in a form that's going to be very quick and easy for you to work with.

There are three sets of functions currently covered by our API:

• Realtime data for top stories, authors and categories
• Analysis of authors, platforms, categories, locales and referrers
• Analysis of individual media items

In order to begin working with the publishflow™ API you will require the following:

• An active account
• Developer ID provided by us
• A working knowledge of network programming using a web friendly language like PHP, Python, Java or Ruby

If you are an active developer using the API you should not notice any difference since it is backward compatible to previous releases - but there are new method calls.

Check out the API for more details.

Journalism and Data Visualization

We came across this really interesting documentary on data visualization and the evolving use of info graphics in journalism and thought it was worth sharing.


Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

Using MongoDB?

If you are like us here at publishflow and use MongoDB you will want to update both the database binary and driver now and update often.  The last driver update improved performance by 10x for most of our 'read' operations.  That's a huge improvement. You could reach a couple of conclusions about this.  The first is that the previous driver versions were pretty bad.  The second is that 10gen - the folks behind MongoDB are still busy improving the product.  It's also pretty clear that 10gen is into rapid development and have short release cycles since we have seen at least 3 major revisions in the past couple of months.

Our experience so far with MongoDB is that while it was always extremely fast for our own use-case, it has also become increasingly stable (almost solid) in the past month with the most recent revisions.

If you are investigating NoSQL data stores and you don't mind a little turbulence (in development and production) in exchange for scalability, performance and low costs we'd recommend MongoDB.

Newsweek and Amazon Web Services

Newsweek and Amazon Web Services

A significant move happened in the online publishing world this week and it is a sign of things to come for any online publishing company that is burning money managing their own hosting operations.

Newsweek.com announced this week that the site is outsourcing its Web site hosting duties to Amazon, joining a small but growing number of companies experimenting with cloud computing.

“Until now, Newsweek.com had been hosted by its parent company, The Washington Post Co. The media company has been trying to cut losses at its magazine division, which recorded $29.3 million in operating losses in 2009. By joining the cloud, Newsweek expects to save close to $500,000 annually.

“It saves Newsweek money,” said Geoff Reiss, vp, general manager, Newsweek Digital.

“Lots of people out there built their own infrastructure and are going to be tortured by this idea of sunk costs.”

Kontexto started using Amazon Web Services in early 2008 and now our whole real time content analytics platform is built on the Amazon cloud. We have always been lobbing the idea around of launching a cloud based news infrastructure that takes care of everything post publishing including storage, search, delivery and analytics. Give the CMS and editing freedom to the content creators, but hand off everything else.

After newsweek.com, it is hard to say who will be the next to transition hosting to the cloud. Some other certainly have without announcing it. But it is good to see a brand name publication make an organizational shift to the cloud.

FT.com Uses Analytics to Drive Revenues Up

It’s always encouraging to come across a media publisher that believes in audience analytics as much as we do. In a recent article The Newsonomics of the FT as an Internet retailer, The Financial Times reveals that it uses analytics all the time to drive reader revenue and advertising revenue.

The core of our real time audience analytics services hinges on making real time audience data accessible and meaningful to online media publishers. It is one thing to capture and display alot of data, but the real value is making what you capture and display actually useable. And what better way to use analytics than to help a media publisher make more money.

FT.com views itself as an Internet retailer more than an online publisher. It is a point often lost by or not even contemplated by most online media publishers. Once you realize that you are trying to sell a product (content) the same way a retailer is trying to sell a physical good, a new paradigm opens up and you can look at your online media publishing operations in a completely new way.

Where do you start? by collecting as much real time audience and revenue information as you can for each link you produce. And you continue to do this all the time, forever more.

If it seems like a daunting challenge, it is if you go it alone. It’s not if you use services like publishflow™. You can begin tracking real time audience behaviour, content performance and revenue performance for your online media property in under 5 minutes. Don’t believe me…