How many links a day do you produce?

One of the things we monitor for our digital media clients is the number of new content links they produce each day. New content links can be stories, blog posts, photo galleries or videos. Anything published to the web or mobile with a unique URL that has a chance to be consumed.

Generally "New links per day" is an overlooked metric, which can actually be an excellent indicator over time of:

1. Search visibility - more seo friendly links means more love from google, yahoo and bing

2. Sharing potential - more links enables your twitter and facebook fans the opportunity to share more frequently

3. Revenue generated -more links means more potential page views with CPM display ad payouts

If you notice that your new links per day is trending up over time, then you are boosting your chance to increase your search, sharing and revenue possibilities on web and mobile.


At the #paywalls12 conference in London today, some recent tweets to confirm similar thinking at economist.com.

Economist doubles content production...





New content has to increase...






Contact us to find out how to start measuring your new links per day and other visitor, competitor and topic trending metrics.

Kontexto Secures $1.4 million Growth Investment

We are pleased to announce that Kontexto, owner of publishflow.com, has secured a $1.4 million investment from Akoranga AG.

Details are available in the press release below:



Kontexto Secures Series A Growth Investment

Investment to Accelerate Sales and Product Development of Company’s Real Time Data Collection and Analysis Platform

London,UK (PRWEB UK) 15 January 2012

Kontexto Inc., a high growth leader in real time data collection and analysis for media organizations, today announced that it has secured $1.4 million in funding from Akoranga AG. Akoranga is a swiss based private investment firm. This investment will primarily be used to grow Kontexto’s sales and product development activities.

Kontexto provides media companies with a complete set of real time data collection and analysis services that help to extract business value from massive amounts of online audience, competitor and social sharing data. Broadcasters, newspapers, content agencies, portals and B2B publishers are all working with Kontexto’s platform to facilitate their ongoing real time data collection and analysis needs including copyright audits, audience analysis, revenue performance monitoring, social sharing trending and competitor intelligence.

“We reviewed many companies across Europe and North America who are trying to help media organizations create value from online data analysis. Kontexto in our estimation has the most flexible data collection capabilities and when they say real time data analysis they mean it,” said Jenifer Osterwalder of Akoranga. “Our strategy is to find great teams with big visions and early customer adoption of their services, Kontexto fits this and we are pleased to welcome them into our investment portfolio.”

“We have spent the past two years strategically building our customer base with the largest media brands in the world,” said Tom St.John CEO and co-founder of Kontexto. “Now is the time to accelerate our sales and product development activities in North America and Europe. Akoranga is the right investment partner to help us with this next growth phase and we are excited to be working with them.”

With the new funding, Kontexto will be hiring a new VP of Global Sales to help build and manage the sales activities of the Kontexto real time data collection and analysis platform. Additional investment will be made in expanding the platform capabilities to handle real time data analysis across all social media services including Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus and Foursquare.

Link to release

ottawacitizen.com and canada.com are live

publishflow continues its Canadian roll out from coast to coast. The service is active in every major news market in Canada.

ottawacitizen.com and canada.com are the latest news websites to activate publishflow.

With each additional newsroom activating publishflow, we continue to gather all the feedback we can to keep improving the service.

As the only service on the market combining real time audience, competitor and topic trending metrics in a single interface... publishflow is quickly becoming a real time tool of choice for digital newsrooms across the country.

publishflow is cookie free

There is a growing movement internationally towards improving online data privacy and protection for consumers.

Website owners are being pressured and directed by government bodies to become more transparent about their online data collection practices.

The main area of priority for privacy regulators right now centers around the policing of "Cookies".

Cookies are text files installed on a website visitors computer. They are used to store information about website visitor activity.

Some cookies expire when a website browser is closed down (Session Cookies) and some remain on a users computer after a browser is closed (Persistent Cookies).

Some cookies are installed by the website owner (First Party Cookies) and some cookies are installed by third parties (Third Party Cookies).

publishflow currently uses a single cookie to identify new viewers vs returning viewers on our client websites.

For all new clients signing up for publishflow, we now offer a cookie free option.

We take your privacy concerns very seriously and have taken steps to become one of the first real time analytics service providers to offer a cookie free service.

You still get access to all the same real time audience, competitor and topic trending data , however you can be confident that we are not capturing and storing session based data or viewing history depending on your privacy requirements.

If you have any questions about this please contact us directly

Amazon Cloud Reader validates HTML5

A lot has been said of HTML5 and its potential to disrupt or eventually displace the stranglehold Apple has over the mobile app marketplace. As with many new technologies, we all wait to see the killer app to teach the rest of us what is possible and to raise the bar. Amazon has done this with their web based book reader. I 'installed' it (by visiting https://read.amazon.com/about in my browser) last night on my first-gen iPad, logged in and started reading a book where I had left off the previous evening. It just works. Scrolling and swiping through pages felt no different than the native reader.

One of the first things the app does is request permission to increase the amount of local storage permitted to 50MB. The reader takes advantage of HTML5 local storage and lets users read while offline. For what it's intended to do, read books and browse/buy from the Amazon book store, it's excellent.

I think this app will show other book, newspaper and magazine publishers 'how to do it' and slowly begin the move away from Apple's app store. Publishers that make the move will gain access to a broader audience across more devices while keeping an additional 30% of each media sale in their pocket rather than handing it over to Apple.

Referral Analytics for Online News Teams

Understanding where your readers/viewers are coming from and which precise links they are spending time with is something online news teams need as quickly as possible.

News is a fast changing and unpredictable business and so are the infinite number of potential places your links can show up across the web to ultimately drive readers/viewers back to your website(s) or mobile web services.

publishflow has just launched a new version of its real time referral analytics system, making it even easier and more effective for online news teams

All of our existing clients and any new clients going forward can now access real time referral data in one click.

Although publishflow monitors real time referrals from any web domain... we have paid special attention to search engine referrals from Google, Yahoo! and Bing, real time Twitter referrals and real time Facebook referrals.

You read it right. With one click in publishflow you can view real time referral data for Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Twitter, Facebook and any other referrer across the web.

To give you a taste, let's take a quick look at how your online news team can use publishflow real time referral analytics to monitor your performance across all the Google search properties:


Google Quick Glance Graph - Real Time Google Distribution








Google Quick Glance Table - Real Time Google Referral Breakdown












Google Drilldown - Real Time Page Views for Specific Story Links












Google Keyword Drilldown - Real Time Page Views for Specific Story Topics













If you are interested in activating a free 30 day evaluation of publishflow click here to send us a message or contact us @kontexto.

Will HTML5 Get A Boost Today?

June 30 (Today) is the deadline for app makers to get in compliance with Apple's strict new rules for in-app payment and subscription links.

Everyone's still confused about how to interpret the rules -- and as written, the guidelines could get big-name apps like Amazon's Kindle booted from Apple's iTunes App Store. The new rules explicitly prohibit apps that include "external mechanisms for purchases ... such as a 'buy' button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book."

The issue is that Apple wants content sellers to use its own in-app payments system, which gives Apple a 30% cut of all sales. Many merchants consider that a dealbreaker.

Other developers are evading Apple's clutches by eschewing mobile apps altogether and building around an emerging Web standard called HTML5.

HTML5 supports video, offline reading, touch and gestural interaction -- all functions that, until recently, were only available for mobile devices on native apps. The Financial Times and ESPN each built new mobile apps in HTML5.

That lets them connect with customers directly through the mobile Web -- no app store required.

Most of the publishers we work with will be going the HTML5 route as part of their mobile content delivery strategies moving forward. Using existing development talent, controlling the revenue stream and making mobile app experiences on the fly without having to wait for in-store approvals seem like the perfect storm to make this inevitable for all publishers.