Audience Engagement New Publishing Tech
4 mins read

Q&A: Content Insights, pioneering content performance analytics

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Founded in 2014 in Serbia by three publishing enthusiasts –
Dejan Nikolić, Ilija Šuša and Dragutin Miletić – Content Insights has since become a leader in content performance measurement and analytics. With offices in Washington D.C. and Novi Sad, Serbia, WNIP caught up with Content Insight’s Goran Mirković and Mia Čomić, to find out more…

Can you give us further background about your company?

Content Insights was built with a simple, but also an ambitious mission in mind: to restore journalism to its former glory and help publishers successfully manage and understand their audience behavior, and increase revenue.

We were initially created with newsrooms and publishers in mind: by editors, for editors. However, with additional features and continuous development – we have expanded the pool of our users. Basically, all professionals who deal with content on some level and need to measure their content performance can benefit from Content Insights.

Current clients include London’s Metro, Süddeutsche Zeitung, De Persgroep, The Local, Toronto Star and others.

What business problem is your company addressing?

Content Insights answers one of the biggest problems facing the online publishing industry: how to move past single metrics and find a more comprehensive approach to measuring content performance.

Our goal is to reveal the human behavior behind the stats and data, and help media businesses and content professionals define success patterns they can replicate in the future. Users are able to see what type of content influences loyal behavior and brings the biggest ROI to their publication.

We also have an innovative way of calculating reader loyalty. Our definition of the loyal reader as the “habitually highly engaged reader” has proven to be statistically accurate, consistent and very valuable for subscription-based businesses.

How is your core product addressing this problem?

There are a lot of content analytics solutions designed for newsrooms, online media organizations, or any type of publishers and content professionals. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these solutions rely on single metrics and measure browser events as opposed to human behavior.

If you take reports from these types of analytics tools for granted, you risk falsely interpreting available data and basing your entire strategy on the wrong performance metrics.

Our content analytics solution relies on a complex algorithm called Content Performance Indicator (CPI) that takes into consideration dozens of different content performance metrics and examines their relationships. It also weighs them differently according to three behavioral models: exposure, engagement, and loyalty. With our solution, you can actually understand the behavior of your audience and how readers interact with your content.

A second problem lies in the fact most publishers get served with raw data, and not information they can act on. That’s just how the majority of content analytics are built. This means they need a lot of time and a high level of data literacy to extract valuable insights from the data. We overcome this problem by actually offering information and insights. We don’t just throw numbers at you.

Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solution?

We have a few user case studies that show precisely how our clients are using Content Insights to help them better understand their audience and to generate more revenue.

Pricing?

Pricing depends on the size of the publication, i.e. the amount of data being processed. If this data gets exceeded, the team waits for 3 months to see if this means the publication in question has reached a new tier or if it’s a seasonal/temporary situation. After three months, the publication in question gets notified about the pricing upgrade.

What are other people doing in the space and why?

The market is swamped with content analytics tools that don’t provide actionable insights. They rely on single metrics and measure browser events, which prevents publishers from seeing a full picture. Single metrics are one-dimensional and usually describe a single action that’s not necessarily tied to real human behavior.

Take Pageviews for example: this metric might as well be called Page-Loads since it doesn’t necessarily reflect the number of times a certain page was viewed, but a number of times a certain page was loaded in the browser (regardless of whether or not the page was opened for just a second or even read). Opposed to Pageviews, we have Article Reads which is a metric that shows how many people have actually started reading your content. Then we build on that with ‘read depth’ and various other complex metrics.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the behavior metrics we have. Thanks to our CPI algorithm, we are able to measure the level of engagement and reader loyalty, i.e. actual human actions that happen behind the screen, not just what happens within the browser.

Another advantage of Content Insights lies in the fact that it directs the attention of editors, publishers, and content creators to what really matters. It is an intelligence tool since it shows you exactly how your content is performing and interprets the data for you, so you can devote your time to more meaningful actions. It aligns with different business models and is a strategic partner, looking not to replace data analysts but to make their jobs significantly easier.

Also, we believe content analytics should serve its users, not the other way around. Content analytics should save your time, not waste it. We know that interpreting data isn’t a simple task and that you’re more interested in human behavior, not just numbers and raw data. This is why we made our content analytics solution very intuitive and user-friendly, with real insights that are easily understandable and therefore actionable.

How do you view the future?

Content Insights is a progress-driven company. We have real editors in our ranks who understand publishing. We nurture great relationships with our clients, devote attention to them and ask for their feedback in the different stages of developing our product.

We are currently working on delivering a related solution that will help publishers grow their subscriptions. Given the fact that subscriptions have proven to be a solid business model and can bring financial stability to media organizations, we have our focus fixed on designing new insights in this area.

Thank you.