

Chartbeat gets $3m from Index, Calacanis, Conway, Clavier, Sacca - arctictony
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/chartbeat-3-million/

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samg
Chartbeat is very cool, but I wonderful how useful it actually is.

Is the idea to modify content on the fly as it gains traction? I just don't
really see how this service adds value (read: increases my revenue, pageviews,
xxx), besides some nice live updating charts to look at.

~~~
nostromo
I've used it for several months. It's not a replacement for Google Analytics
as some have implied. However, it is useful for getting early feedback on your
marketing spend. For example, if you turn on an expensive Google SEM campaign,
you can start watching the visitors in real time. I've used this to find
negative keywords and block them instantly, without waiting for Google
Analytics reports to catch up.

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RBr
Chartbeat was uber powerful for Mahalo. I'm not surprised that Jason Calacanis
invested in it.

Mahalo lives-and-dies in grabbing headline traffic and monopolizing on both
short and long-tail trends. Chartbeat shows exactly which pages are hitting.
It's an easy to follow formula for updating pages on Mahalo. The system not
only shows which pages are hot, but which pages are talked about on Twitter
and shows very early trends from the SE's.

Jason would regularly encourage folks to use it before his investment. Seems
like a good snag for him.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
You are 100% correct.

Last year we would see trends like StarCraft 2 come out, so we made pages like
this:

[http://www.mahalo.com/starcraft-2-wings-of-liberty-
walkthrou...](http://www.mahalo.com/starcraft-2-wings-of-liberty-walkthrough)

Which we spend and make thousands of dollar on, and then double down by making
videos on our Youtube channel:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YzhojCvUYA>

Some SEO folks claim we "spam" search engines, but the truth is we identify
any page that gets over 1,000 views a month on Mahalo and we then spend $500
to $5,000 building it out.

The reason we are the #170th largest site on the web (and profitable), is
because we use Chartbeat to find our winner and we DOUBLE DOWN on original
content.

After we double down you know what we do?

We _double down_ again! :-)

I love Chartbeat. It rocks. It's also helping us build out vertical Q&A sites
like www.ipad-answers.com. We have three or four pages that break out on a
site this every month, and we send amazing talent to those page and blow out
amazing answers. Again, double down and double down again.

When you got the nuts you pound it.

~~~
pclark
Is any of this related to Chartbeats USP of it being real time? Sounds like
any analytic package would show you which areas are receiving the most traffic
in a time period.

It isn't like seeing trends _now_ is different to seeing trends _in a few
hours_ given that you have to spend resources and time doubling down ...

~~~
RBr
For Mahalo, the difference was immediacy. Mahalo had a lot of existing pages
that did not provide adequate information. Remember that the vast majority of
Mahalo pages were created automatically by a bot or by using outsourced labor
that didn't do a very good job. They were ranked but crappy.

So, when a trend hit or for whatever reason, a page started to receive
traffic, you could see it right away, add a bunch of content to it and then
almost magically, push up it's search engine result position to snowball the
page. For topics such as "Tiger Woods Affair", recall notices, etc, it worked
really well.

Generating pages with inadequate information is in the same vein as throwing
crap at a wall to see what would stick. It could be thought of as SE spam, but
when quickly and carefully built out it was just the way that Mahalo worked.

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maxklein
The market for these kinds of services is going to be great over the next
years. If you want to make a startup, do it off those principles:

We have all this unstructured data and information - make sense of it, and
give it to me in a useful instantly understandable format.

~~~
paraschopra
Can you expand on this? I had blogged about how I would like future of web
analytics to be: [http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/what-web-analytics-
sh...](http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/what-web-analytics-should-
actually-be/)

Hearing your thoughts on this will be interesting.

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joncarder
I think chartbeat on a cool factor is high but on a useful factor it's low and
therefore I passed. What web analytics needs is to go beyond just showing the
data (real-time or not) into helping you understand WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE in
order to IMPROVE your website objectives.

To be more specific: Tying in a/b testing with user flows and analytics like
\- ranking pages by abandon rate so you can see where your loosing people \-
tracking funnel processes like sign up and shopping cart to identify problem
areas \- ranking links based on clicks to show what users really care about
and what is just taking up space on a page \- enabling exit interviews and
real-time chat with users to collect feedback \- and on top of identifying
problems it would be really useful for it to present suggestions to help solve
the problems.

Analytics are just a means to an end but for some reason analytics companies
think analytics are the end. Big disconnect here as most of their customers
don't have the sophistication to take the analytics and know how to improve
their site from them. The analytics company that provides an idiots guide to
fixing problem areas and optimizing your site will be a game changer.

~~~
arctictony
Hey Jon, I'm the GM of chartbeat and totally appreciate your point. Everything
you say is super appropriate for the traditional role of static analytics
which was to look at usual behaviour on fairly persistent architectures over
time and optimize that.

However, real-time analytics is almost the antithesis of this. It's focused on
exploiting unusual behaviour _now_ often across transient content. With this
kind of content and the kind of user flows we are seeing more of across the
sites we track (more spikes and troughs than ever before) you can seriously
boost your traffic by reflecting user behaviour in the site and (as Jason
suggested above) doubling down on what's got the edge in that moment. The page
that's driving the majority of your traffic today might not have existed
yesterday and might not be looked at tomorrow so purely trying to apply
traditional analytics methods to it has diminished utility.

So you should totally continue to use traditional analytics for optimising the
persistent architecture of your site (I'd highly recommend Kiss Metrics), but
think about chartbeat as a complement to that, helping you adapt the transient
content on your site to the flows of user behaviour.

There's a reason almost every major publisher has integrated chartbeat, some
spending thousands of dollars on us a month, and it ain't just because we're
pretty ;)

~~~
joncarder
Hey Arctictony, Thanks for the clarification. I agree your guys solution is
perfect for media companies or any company that has fresh content coming in
and needs to know which content is working. I think Jason's strategy is right
on. I guess I'm just bitching because I can't find a "smart analytics"
company, one that goes beyond the numbers to recommend solutions for companies
like mine.

My company is <http://www.MojoPages.com> and we are constantly iterating the
site to improve the user experience. Analytics companies like Kiss Metrics
don't show the level of detail that we need to really understand the smartest
improvement. We're forced to test, test, test and hope we're smart enough to
figure out the problem and the optimal solution.

Imagine if an analytics company used the data from 1000's of clients to be
able to suggest problem areas on your site. An example is if it could analyse
your sign up flow and tell you if the location or color of your button or the
amount of fields you had etc. was hurting your conversions and the data shows
that if you made x,y and z change it would improve 20%. It would make life at
a start-up a little easier and whoever creates this magical analytics company
a little richer.

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paraschopra
This is an interesting announcement. Chartbeat may have $300k annual revenues
(2500 * 10 * 12), 5 employees and a ton of competitors (GA, Clicky, and tons
of other web analytics tools). And they raise $3m. Probably they have
interesting plans ahead.

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dataminer
Khan Academy on Chartbeat

[http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=0...](http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=032eb5f1ea0b68a948634d6af8a6ee8e#)

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lukestevens
"Real-time analytics" is a contradiction in terms, imo. Analytics isn't day
trading. Who takes action in response to data in "real time"? What does that
even mean? Even Jason Calacanis says "...the truth is we identify any page
that gets over 1,000 views _a month_..." (my emphasis). There's a lot of
novelty value in blinking stats, but I concur with the general sentiment here
that we need better analytics that makes sense of the data, not "real time"
analytics that just pumps it out faster.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
Sorry, I didn't explain clear enough.

Chartbeat acts as an early warning system as to what those pages will be. so,
if we are watching out big winners and suddenly see a new page jump into the
top 50 pages we can double down on that THE MOMENT it spikes.

this is uber-powerful.

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jasonmcalacanis
I've been a fan of Chartbeat since day one, and I've been a consultant to the
company for a year. I was thrilled to be invited as the first investor into
the company, and the sky is limit for this startup.

ChartBeat is Google Analytics on crack. :-)

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jasonlbaptiste
I've been using chartbeat for the past few weeks. It's absolutely awesome and
I recommend it to anyone here. FYI, I have no affiliation with their team +
don't even know the team there.

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slig
I really love chartbeat. It's very useful and addicting, so you have to be
careful to not waste loads of times watching it.

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d2viant
These guys will get snatched up by Google. It would be a perfect complement to
Google Analytics.

~~~
RBr
It sure seems like a good fit... Charbeat focuses on real-time analytics while
Google delays stats. Adding Chartbeat's real time capabilities would be
interesting.

I don't know if Google would take the performance hit of Charbeat's code
though. It would make more sense to me for Google to simply build in
Chartbeat's real-time block of popular pages into a new section. Add in
"conversation" options to track Twitter, Facebook, etc and they'd have a new
interesting social aspect.

Chartbeat has a way to go if they really want to be bought by Google. My money
is on Google simply recreating the best parts of it with an eye toward
performance over features.

