Right now, about 200 of you are reading something I've written on Wired.com. At least, that's true while I'm typing this. The number may be higher or lower by the time you read it.
I know this because I use Newsbeat, a brand-new real-time analytics tool that tracks visits to Wired.com. I know, for instance, that many more of you are reading Katie Scott's article for Wired Science titled "Robot Taught to Think For Itself" (and why wouldn't you?); that Ryan Singel's update on KISSmetrics' sneaky tracking techniques is steadily driving traffic to his scoop on the company from last week; and that far too few of my stories are published before noon EDT.
Why does this time slot matter? Because it's when the U.S. East Coast goes to lunch, the end of the work day in Western Europe, and the start of the work day in California. It's a bit late for Australia or India, but otherwise, it's a magical hour when just about the entire English-speaking blog-reading world gets on the internet.
Chartbeat's been providing this kind of data to sites since 2009, but news companies are different. As Chartbeat's Tony Haile told GigaOM's Mat Ingram, an e-commerce site wants to know how to funnel its customers through to a sale; news editors want to know where their readers are coming from, what content they're engaging with, whether their social media campaigns are working, which new headlines are luring readers in and which new advertisements may be turning them off.
Newsbeat organizes its content by author, not product. As Nieman Lab's Megan Garber notes, individual writers, not just editors or designers, can make better use of the tool — particularly since they're also frequently charged with promoting their stories on social media. As a journalist, your engagement doesn't have to end when you file.
This kind of data can also usefully confirm or confound your editorial intuitions. Alexis Madrigal writes that red-meat quick-hit gadget stories that rack up huge pageviews at other technology sites don't actually do nearly as well as the odd, historical, reflective stories he showcases at The Atlantic:
"I love analytics," Madrigal concludes, "because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet."
I agree with Mat, Megan and Alexis but I think there's one big point that needs to be hammered home: the need for tailored real-time web analytics is perhaps strongest for news organizations because __we're working and publishing in real-time, too. __
The rules for newspapers or magazines or even blogs five to ten years ago no longer hold for us. We don't deliver to your house or increasingly, even your RSS reader. We count on our readers and other organizations to get our stories to you, the reader — and we are competing with every other form of real-time content you could possibly be looking at on your computer, tablet or smartphone screen.
Our business is not publication, but broadcasting. But it's not an indiscriminate broadcast, like most traditional TV or radio; it's a targeted broadcast, matching stories with the readers who are looking for them, even if they don't yet know that they are.
I can know at 3 p.m. EST exactly who in the world can be reached by this story and how I might reach them. That's what real-time analytics lets me do.
