We’ll have a booth (#7) so if you’re attending do please drop by and see us. We’d love to discuss our vision of the data driven newsroom and the host of  features and tools we have that can help support editors. If you’re not attending but in the area we’d be more than happy to shout you a _____ (insert your preference :-)) at the hotel bar, so do drop by!

INMA is being held here:

J.W. Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live Hotel
900 West Olympic Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90015

9:30 am – 10:15 am
Driving Content Creation with Analytics and Audience Development
Today, the three vital voices of the media business – content creators, audience members and marketers – now “publish” together. Learn how leading editors are rewriting the rules of digital content through analytics, audience development and programming.

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I’ll be at the conference Tuesday, But I’ll be in town tomorrow Monday April 30th meeting with Customers and other good people – My evening is open if you want to sit down over some Sushi and discuss the Data Driven Newsroom, and help me formulate exactly how that Bloomberg terminal of the Newsroom should look like.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/4/prweb9425056.htm

Visual Revenue, Inc., the leading provider of online publisher tools for real-time homepage editing, continues to expand its portfolio of online publishers with the announcement today that A-pressen, a leading Norwegian media conglomerate, will join its rapidly expanding customer base.

The Visual Revenue Platform delivers Editorial teams real-time recommendations on what content to place where on their homepage (and section front pages) and for how long. An intuitive solution designed specifically with Editors in mind, the collaborative online environment takes editorial discussions to the next level ensuring content placement decisions can be taken faster, more accurately and with a greater level of confidence.

A-pressen is Norway’s second largest publisher with an annual turnover of NOK 4.6bn and 2.500 employees.  The company is the country’s leading publisher for local media, holding majority ownership in 48 local titles, 46 of which have a strong online presence.  The company also holds 50 percent of the pioneering, online-only, national newspaper Nettavisen.no.

“There are many analytics tools aimed at publishers in the market. We chose Visual Revenue because it gives us unparalleled insight into how our readers interact with our front pages and our content, as well as real-time recommendations as to how our editors should edit the front page for maximum impact and relevance,” said Pål Nedregotten. VP Product Development at A-pressen. “Nearly 80% of our readers enter our sites through our front pages, and the difference between a well-edited front page and one that misses the opportunity to resonate with our readers, directly translates into lost revenue.”

“The VR installation is available for 13 of our newspapers, as well as for our centrally located editorial coaching staff.  As a media conglomerate, this offers us the opportunity to identify usage and editing patterns between all 13 newspapers, identifying best practice and gives us a clear indication on how to better coach our local online staff to make wiser, more informed decisions.”

“I think what’s exciting about our partnership with A-pressen is the centralized and localized nature of the deployment,” said Charlie Holbech, VP Operations and Co-Founder of Visual Revenue, Inc. “Supporting the local news destinations with real-time recommendations and insight, whilst being able to simultaneously provide this information at a corporate level truly makes use of our collaborative editorial environment.”

About Visual Revenue
Visual Revenue Inc. provides a predictive analytics solution that helps online media organizations set a better front page. Headquartered in New York, Visual Revenue is helping media organizations across the globe better place their current content throughout their online publication. Visual Revenue’s Front Page Decision Platform currently provides more than 45 online publishers with real-time recommendations. These include Forbes.com, NYDailyNews.com, Telegraaf.nl and OneIndia.in.

Visual Revenue was founded by former IndexTools (now Yahoo! Web Analytics) COO Dennis R. Mortensen and officially launched in January 2011. The founding team are industry veterans from the web analytics, big data and predictive modeling world.

For more details on Visual Revenue, Inc. visit the corporate website at visualrevenue.com or call +1 (212) 506-6700 or email hello@visualrevenue.com.

Filter bubble is a term coined by Eli Pariser in his book by the same name to describe a phenomenon in which some publishers use algorithms to selectively predict what article a user is more likely to read based on prior behavior or the behavior of similar users – effectively isolating the user in a bubble that tends to exclude contrary information. The extreme version of this is your Facebook news feed.

Sarah used an example of how a given topic (child violence) was reinforced due to a prior child violence article view. This action unhappily moved her into a segment (bubble) which she was uninterested in being part of, and all due to an innocent prior click. The inverse filter bubble, or as she writes:

“what if the filter is wrong? What if it’s not a true reflection, but a false mirror — one that does not respond to fears and prejudices, but creates them?”

That is a super interesting observation!

A fair question on top of the original filter bubble definition and Sarah’s new observation might well be; how do we, the industry at large, help publishers break out of these filter bubbles – or perhaps better put, not participate in creating them to begin with.

To answer this question, or any question of this type, I believe it is important to differ between content creation and content promotion. Whereas the content pool at Yahoo’s (the publisher Sarah used as an example) disposal, by any standard is so large that any editorial (or commercial) willingness to break out of the filter bubble is possible. Which quite clearly and to no surprise leaves this effect as a pure content promotion concept, and one where maximizing for highest possible return at all times is a standard when applying aggressive personalization.

I very much believe publishers can apply a more balanced content promotion strategy while continuing to be financially successful, simply by marrying the Editor with proper decision support - not by eliminating the editor all together. It seems naive to present, as we see so often, two polarized options only:

• Machine learned personalization (which can only be achieved through 100% automation)
• Editors fueled by gut feel and diet coke (hand curated stories selected for the homepage)

I’ve been extremely eager to execute on our goal of becoming the Bloomberg terminal of the newsroom – and not only that, assuring along the way that it was obvious that the platform works for the editor and not the other way around. Decision support! Not editor replacement and personalization with maximum effect in mind at all cost.

Editor Curated Content Promotion (or intelligent Homepage Programming if you will) should be a process where the editor decides what story to go with, but not on experience alone, but a call powered by proper data and full on decision support. Moving us towards the Data Driven Newsroom, not elimination of the news room all together!

That is not to say that personalization does not have its place in front page programming – or news programming in general. I certainly think designated and marked zones, like we’ve see advertisement flow into content spaces, should be used – which is again, exactly how we think about personalization at VR.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

We’ll be in town to share our vision of the data driven newsroom with publishers and editors. If you’re attending, come check out how the Visual Revenue content recommendation platform helps editors program the homepage and make the most out of their existing content and layout – we are at booth #610.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/3/prweb9304476.htm

Visual Revenue, Inc., the leading provider of online publisher tools for real-time homepage editing, continues to expand its portfolio of global online financial and business news destinations with the announcement today that Forbes has subscribed to their service.

The Visual Revenue Platform delivers Editorial teams real-time recommendations on what content to place where on their homepage (and section front pages) and for how long. An intuitive solution designed specifically with Editors in mind, the collaborative online environment takes editorial discussions to the next level ensuring content placement decisions can be taken faster, more accurately and with a greater level of confidence.

Forbes.com Inc., a leading Internet media company, is the most trusted resource for the world’s business and investment leaders, providing them the uncompromising commentary, concise analysis, relevant tools and real-time reporting that they need to succeed at work and profit from investing.

“Visual Revenue has been a great addition to our newsroom,” says Drew Hansen, Director of Editorial Operations & Business Development. “Their technology supports our ongoing effort to create feedback loops at critical points of the editorial process. The platform provides real-time programming recommendations that our Home Page editors can act upon, without overriding their judgment, and continually learns from their decisions and instructions. As a result, we’ve increased audience engagement and now want to explore new applications of their technology.”

“It’s fantastic to be partnering with Forbes,” said Charlie Holbech, VP Operations and Co-Founder of Visual Revenue, Inc. “Couple our platform with the fact that they’re an extremely progressive news organization and it makes for an exciting combination. We’re humbled that the platform has been given the opportunity to participate alongside the Forbes editors in the ongoing newsroom dialogue.”

About Visual Revenue
Visual Revenue Inc. provides a predictive analytics solution that helps online media organizations set a better front page. Headquartered in New York, Visual Revenue is helping media organizations across the globe better place their current content throughout their online publication. Visual Revenue’s Front Page Decision Platform currently provides more than 45 online publishers with real-time recommendations. These include Forbes.com, NYDailyNews.com, Comcast, Time Inc, Cox Media, Telegraaf.nl and OneIndia.in.

Visual Revenue was founded by former IndexTools (now Yahoo! Web Analytics) COO Dennis R. Mortensen and officially launched in January 2011. The founding team are industry veterans from the web analytics, big data and predictive modeling world.

For more details on Visual Revenue, Inc. visit the corporate website at visualrevenue.com or call +1 (212) 506-6700 or email hello@visualrevenue.com.

Forbes Media
Forbes Media encompasses Forbes and Forbes.com (http://www.forbes.com), the leading business site on the Web that reaches on average 27 million people monthly. The company publishes Forbes and Forbes Asia, which together reach a worldwide audience of more than 6 million readers. It also publishes ForbesLife magazine, in addition to licensee editions in Africa, Argentina, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Korea, Latvia, Middle East, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Other Forbes Media Web sites are ForbesWoman.com; RealClearPolitics.com; RealClearMarkets.com; RealClearSports.com and RealClearWorld.com. Together with Forbes.com, these sites reach on average 33 million business decision makers each month.

Steve Forbes serves as Chairman and Editor in Chief. Mike Perlis is President and Chief Executive Officer. Lewis D’Vorkin is Chief Product Officer. Meredith Kopit Levien is Chief Revenue Officer.

Article selection and front page programming, whether that is a completely manual hand curated experience or one of sophisticated data modeling on audience and previous editorial tone, is very much something that impacts the paywall business case.

Let’s use the traditional and well respected metered model of the NY Times as a backdrop for the following three conclusions:

- Better front page programming moves readers towards the subscriber threshold faster
In Visual Revenue’s case, we help increase the number of people that reach the magical 20 stories per month threshold faster. Hence, if you have people consuming only 17 stories per month (and not reaching the limit), with our platform you’d see those people consume 5 or 6 more stories per month, simply because you had the right content in the right positions at the right time. This is NOT the same as decreasing the 20 story threshold to 15, as you would want to keep everything the same – including the positive sentiment when reaching the 21st story. This is a revenue increase opportunity!

- Better front page programming increases the sign-up-as-subscriber conversion rate
Moreover, people that reach the limit faster are not, to put it simply, “tricked” in the process, but rather having discovered stories they want to read on their own. Hence, we see that they are more likely to convert to a subscriber once they reach the monthly limit. The mindset of the reader at the conversion moment, given higher story read frequency (very much like traditional marketing), is simply superior to that of those who consumed stories at a lesser frequency.

- Better front page programming decreases churn
Once you sign up a subscriber, we provide a very traditional and well proven decrease in churn by increased utilization. This is usually a difficult to measure financial tradeoff, but as there is minimal to no cost in increased utilization (more stories read), it becomes slightly easier to conclude a direct positive – and quite profitable – effect to your churn rate (not loosing subscribers as fast). We’ve all seen Netflix and others work this dilemma successfully in their segments for decades.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

Nota bene (Icing on top):
I can’t help it, but this VR feature is pretty cool, you can enable Conversion Tracking and Optimization on the Visual Revenue platform and basically track which stories are more likely to lead to a conversion (subscriber) and then we can feed that information back into our model. Heck, you can even use these stories more aggressively elsewhere.

The award ceremony was last week and sadly we were unable to attend (the busy, frugal, startup life we lead!). However, we were extremely excited to find an email from Laura Wall the following morning informing us we’d WON!!!

What the judges said: “Visual Revenue enables publishers to predict the performance of a piece of content, giving online editors real-time recommendations on what to place in which position. Publishers who are not already using the technology will be queuing up to test it!”

We’ve put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the company thus far and recognition like this is a phenomenal boost for the product, the team and the company! Thanks in particular to our customers for their continued support, without you there is no product.

For a full list of the evenings winners check out the Econsultancy Blog.

Keynote: Dennis Mortensen, CEO, Visual Revenue

Applying traditional retail product concepts to news content could accelerate data driven publishing. Publishers do not predict customer demand for content, nor do they perform traditional market research like Nike would for a new pair of sneakers. You’ve probably never heard of a publisher applying six sigma strategies to how it produces content. And when publishers promote their content, it’s rarely with the same rigor and aggression as MARS fighting for shelf space at Wal-Mart.

Why not ?

/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)