How to See these Stats

Getting to this data isn't easy, though. First of all, you have to use AdSense for feed or FeedBurner to track this data. Then, in Google Analytics, you have to go to Traffic Sources and click on All Traffic Sources. After this, you still have to filter your traffic by entering 'feedburner' in the search box at the bottom of the page. In the Campaigns view you can also filter stats by 'feedburner.'

In today's announcement, Google explains how to customize the way FeedBurner tags clicks it sends to Google Analytics. Google plans to create more endpoints for FeedBurner data in the near future.

More to Come

FeedBurner users will be happy to hear that Google plans to release more features in FeedBurner that will take advantage of this new functionality in the coming weeks. FeedBurner had been lying dormant for quite a while. Today's announcement hopefully signals the end of this stage in FeedBurner's development.

Facebook Platform product manager Mark Kinsey writes on the Facebook Developers blog, "Today we're making the sharing experience on Facebook and off even richer by launching the next version of Facebook Share, with a live counter, as well as new ways to measure how content is being shared on Facebook."

"You can do this programmatically by calling the links.getStats API method, or you can run an FQL query on the link_stat table," writes Kinsey. "By giving you access to this data for all URLs, we hope you'll create tools to help analyze and understand how users interact with your content on Facebook."

The Facebook post further notes that Techmeme, bit.ly, and awe.sm have already put this data to use in analyzing traffic and monitoring user attention.

The lesson here is that while we're meant to "embrace the chaos" of audience feedback, it's best to look at the forest (or overall reactions) rather than the individual (and sometimes spiteful) trees.

While competitor Infegy displays relevant web chatter, UberVU goes one step further by offering developers a chance to create their own mash up and filtering tools. The ContextVoice API's new search functionality allows developers to measure public reactions within specified time frames. Explains the company, "A conversation with 10 reactions in the last minute may be hotter than one with 1500 reactions distributed over a month. But the hot conversation matters more, because that's the one that has the attention and momentum."

Suggested mashups include social media dashboards to measure outreach, memetrackers to get the lowdown on entire industries, community dialogue tools to pull comments back onto your site and comment tracking for stock trading purposes. To check out the search API visit the ContextVoice developer page.

Today, the analytics feature has been enhanced to provide even more data than before, this time with a specific focus on Facebook shares. Also new today is the integration of Tweetmeme and Digg data into shares as well as YouTube stats for video shares. For anyone using Facebook to promote their content, Sharein has just made itself indispensable.

Better Analytics for Facebook Shares

Today, in addition to seeing the views, reach, and re-shares for links shared on Twitter and Facebook, Sharein is now capturing data on Facebook "likes" and comments. In fact, it's even pulling in the comments' text itself so you can use the service as a one-stop shop for tracking the popularity of items on Facebook.

And as before, the aggregate data tracked using the service is further analyzed on your main "Shares" page where you can see the most popular links for the past week, month, or year. You'll also be able to tell who your most popular sharers are so you can better engage with your core fans or customers.

New Features Help Increase Click-Throughs on Facebook

The way your shared links appear on Facebook has also been revamped as of today. Sharein is (at last!) generating a thumbnail to accompany an article, just like how Facebook's own tool displays native link shares. The shares now also feature data on the number of tweets courtesy of Tweetmeme and the number of diggs on the social news website Digg.com. This extra information can help generate more interest in the shared link as visitors will be able to see at a glance how popular the article is on other social networks.

For video shares, extra information has been added here, too. When sharing YouTube videos, the ratings info and total views are now displayed. Again, this is to help increase click-throughs by highlighting the popularity of the content.

Try it Now!

With all the features being offered by this tool, we're surprised that more people aren't talking about or using the service. However, Sharein is still so new that few may have heard of it yet. We're sure that once Facebook and Twitter marketers, businesses, and any others who want to track their shares on social networks get wind of what Sharein can do, its popularity will increase dramatically. If you haven't tried Sharein yet, you can set up an account today from the company home page.

If you think you aren't affected by these types of troubles because you don't own a Pre, think again. Multiple iPhone applications - yes, even the ones approved by Apple - are also busy tracking your personal data and "phoning home." Which applications? What data? As an end user, determining this information is difficult. But some iPhone developers have been digging into this issue and the results of their findings may surprise you.

As far as we know right now, Apple itself is not performing any user tracking via its pre-installed applications. However that doesn't mean that you're not being tracked by someone, somewhere. There are a number of applications available now in the iTunes App Store which track your user data, including things like location, your iPhone's unique ID, the phone's model, whether it's "jailbroken," and possibly even your gender, birth month and year, and whether the application is Facebook-enabled.

Specifically, a mobile analytics company called Pinch Media is being singled out for being more intrusive than others when it comes to this sort of tracking. Mobile analytics firms like Pinch allow developers to insert code into their application for the purpose of tracking and analyzing how their users interact with applications. In general, this type of tracking is relatively harmless for the end user and helpful to the developer. It reveals stats like: how long did the user play the game or use the app? Do users access this feature more than that one? What time of day are users launching the app? And so on. The results of this type of tracking allow developers to make their apps more usable and help them redesign or tweak aspects of the apps that may not be working.

However, in Pinch Media's case, the user tracking goes a bit further according to one iPhone developer. He says applications using Pinch Media track the following information:

• iPhone's unique ID
• iPhone model
• OS version
• Application version (in this case, camera zoom 1.x)
• If the application is cracked/pirated
• If your iPhone is jailbroken
• Time & date you start the application
• Time & date you close the application
• Your current latitude & longitude
• Your gender (if Facebook enabled)
• Your birth month (if Facebook enabled)
• Your birth year (if Facebook enabled)

What's worse is that you're often never told that the app will be performing this level of detailed tracking and you're often never given the opportunity to opt-out. The data recorded is continuously tracked every time you use the application. This violation of user privacy is so egregious that the developer even goes so far as to call Pinch Media "iPhone spyware."

In addition, a recent post on the iPhone Dev Team blog, the site hosted by the developers who release the jailbreaking and unlocking applications for the iPhone, also calls out Pinch Media for tracking your location even when it's unnecessary to do so. In the example they cite, a tip calculator app was identified as tracking your geographical location through time and uploading that data to Pinch Media.

It's Not Pinch Media That's to Blame, It's Developers

However, in the comments of the blog post, one developer using Pinch Media analytics fights back, claiming that his applications do request permission before gathering statistics. He bristles at the suggestion that they should be called "spyware."

Pinch Media is also frustrated by these accusations. They argue that no location can be sent back without the user's explicit opt-in. Since you have to press a button that explicitly allows the application to access your location, how could this possibly be without the user's consent? The company also claims that the blog posts by this 0th3lo person are "full of factual inaccuracies" (although they didn't detail specifically which parts are inaccurate). They even hint that the blogger's motivations are less about exposing user privacy violations and more about retaliating against the company because Pinch Media recently launched tools which allow developers to identify pirated (aka stolen) applications. That would be something that this particular developer, an active member of the hackulo.us forums (a forum for pirated apps), would not be fond of.

The company assures us that their product complies with all major privacy laws, saying that no personally identifying information is stored and the user opts in through the Licensed Application EULA, which specifically permits the gathering of information and sending it to third parties. In fact, says a company spokesperson, the tracking done by their company is even less intrusive than web analytics, where information is gathered without anyone's consent or opt-in, pointing to ads on this very website as an example of that.

Is This Really an Issue?

At the end of the day, is this sort of tracking all that invasive? Well, tracking a unique identifier such as the iPhone's UUID is not exactly comparable to the type of tracking you see on the web today. It's not anonymous data - it's an exact ID that's unique to each physical device that Apple manufactures. And Pinch Media is not the only analytics company to track this information. Also, when tracking your location data on the iPhone (0th3lo says Pinch Media calculates this to 8 decimal points), that can be far more exact and accurate than any sort of geographically-based IP address look-up on the web. Instead of getting a general location, location data on a GPS-enabled mobile can identify your precise latitude and longitude.

But should you be concerned? Perhaps. Although Apple requires that applications ask if they can use your location upon launch, there aren't necessarily requirements for app developers to disclose what data they're tracking beyond location data, how often it's tracked, and what they're doing with that data when it's received. They also don't require that developers ask for your consent before this sort of detailed monitoring takes place.

Still, not all applications using analytics on the back-end are to be feared. For the most part, the data being recorded is anonymous and helps the developers make better apps. The problem is that, as of today, there's no way to know which apps are the safe ones.

In light of Facebook's recently announced vanity URL availability, founder Jesse Stay writes, "We're extending our existing Facebook profile redirect URLs, which redirect yourusername.socialtoo.com to your Facebook profile, and adding an additional layer of analytics to the whole process. So tonight, you'll be able to get a Facebook vanity URL and get the SEO benefits, but the URL you'll want to hand out to all your friends will be your SocialToo vanity URL because we'll provide statistics around those clicking on the URL, the browsers they're using, where they're located, and where they're clicking from." And yes, there's an app for that.

Here are some examples of the types of data users will be able to see:

To get the analytics-powered profile, all a user needs to do is register an account, click on the link to get a special code from Facebook, provide the code (along with a SocialToo username and password), and submit that information. No Twitter username is necessary, although providing Twitter information will give users additional features for Twitter. When the user logs in, he will see the new "SocialStats" tab with statistics for their URL.

Twitter exposes conversations that can show us who's in anyone's inner circle because conversations there are public and programatically accessible. In the following post we look at the data and find out who has the most reciprocal conversations on Twitter with 10 geek heroes - from the founders of big sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon to nonprofit geeks working to challenge injustices.

In the charts below, assembled using developer Pete Warden's service Mailana, you'll see the top 5 people these geek heroes have reciprocal conversations with on Twitter and a screenshot of their larger web of connections. You can click through the links below to visit the full Mailana interface or visit this page to learn more about the methodology. On Warden's site you can click on the "info" links and see exactly what topics these friends discuss. There you'll see explanations like "@kanter sent 47 messages to @agahran and got 46 back." Note that these charts are just based on reciprocated public replies - not private direct messages.

If this post helps you get as excited as we are about Twitter, we hope you'll join us there.

Evan Williams

Evan Williams was the co-founder of Blogger and is now the co-founder and CEO of Twitter. He announced today that he's an expectant father! Who does he converse with most on Twitter?

1. Sara Morishige Williams, Ev's wife. Good man, Ev.
2. Chris Sacca, a startup investor and adviser to Twitter.
3. Jason Goldman, Product Manager at Blogger turned Product Manager at Twitter.
4. Biz Stone, Twitter's co-founder.
5. Sarah Lacy, tech business journalist (now on staff at TechCrunch) and author of the excellent Web 2.0 history book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good.

Here's Ev's full profile on Mailana. (Photo CC from Joi Ito.)

Veronica Belmont

Veronica Belmont is everybody's favorite geek video host. Who does she trade Tweets with the most? You might discover a person or two on her list.

1. Ryan Block, gadget blogging rock star and founder of Gdgt.com.
2. Tom Merritt, CNET podcast host.
3. Casey McKinnon, web actress and show host.
4. Patrick Norton, Veronica's co-host on Tekzilla.
5. Felicia Day, gaming web show host.

You can explore the Veronica-sphere here.

Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose, founder of social news site Digg, has long been one of the most-followed people on Twitter. More than 320,000 have opted-in to receiving Tweets from Kevin. He's following 160 people in return. Who does he have the most conversation with? Rose's list is unsurprising; it's mostly co-workers.

1. Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.TV.
2. Aubrey Sabala, Marketing Manager at Digg
3. Joe Stump, a developer at Digg.
4. David Prager, one of Rose's co-founders at web TV station Revision3.
5. Alex Albrecht, co-host of Diggnation.

You can see Rose's full list here.

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Publishing and a related series of events like the Web 2.0 Conference. Here's who Tim has mutual conversation with on Twitter most often.

1. James Governor, an open source analyst at RedMonk.
2. Fred Wilson, one of the best known venture capitalists in the Web 2.0 world. Wilson has invested extensively in Twitter, for example.
3. Validis Krebs, the man behind Orgnet, a social network analysis and consulting firm.
4. Paul Kedrosky, writer and pundit on international finance.
5. Jennifer Pahlka, Web 2.0 Conference Chair.

Here's Tim's full profile on Mailana.

Shaquille O'Neal

Shaquille O'Neal hasn't always been a geek hero. The basketball great is fast becoming one, though, and if you haven't read about his awesome real-life meetups with Twitter friends, you really should. Shaq talks to all kinds of people on Twitter all day long (usually from his iPhone, it appears) - but who does he converse with the most?

1. Kathleen Hessert, a sports marketing Twitter pro.
2. A. Jo. Martin, Director of Digital Media & Research for the Phoenix Suns.
3. @laskey is someone with protected updates; we have no idea who this is.
4. Nate Moller, a marketing consultant.
5. Mona Mohammadi, Deputy to the Senior Adviser at the Office of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, according to her LinkedIn profile, though that's not mentioned on her Twitter profile.

You can see all of Shaq's closest connections here, though he's such a gentleman we can imagine him taking offense at the idea that he loves any of his Twitter friends more than others!

Garrett Camp

Garrett Camp is the founder of StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is awesome and Camp is a fairly consistent user of Twitter. Which lucky people get to engage with him the most?

1. Travis Kalanick is an entrepreneur who sold his P2P company Red Swoosh to Akamai in 2007. He advises and invests in startups.
2. Tim Ferriss is the author of the book 4 Hour Work Week.
3. Melody McCloskey, manager of video at Current.tv.
4. Gary Vaynurchuk, wine and social media man.
5. Zappos, Garrett Camp talks with his shoes.

Here is a full picture of Camp's network, though from the picture below you can see it's actually pretty sparse.

Alexis Ohanian

Alexis Ohanian is the co-founder of social news site Reddit. Reddit is old school and full of developers. Whom does its founder talk to most on Twitter?

1. Brad Parler, video dude at Powered Production.
2. Ian White is the creator of music sharing site Blip.fm.
3. Tony Adam, manager of search traffic acquisition at Yahoo.
4. Wil Wheaton, a famous guy who claims he disappoints everyone with his lack of responsiveness on Twitter.
5. Jacqui Cheng, Associate Editor at Ars Technica.

Here's the rest of Alexis' inner circle on Twitter.

Jeffrey Levy

Jeffrey Levy is the Web Manager at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He Tweets a lot, and well. Who does he Tweet with when he Tweets with other Tweeters?

1. Adriel Hampton works at the San Francisco City Attorney's Office and is a Goverment 2.0-head.
2. Ari Herzog is a strategic consultant.
3. Chris Dorobek, anchor at Federal News Radio.
4. Amy Gahran, a media consultant who was one of my (Marshall's) first web 2.0 heroes.
5. Dr. Mark Drapeau, Government 2.0 guy.

Check out the rest of Levy's inner Twitter circle here.

Jeremiah Owyang

Jeremiah Owyang has helped bring the stuffy world of corporate industry analysts into the Web 2.0 era of conversation as much as anyone has. He's got more than 36,000 people signed up to get his posts on Twitter, but there are some who he ends up conversing with more than others.

1. Peter Kim, former Forrester analyst with Owyang. Kim is now working on a stealth startup called the Dashis Corporation.
2. Jennifer Leggio, ZDNet social business blogger.
3. Shel Israel, Silicon Valley writer and communications guy.
4. Josh Bernoff, Jeremiah's fellow analyst at Forrester.
5. Amy Worley, VP of marketing at humor book publisher Andrews McMeel Publishing.

You can see the rest of Owyang's inner Twitter circle here.

Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter is one of the most inspiring non-profit tech consultants in the world. She's raised thousands of dollars on Twitter and has friends from everywhere. Who does she have conversations with more than anyone else, though?

1. Marnie Webb is the co-CEO at Compumentor/TechSoup. You should get to know Marnie; once you do you'll wonder why you waited so long.
2. Amy Gahran, see Jeffrey Levy's list above. Gahran has a lot of conversation with a lot of awesome people.
3. Jonathon D. Colman does SEO for REI.
4. Beth Dunn is a consultant and MBA candidate.
5. Dr. Mani is an Indian entrepreneur and heart surgeon.

There are a lot of people in Kanter's circle. You can meet some of them here.

That's a wrap!

We really like Pete Warden's site Mailana, where all these links and images come from, a lot. We like to combine Twellow and Mailana to find the most followed people in certain industries and then explore their circles of friends.

You should look yourself up on Mailana - you might be surprised who you converse with most often! The possibilities of these and all the tools that can be built on top of the wonderful Twitter API are nearly endless. Pretty interesting, is it not? Who's in your inner circle?

Here are a couple of screenshots showing the type of data musicians and music industry professionals can expect.

The first is an example of where a band's fans are hanging out on popular music social networking sites. In the example below last.fm has the largest fan base. This kind of information will be very handy to bands, because it will enable them to target news and interactive features to the social platforms where most of their fans hang out.

The following screenshot shows examples of song stats on a website. The 'total plays' stat is not too disimilar to the 'page views' stats that online publishers track in Google Analytics - and indeed Band Metrics very much models itself after the popular Google Analytics service.

Band Metrics received angel funding in November '08. It is a project of Indie Music, Inc., an Atlanta-based music technology company founded by Duncan Freeman.

Statistics for musicians is an important next step for online music. As a Wall St Journal article about trendy indie musician Bon Iver noted, "exposure on blogs, YouTube, social-networking, marketing and other sites can allow them [musicians] to nurture a following quickly and cheaply." So services like Band Metrics will add an extra layer of granularity to that, allowing the next Bon Ivers to get hard data about their popularity on the Web.

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

The company says it "will be releasing a collection of products over the period of next six months related to [feed analytics]: helping publishers and readers discover topic experts and measure their influence, engagement analytics (social media analytics), real-time tracking and other tools to help publishers and readers find and read what matters."

Can They Pull it Off?

The main asset PostRank has going for it is that there's a very clear value proposition. We've found that it takes one sentence to explain what this service does and nearly anyone who uses RSS immediately grasps the value of the application and wants it. That's quite remarkable considering how hard it is to explain most things about RSS.

FeedBurner got huge piles of users by saying "go through us and we'll tell you how many RSS subscribers you have." PostRank can tell potential users "go through us and we'll tell you what your hottest posts are, who the most loved writers are in your field and what topics are burning up the charts." And hopefully, how many subscribers you have.

The Challenges PostRank Will Face

There are a lot of challenges that PostRank will face in trying to replace FeedBurner.

Will Google Reader, now the dominant RSS reader by far, report subscriber numbers to PostRank? FeedBurner requires RSS readers to report numbers daily, something that doesn't always work. Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, will they hand over their huge part of the numbers to a competitor?

Far more processing power is required to count comments, inbound links, etc. for every blog post in an RSS feed. When PostRank came out with a Google Reader and Newsgator plug-in, for example, it limited its filtering to just the most popular 1,000 blogs on the web.

It's more complicated to evaluate "social media engagement" than it is subscribers, and subscribers is fairly complicated itself. How many people are still mystified by the way FeedBurner numbers rise and fall daily, or by the obtuse "reach" metric that FeedBurner now emphasizes? Similarly, PostRank appears fairly transparent on the surface, but a closer look at their metrics leaves us feeling more in the dark than we'd like to be.

It hasn't been a bump-free ride so far, either. Feed URL irregularities, caching strategies that didn't work out, server troubles - we find ourselves contacting PostRank on a regular bases to report problems. We also subscribe to the feed of their GetSatisfaction forum and we know we're not the only ones. In their defense, the company has raised more money lately and so could be better prepared for the load. This author also used PostRank on a major public production for a large consulting client 6 months ago and that worked quite well.

Finally, will publishers trust another 3rd party feed publishing service to stand between them and their readers? Some blogs have reported no problems of late with FeedBurner, but a quick search on Twitter shows that many others have.

We're excited to see what PostRank can do, though. If you are too, drop by the company's new Feed Analytics page and share your ideas and feature requests for a feed analytics service of the future.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrankcom_aims_to_replace_feedburner.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrankcom_aims_to_replace_feedburner.php Blogging Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:57:53 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick If you're in the practice of researching sites - trying to get a better idea of Web traffic or metrics - you've likely developed a workflow for gathering your information. Start with whois, jump to Compete, head over to Alexa, check Quantcast, search on Google, search on Twitter, and so on and so on. Even with a saved set of tabs or a handy bookmarklet, you're jumping all over the place.

Now, you can get at all of that information with one simple search at Dataopedia, a metasearch engine for Web site data.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Dataopedia hits all of the high points for Web metrics. Searching for a particular URL provides you with rankings from Google Page Rank, Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast, four of the primary sources I check on a regular basis. It also provides whois information, one of those most basic resources that always contains nuggets of interesting information.

But the service goes beyond those traditional lookups to provide more details on the site and its offerings, serving up a few extra data points that round out the the typical traffic and visitor information. Dataopedia also searches YouTube and Flickr for multimedia associated with the site. It looks at social news networks like Delicious, Reddit, and Digg to help provide insight into the site's popularity. And it checks Technorati, Google News, and Twitter for other mentions of the site.

There's also something interesting buried at the bottom of the site profiles: an ability to comment on the site using Disqus. While that's not likely to have the reach of a Google Search Wiki, it provides yet another way to gather details about the site and its reputation.

Dataopedia does a nice job of gathering quantitative and qualitative site metrics in a single spot. And its tab structure makes the information easy to consume. I'm planning to use it on a regular basis to get more details about the sites I'm planning to cover, because you never know what it might reveal.

To try it, visit Dataopedia and enter a URL into the search box.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dataopedia_quantitative_qualitative_site_metrics.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dataopedia_quantitative_qualitative_site_metrics.php Search Services Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:30:35 -0800 Rick Turoczy Does Adobe think they can out-Google Google? Perhaps. The company is involved with Zoetrope, a joint project with researchers at the University of Washington. What they're building is a tool that allows for manipulating the web over time. Instead of the snapshot of the web you see today when googling, Zoetrope will let anyone use keyword searches to discover archived web information and look for patterns in the data found.

]]>Sponsor

]]> About Zoetrope

As with the Internet Archive, the data in Zoetrope's database is a backup of the entire web, including those pages which have changed over time. But this archive won't be limited to the somewhat inconsistent periodic snapshots of the web's content like the Internet Archive offers. It will encompass everything.

Using the intuitive Zoetrope interface, a user could compare historical changes of various data through time by comparing snapshots of different pages on the web. Analyzing different, changing elements on web pages, side-by-side and over a period of time is downright difficult today - if not impossible. But Zoetrope makes it happen.

The process is done using Zoetrope "lenses" to draw boxes around elements, connect data from one site to another, and pull up charts of relevant data, all while manipulating a slider to scroll back and forth through time. That may sound hard, but if you watch this video, you'll see that it looks surprisingly easy.

For Everyone, Not Just The Computer Savvy

In a way, this project is similar to Google's new visualization API, which lets developers use historical web data to build charts, graphs, gadgets, and the like. However, where Google's tool is aimed at the technically savvy programmer, Zoetrope, on the other hand, is for the average user. Says Dan Weld, a UW computer science and engineering professor who worked on the project, "Zoetrope is aimed at the casual researcher. It's really for anyone who has a question."

As noted in the Washington University article on the project, example uses of Zoetrope could range from the basic: checking historical rankings of favorite players on a sports team, to the advanced: comparing daily air pollution levels in Beijing to number of world's records broken each day in the 2008 Olympics. 

"Your browser is really just a window into the Web as it exists today," said Eytan Adar, University of Washington computer science and engineering doctoral student who's also a co-author of the research paper on the project.

"When you search for something online, you're only getting today's results...This is really a new way to think about storing information on the Web."

The researchers hope to offer Zoetrope for free as early as next summer.

Image credits: Color, Torley; Others, University of Washington

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zoetrope_new_web_crawler_searches_analyzes_ever_changing_web.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zoetrope_new_web_crawler_searches_analyzes_ever_changing_web.php Products Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:47:01 -0800 Sarah Perez From the moment people had the ability to upload video content to the Web, they took the liberty of posting anything and everything they could find - whether they owned the rights to the content or not. Unfortunately, this caused the people who did own the rights to the content a great deal of heartache, as that free distribution channel cut into their profits. So they fought back with lawyers, take-down notices, and other legal threats. Where did it get them? Not terribly far.

But now, a new partnership between MySpace and MTV Networks might have those content owners changing their tune - and actually encouraging people to upload all the content they want.

]]>Sponsor

]]> What could cause such a drastic change in MTV's attitude? Auditude, a technology that allows MTV to identify even small clips of their content using audio and video fingerprinting.

With Auditude, MTV Networks will be able to identify practically any of their content on MySpace - so long as Auditude has a record of it - without relying on user-generated keywords or tags. Once identified, the MySpace-hosted MTV content becomes an advertising platform for MTV. Auditude allows them to add a video overlay to the clip, advertising the content source, the original broadcast date, and links to purchase the entire episode or other related content.

Using Auditude's library, MTV Networks will have the opportunity to identify more than 250 million videos and 4 years worth of 100 channels of television on MySpace. And that's content that is highly likely to be embedded by MySpace users - music videos, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, among others.

While the concept of fingerprinting isn't new, this application is. In the past, content owners have used identification methods as a means of identifying unauthorized content for the sake of calling out the attack dogs and sending take-down notices.

The Auditude solution takes exactly the opposite tact: identifying content as a means to extend MTV Networks' reach with the MySpace audience. It's an incredibly innovative way to embrace the behavior of today's Web users while giving something back to the content owners.

It seems like the perfect ending - a win-win situation - to a bubble-gum pop MTV video. But is that the end of the story?

Analytics Anyone?

There's something else about the Auditude technology that makes this partnership all the more interesting.

With the ability to add a custom overlay to each clip uploaded to MySpace, MTV Networks gains something even more important than advertising and follow-on sales. What's that? Detailed viewing metrics and click-through data on a population that has - to date - been a complete mystery.

With Auditude ads - and the analytics to monitor them - MTV Networks can build a mini-Nielsen-esque view into how their content is being used on MySpace. They'll be able to see any number of interesting metrics and trends. Who is uploading content? Which shows get posted most? Which shows get watched most? What are the demographics of the people posting the shows? Which users are getting the most click-throughs?

The list could go on and on.

That data is valuable enough, by itself. But MTV Networks also gains the ability to compare those MySpace findings with the information they have about television viewers and people who access MTV Networks' content through authorized distribution channels.

For an industry that lives and dies by audience analysis, this new windfall of data - from a previously untapped resource - is a veritable metrics gold mine, certain to provide reams of reports and analysis in the short term. In the long term, it could change how - and where - MTV Networks' programming is released and distributed.

All from a little ad and the means to track and analyze it. That old Duran Duran video may have just gotten more valuable than ever.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_and_mtv_cant_beat_em_j.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_and_mtv_cant_beat_em_j.php Online Video Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:11:02 -0800 Rick Turoczy YouTube announced today an interesting addition to its Insights analytics dashboard. Called "Hot Spots," the feature displays the "bounce rate" of viewers in any publisher's video on a second-by-second scale. Wondering if that joke you told went over well or not? YouTube will now tell you if a substantial number of viewers clicked away from your content at the moment your wisecrack went live.

The Insights analytics tool launched in May and offers free demographic data about viewers. We'd love to see these two features combined. Worried something you said might come across as sexist? If a whole lot of women stopped watching right after you said it - there might be some truth to that! (Who are we kidding? This is YouTube we're talking about.)

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]]> Update: This post has been submitted to Digg where savvy reader MissWATCH asks the question: "i wonder what would it say about Rick Roll and 2 Girls 1 Cup." Awesome.

The service isn't just tracking departures in pure numbers, either, it's pretty sophisticated:

The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine "hot" and "cold" spots by comparing your video's abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.

Numbers are cool - benchmarks relative to the numbers of other related content are even cooler. That's the kind of thing that no video startup could meaningfully offer - just YouTube with its giant network effect and perhaps some of the other giant video services.

We were unable to test the feature ourselves. Neither old nor new videos have the Hot or Not link displayed for us yet. We'll be keeping an eye on them for sure.

In some ways Hot Spots may be more interesting than Insights demographics initially was. Viewer demographics are mostly useful when considering advertising and the effectiveness of targetted promotion. ("How can I get more young men to watch this video on YouTube?" Tough question.) Bounce rate will tell you something about the specifics of your content. We like it.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/youtube_now_offering_secondbys.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/youtube_now_offering_secondbys.php Online Video Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:34:07 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick From Medialets, the company that was first to launch with an ad platform that was like "doubeclick for iPhone apps," has just announced a new version of their analytics tool for mobile apps. Previously available only to iPhone developers, the company is now bringing their analytics program to Android developers, too.

Now, no matter what next-gen platform you want to develop for, iPhone, Android, or "whatever comes next," says the company, you can stay on top of your business with one easy-to-use tool.

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Apple may be monkeying around with some developers and restricting certain highly anticipated apps from inclusion in their store, but that's not going to stop the overall land rush to develop for the iPhone. Why? Success stories like that of Trism, a popular puzzle game that raked in $250K over the course of two months, prove there is potential for huge success on this platform. It's nothing like the mobile market has ever seen.

And today, we receive yet another next-generation platform designed to compete with iPhone: Google's Android, a mobile OS with applications of its own. Even before this platform became publicly available, Google had developers competing to win cash prizes by building the most promising apps for the upcoming OS. With winning prize amounts in the range of $100,000 - $275,000, these were "quit-your-day-job" numbers.

If Building Mobile Apps Is Big Business, Then We Need Big Business Tools

When someone gives up months of their time to build an application or makes the decision to build a business around an application, there's a real need for tools that can help measure an app's success (or, perhaps, the lack thereof). What developers need is a way to track all the information about their application - from downloads to daily users as well as historical changes.

Did everyone download the application right away but never really used it more than a few times? How many people installed the latest update? Are ads generating any revenue? How do I compare to my competitors? Is my app doing better on iPhone or Android?These are the types of questions a developer needs to know the answers to. Once they have answers, they can then make informed business decisions like whether they should add more employees, adjust app prices, etc.

Looking at the screenshot below, you can see the types of answers the Medialets analytics program provides. Active users, average daily users, sessions, average sessions, ad revenue, app store ranking, metrics, historical changes, and much more are easily visible in the program's well-designed UI.

In addition to those basic metrics, developers can also gain insight as to how users interact with the application itself. This is done via custom app events, which are basically small triggers written into the application itself. They can be anything about the application that a developer would want to track; for example: how many people beat the first level of a game? How many people clicked the link that provides the directions in the location-aware app? These triggers let developers receive the kind of feedback that console game developers would only get after hours on end of monitoring focus group users as they interact with a game.

Why Medialets?

Medialets isn't the only company out there that can help iPhone developers analyze and monetize their applications. However, they're already five to six times bigger than their nearest competitor, Pinch Media, having managed to sign up around 200 developers within their first sixty days. Those developers are building some of the top-rated applications out there, too.

But size alone is not the key difference between Medialets and Pinch Media (or others like them). The key difference is in their focus. Where those other companies are iPhone-only, Medialets is building tools for iPhone, Android, and whatever platform comes next. For today's app developers who don't want to be tied to just one mobile OS, they can now choose to have the same consistent tool set available no matter where their applications are installed.

Developers can sign up for the beta of this new analytics program at http://www.medialets.com/android.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_analytics_tool_for_iphone_and_android.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_analytics_tool_for_iphone_and_android.php Products Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez If you're a user of the analytics service SiteMeter, you will now see a better interface when you check your site's statistics. The site redesign provides a host of new features for users that could cause users of Google Analytics to do a double-take. Here's a closer look at what users can expect from the upgrades SiteMeter has made.

UPDATE: Turns out the new design wasn't so great after all. SiteMeter has implemented an immediate rollback to the old design!

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]]> Visual Goods

SiteMeter has made a switch from a codename based management system to an email based system. This means that users can now consolidate their SiteMeter accounts under one email address. In doing so, users will be required to reactivate their accounts under their email address. You can even group your premium account reports by topics to compare and contrast the data of all your sites .

Visually, the service has redesigned the way users can now view their data. Statistics can now be visually seen using charts, graphs, or a table view. Choose date ranges of data to view, export your data, view demographics and do a ton more via a sweet visual interface. SiteMeter is also reporting to have more accurate data for visitor counts and page views by differentiating between visitors and unique visitors. All of your statistics are available visually and textually for any section of the service.

Taking Notes

With some of the new features, we have to wonder if SiteMeter decided to take a couple of visual cues from Google's popular Analytics service. Whether they have or haven't, SiteMeter has certainly done a great job on an long over-due upgrade. However, we're not sure if the new features are enough to keep users from using Google Analytics for free. If you're a user of SiteMeter, let us know what you think of the site's redesign and changes in the comments section.

Site Meter company profile provided by TradeVibes

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sitemeter_receives_a_visual_makeover.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sitemeter_receives_a_visual_makeover.php Data Services Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:41:55 -0800 Corvida