danielknox.net

I absolutely love the new Chartbeat (which you can see in action here).

The design is stunning and the dynamic / flashing elements highlight that this truly is real-time web-analytics… the demo site is fascinating to watch (and must be borderline addictive for site owners).

UPDATE: I particularly like the new ‘trending’ feature which lets editors see which stories are hot in real-time. Similar to the ‘movers’ feature with have on Newstogram.com but more visually stimulating than our current design.

Earlier this month Quantcast announced a Series C funding round of $27.5m (led by Cisco Systems and also including existing investors Polaris Venture Partners, Founders Fund and Revolution Ventures), increasing total investment in Quantcast to around $50m.

Today, Techcrunch is reporting that NuConomy is being acquired by LivePerson for around $3m.

Although they take different approaches, both of these companies are focused on making online analytics more useful and actionable for sites and advertisers - it is great to see investment activity in this space.

Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified released a white paper today foreshadowing a ‘coming revolution in web analytics’.

Peterson believes we are on the verge of seeing “third-generation digital analytics tools” that will provide greater insights and opportunities by bridging the gap between offline data (such as market research) and online data.

This white paper describes the impending revolution in digital analytics, one that has the potential to change both the web analytics and business intelligence fields forever.  We make the case for a new approach towards customer intelligence that leverages all available data, not just that data which is most convenient given the available tools.  We make this case not because we believe there is anything wrong with today’s tools when used appropriately, but because we believe digital analytics should take a greater role in business decision making in the future.

Peterson also believes that first- and second-generation digital analytics tools have failed to live up to expectations in part because companies thought that the tools themselves would lead to meaningful and actionable insights, and as a consequence failed to invest in the resources (aka analysts) that actually create insights out of the data collected by the tools. This is consistent with web analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik whose 10 / 90 Rule advocates spending 9 times more on resources to extract value from web analytics data than on the tools that collect the data.

This raises the question of whether paying for web analytics tools that collect web data will be a casualty of Peterson’s ‘revolution’. Companies who pay for their web analytics solutions are already the minority (this is true even for large enterprises: study finds only 33% of large enterprises pay for web analytics technologies), and of those who do pay for web analytics tools, most are considering displacing them with a free alternative. A primary motivation? Freeing up resources so they can invest more in the people necessary to drive insight rather than the technology used to collect and analyze data.

Seems like this ‘coming revolution’ will be good news for people with the skills to turn data into insights, and bad news for companies who have built their businesses on charging for collecting data.

Next New Networks published some interesting data last week about viewership to their family of online video channels, which include Indy Mogul, Barely Digital (home of Obama Girl) and new addition Hungry Nation. The study, conducted with the help of web video measurement firm Visible Measures, showed that the peak period for video viewership was the six hours between 12pm ET to 3pm PT, when many North Americans are presumably looking for a short distraction from work.

[caption id=”attachment_32” align=”alignnone” width=”481” caption=”Source: Visible Measures via Silicon Alley Insider”][/caption]

This trend is hardly surprising given the type of content that Next New Networks specializes in…. short-form entertainment videos. I recall from my time at Channel 4 that short-form videos were popular during the day and long-form videos were popular during the evening (and I bet if you looked at data for Hulu you’d see a similar trend).

By contrast, the general trend for most online news sites is still a morning peak (for instance, DailyMe.com has a readership peak most days between 7am ET and 10am PT). However, I suspect this general trend masks differences between different types of content on online news sites, some of which may provide a similar lunchtime ‘outlet’ to the Next New Networks videos. Newstogram, our soon-to-launch analytics / intelligence platform, will provide an easy way for online news sites to drill down and find the popularity of different categories, topics, people etc. throughout the day in order to identify the types of content where Lunchtime is the new Primetime.

It was a big weekend in the online news field with the Online News Association’s annual conference (“ONA09”) and the Online Journalism Awards (congrats to all the winners especially the awesome folks at Publish2 who won the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism).

While I didn’t go this year (DailyMe was represented by President / Chief Product Officer — and ONA Vice President — Neil Budde), I followed proceedings closely via the #ONA09 hashtag. I was particularly interested in the various sessions on the use of data and metrics by online news organizations (#ONAmtrx and #ONAdata). As Dana Chinn of USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism (and author of the NewsNumbers blog) pointed out, web analytics is a complex area for online news sites and measuring user engagement requires looking at a number of different metrics (Dana’s presentation is available here).

One of the hits of the #ONAdata strand seemed to be the alpha demo of DocumentCloud, the Knight News Challenge-funded investigative journalism tool that plans to “turn documents into data”. The ‘data’ part of DocumentCloud is powered by OpenCalais. The semantic processing for Newstogram, DailyMe’s analytics / intelligence platform for online news sites, is also powered in part by OpenCalais, so I was glad to see it getting exposure at ONA09. OpenCalais is a great opensource resource and I’m sure it won’t be long until OpenCalais-powered functionality is widespread in the online news industry.