Are Online Companies Us...

Everyone knows you need analytics on your website and some people actually pay attention and act on the data they acquire. But digital design agency Extractable says you might be putting all your eggs in the wrong data basket. Right now, off the top of your head, what would you say is the most common data point for measuring success? If you said traffic, give yourself a gold star. 66% of the companies Extractable surveyed said they use use traffic numbers as a measure of success. 46% said they use time spent on site but neither one of these is a true indicator of customer satisfaction and neither speaks to conversions. For example, back in the heyday of StumbleUpon, you could see your traffic triple overnight. Trouble is, most of it was junk traffic, people who hit the page because it was offered to them, without any real interest in the content. Two days later, it’s back to business as usual. Now, if you were paid based on traffic, then glory be, but otherwise, it’s not traffic worth counting. As for time on site. . . oh, how I’ve battled folks on that one. Extractable points out that extended time on site doesn’t mean the customers are happily interacting. It could mean that they’re lost and aimlessly clicking around trying to complete a task such as buying what you’re selling. Take a look at this chart from Extractable’s Data Driven Design report. Shouldn’t customer satisfaction and conversions top traffic? At least Social Media likes isn’t at the top of the list but I suspect that it will show up higher in the years to come. Look, I get it. We measure traffic because we can. It’s like counting heads as people walk into a store. Even if they don’t buy anything, it’s a first step and getting people to your site is indeed a first step. But pulling people in isn’t enough. You have to engage them and you have to get them to “buy.” For you, “buy” might mean purchasing a physical product. For someone else, “buy” might mean downloading a free app or reading the content on a digital magazine. Every website has an expected action. That’s what we need to be measuring. That’s how you define success. What do you think? Is traffic measurement something we do just because we’ve always done it or is it a valid measure of success?

Virurl Raises $1.2M To ...

Virurl , a startup that helps advertisers promote their content virally, is launching its public beta test today. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding. Here’s how the Virurl model works: Advertisers upload the content that they want to promote, then set a campaign budget and a cost-per-click rate that they’re willing to pay. Then users can browse the content and share it with their friends via social networks or email. For each click that they generate, users earn points that can be redeemed for rewards or cash. (Any proceeds from Facebook clicks are donated to a charity of the user’s choice.) In its alpha stage, Virurl says it has already attracted more than 40,000 registered users who each have more than 100 Facebook friends, and that more than 1,000 content marketers have applied to advertise. There’s certainly a slightly icky aspect to the idea, but it’s one that seems to be catching on — last month I wrote about a similar company called Wingsplay, which pays users to spread video content . I can see the appeal to advertisers, and at least users sharing the content have to disclose that it’s sponsored. The round was led by Tice Capital and the Los Angeles Syndicate of Technology, with participation from several unnamed angel investors. MSNBC.com founding editor Merrill Brown is joining the company as chairman.

Flickr Adds Pinterest B...

Yahoo-owned Flickr is one of the largest content sources for Pinterest , with users posting Flickr images on the pinboard sharing site in droves. But in order to Pin a Flickr photo on Pinterest, you had to use Pinterest’s own Pin button, and you couldn’t Pin photos to pinboards directly from Flickr. Until today. Flickr, which just debuted a new HTML5 photo uploader last week, is announcing a partnership with Pinterest to add Pin It buttons to sharing options on the photo sharing platform. Flickr also assures that all pinned images will be properly attributed, regardless where they are pinned from. As Flickr’s head of product, Markus Spiering, explains to us, the photos sharing site wanted to make sharing to Pinterest a one- to two-click process, for both content owners and for people who discover interesting photos on Flickr to be pinned. Now, you’ll see a Pin It button on Flickr image pages where you see Twitter, email, Facebook and Tumblr share buttons. You’ll be able to share photo pages, favorites, and groups. If you pin a lot, the share menu will prioritize the Pin It button, showing it as one of the two shortcuts on the photo page. Not all images will be able to be shared. This decision is up to the content owner, says Spiering. If the photographer is fine with an image being shared, then the source of the image will always be attributed on Pinterest. If a photographer does not want their content to be shared, the share menu will be disabled making the Pinterest option unavailable as well. Photographers can also designate that they can share the image, but others cannot. Every image shared from Flickr will be clearly attributed with the name of the photographer, the title, as well as a link to the photo page. Attribution cannot be edited, and pins and repins of their images will be credited and linked back as well, ensuring people can leave comments, fave the photo, or contact you directly on Flickr. And if someone has embedded your Flickr photo on their website or blog and it is pinned from there, the photo will automagically be attributed on Pinterest and linked back to the Flickr photo page. Attribution is a huge issue for both Flickr and Pinterest. As you may remember, back in February, VentureBeat reported that Flickr added Pinterest’s ‘do-not-pin code’ to Flickr pages with copyrighted or protected images, so that these pages could not be added to Pinterest at all. As we know, copyright issues are a larger problem for Pinterest. But considering Pinterests’s viral growth and traffic, as well as Flickr’s presence on the platform; Pinterest can’t be ignored. The photo sharing site had to come up with a way to make pinning easy and attribution work for photographers. Other sites, including online retailers eBay and Amazon , can’t ignore Pinterest any longer as well, and have also recently added Pin It buttons. It should be interesting to see if other popular photo sharing sites start incorporating Pin It buttons for seamless pinning soon.

Happly For iPad Helps C...

iPad guilt? There needs to be a technical term for that feeling in the pit of a parent’s stomach that arises from handing over the iPad to their kids, only to watch them play brain rotting Outfit7 games or level after level of Angry Birds. Fortunately, some startups are focusing on developing more educational content for the iPad to help parents assuage some of their guilt over their kids’ ever-increasing screen time. One such company is Daily Interactive, which is now launching Happly for iPad , a collection of original and curated content for kids, including online videos, games, and stories. And while the content may be deemed educational, the kids might not realize it, given the app’s focus on topics kids love to explore, like dinosaurs, space, sports, animals, how to’s and more. The company was created by Brian Monnin and Greg Harris, who met back in the 90′s launching and developing interactive products for MSNBC.com. They later co-founded MetaStories, which was sold to Brightcove back in 2005. Harris was the creative director of MSNBC.com and, most recently, NationalGeographic.com, where he was in charge of the redesign of all their digital properties. In other words, these two know a thing or two about creating digital content. But their motives for developing Happly were more personal ones. Explains Monnin, “I created Happly so that my wife Janine and I could get a better handle on filtering out websites and videos that we wouldn’t want our boys (ages 5 and 9) stumbling into. The iPad is clearly a great addition to our home but we’ve had our share of not-so-cool experiences with connected devices, too.” He details some of those experiences here – it’s a funny, but sadly relatable story about how his kid learns how to drop the f-bomb courtesy of YouTube. And so, Happly was conceived. The app itself is rather clever. Instead of simply bundling its content into one large collection, parents can administer the app by setting up PIN-protected profiles where they customize what their children see. The categories, which include things like “Did you know?,” “How to do Stuff,” “Space & Beyond,” “Weird & Wacky,” “Dinos,” “Funny Videos,” and more, can all be toggled on and off as the parent chooses. (Note that I did encounter a bug where the toggles froze after my first customization, but the bug fix is being submitted to the App Store today, so it should no longer be an issue following the update).  As noted above, some content is curated from web sources, while other content is originally produced. For example, the app’s creators added an informational graphic to augment a collection of stories about James Cameron’s dive to the Mariana Trench. On another piece, they worked with photographer Michael Nichols to refine his lifelong study of African elephants into kid-friendly format. “Our background – whether it be all the way back to MSNBC.com, or Discovery Channel, or National Geographic – is rooted in interactive storytelling,” says Monnin. “So it’s not just video or just games, it’s a blend.” Plus, parents can add their own discoveries to the app, with features that let them search for new stories via an in-app browser or new videos from an in-app “add YouTube video” button. These features are only available from the parents’ login, however. Since parents set up profiles for each child, the child can only view the approved content, not search for new items. Another interesting feature is an in-app messaging system that allows parent and child to communicate by leaving messages for each other. It’s a lot like what FingerPrint Digital is doing with their SDK for educational game makers, in fact. As with FingerPrint, the idea here is that the iPad doesn’t have to reproduce the passive TV-watching experience, it can be a platform for two-way communication and learning combined. The challenge, of course, is making all this content as appealing as another round of a kid’s favorite mobile game. ”Our closet competitor is…every Angry Birds-type game that’s out there,” Monnin admits. Daily Interactive is a five-person Seattle-based company which also produces digital apps and content for customers including NatGeo, Microsoft and others to help fund Happly’s development. Happly is available for the iPad only, and is live in iTunes here .

SAY Media Has A New Way...

Back in February, comScore released a statistic that was probably pretty discouraging if you’re an online advertiser: In a study, it found that 31 percent of ads delivered were never actually seen by consumers. If you’re paying by the ad impression, that’s a lot of wasted money. Now online publishing and advertising company SAY Media has come up with one way to solve the problem, through a measurement called “cost per exposure.” CEO and co-founder Matt Sanchez says that since “we have a proprietary technology stack,” SAY can communicate with the browser and determine whether an ad was actually seen. That doesn’t mean it’s literally tracking where you’re looking, but it can tell whether the ad actually loaded within your browser window. So when SAY says it’s charging “per exposure,” advertisers don’t have to pay for ads that viewers never scrolled down to see, or that they scrolled past before the ad loaded. Sanchez says he’s hoping other publishers start adopting a similar system. “We really wanted to move the debate forward,” Sanchez says. “Instead of thinking about how to serve the most ads, publishers can start thinking about how to create value and how to relate advertising to content.” SAY isn’t just doing this to advance the cause of accountable advertising. It’s also announcing a new advertising unit, called Content Ads. Until now, SAY and its “Clean Campaign” strategy have focused on big ads that are priced for engagement, rather than impressions. Sanchez says the company wanted to create ad units that could serve companies that were a good fit for SAY’s sites but didn’t want to pay for the engagement ads. For example, he says private sales site Vente-Prive might want to advertise on Fashionista , but might not have the budget for or interest in a “big, high impact advertising campaign.” Content Ads are smaller, “lightweight” ad units that should, as the name implies, feel like content — they should usually come from advertisers who match the site’s editorial mission. And it didn’t make sense to price these new ads on the engagement model, so SAY came up with the cost-per-exposure plan. Sanchez says Content Ads are limited to SAY Media-owned sites, while cost-per-exposure pricing is available all across the company’s ad network.