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New York’s Visual Revenue to Beef Up Tech Staff
Joseph Walker, February 22nd, 2012
After raising $1.7 million in new financing last month from IA Ventures and SoftBank Capital, New York-based Visual Revenue Inc. plans to hire at least 10 new employees this year. The 16-person company was founded in 2010 by Dennis R. Mortensen, the former director of data insights at Yahoo.
Visual Revenue makes software for news and content publishers that recommends where and when to place stories on their websites and mobile apps. The company’s algorithms analyze a publication’s audience viewing habits in real-time to deliver precise recommendations for each client, Mortensen said. The company’s customers include the New York Daily News and Fast Company.
Did Visual Revenue Predict This Headline?
Gavin O’Malley, February 21st, 2012
Probably upsetting every editor in the room, Visual Revenue CEO Dennis Mortensen is stirring up OMMA Metrics with talk of his headline predicting technology. The company’s “Bloomberg terminal of the newsroom,” so-called, has been gathering steam over the past year. Having recently raised $1.7 million, Visual Revenue now boasts an impressive client list, including Forbes, Time.com, NBC, CNN Money, and Cox Media.
Visual Revenue offers media companies a “Front Page Decision Support System” for their online editors.
Visual Revenue Envisioning The Bloomberg Terminal Of The Newsroom Says CEO Mortensen
John Ebbert, February 17th, 2012
AdExchanger: What has been the big highlight for Visual Revenue in the past year?
DM: We haven’t pivoted into anything else so the vision with which we set up the company a year ago is exactly the same today.
In the space that we’re in now, where we spend all our time speaking to editors, the thing that matters the most is NOT an increased revenue opportunity or lift. They want to make sure that if they’re at the FT (Financial Times), the FT stays the FT and doesn’t turn into the New York Post, or vice versa.
How Long Should This Article Stay on the Front Page? Visual Revenue Can Predict
Erin Bury, February 15th, 2012
The company is trying to become the “Bloomberg terminal of the online newsroom” through their Front Page Decision Support System.
The company promises increased visitor engagement, content relevancy and revenue from using the tool, which probably looks like an oasis in the desert to online publishers struggling to maintain advertising revenues.
Launched in January 2011, the company’s client list reads like a who’s-who of the media industry: CNNMoney, Forbes, and FastCompany to name a few of the 45 they currently have on board. The investors list also reflects how people are flocking to big data, with prolific angel Ron Conway on board, as well as big VC firms.
The Blaze, Glenn Beck’s News and Opinions Website, Deploys Visual Revenue
The Team, February 1st, 2012
Visual Revenue Helps The Blaze Generate a More Valuable Connect Between its Readers and its Homepage
The Blaze uses Visual Revenue to better understand how their audience is interacting with the content on their homepage. “Visual Revenue is like an EKG or MRI for your site. I love being able to look at detailed data that reveals how our readers are really engaging,” said Scott Baker, Editor in Chief of The Blaze. “It’s not a tool that tells you what to do. It’s a tool that educates you about making wise decisions. The ability to drill down on front page and article performance is amazing. I can’t imagine running a site without it.”
Read the full press release here »
Data & dollars: The death of the printing press doesn’t mean the death of the ‘press’
Paul Sawers - TheNextWeb, January 18th, 2012
Data is the name of the game, and the media industry – including newspapers – must sit up and take note. A few months ago, we reported on a company called Visual Revenue, a US-based firm that’s seeking to enable data-driven decisions in every newsroom. The company has just announced big expansion plans too, which could prove to be a major boost for the media industry.
Is It Possible to Predict Pageviews 15 Minutes Into the Future? $1.7 M. for Visual Revenue Says Yes
Adrianne Jeffries - BetaBeat, January 18th, 2012
IA Ventures and Softbank Capital are invested.
“We’ve done REALLY well, since we spoke last,” Mr. Mortensen said in an email, pointing us to the company’s long list of customers: Forbes, Time, De Telegraaf, NBC, CNN Money, and Cox Media, among others. Visual Revenue appears to be doing exactly what it was doing in January of last year, we noted. “We are pretty proud of that,” he said. “No ‘pivot’ for us!”
A year, a roster of more than 35 global media partners, and an endorsement from big data mogul Roger Ehrenberg? We’re starting to worry this company may be able to predict the future or something.
Visual Revenue Inc. Secures $1.7M Series A Funding
The Team, January 26th, 2012
Investment to Expand Team and Continue Drive to Become the ‘Bloomberg Terminal of the Newsroom.’
“Visual Revenue sits at the intersection of real-time data, semantic analysis and web optimization, and seamlessly delivers this ROI-based solution to publishers both large and small,” said Roger Ehrenberg, Managing Partner at IA Ventures. “Dennis and the Visual Revenue team are executing on an ambitious and exciting business plan, arming publishers with the tools to best monetize their inventory while delivering a top quality product to their readers.”
Read the full press release here »
Online Publishers Can Benefit From Predictive Analytics Platform
Pierre DeBois - All Analytics, January 18th, 2012
The interesting aspect of the platform is that it focuses on the decision, rather than metrics.
The recent changes in Web analytics dashboards, like those for Omniture SiteCatalyst 15 and Google Analytics v5, promise better flexibility in labels, improved visuals, and customization. However, the Visual Revenue platform offers no graphs based on average time on site or bounce rate. Instead, it concentrates on the decision to publish or not publish certain content.
How Visual Revenue plans to enable data-driven decisions in every newsroom
Paul Sawers – The Next Web, December 10th, 2011
So there’s two challenges facing publishers: How to fulfill demand, and how to promote. Visual Revenue focuses on the latter.
Where will they be 12 months from now? “I want to make sure that any editor is fully aware of the opportunity of being more data-driven”, says Dennis. “So I want them all to know that we exist. At some point, I want to be fully embedded into every newsroom. This whole notion that no trader on Wall Street is without a Bloomberg terminal? I don’t want any editor without a Visual Revenue terminal.”
PRESS RELEASE: Visual Revenue’s Platform helps NewsOK edit their Homepage in real-time
The Team, December 7th, 2011
“NewsOK is using Visual Revenue for recommendations for our lead stories on several pages throughout the site” said Alan Herzberger, Digital Managing Editor for NewsOK. “Our editors have found the tool to be a welcome complement to our news judgment, allowing for predictive analysis to be mixed in with the knowledge we already have about our audience’s interests and trends. In short, Visual Revenue’s recommendations serve as another set of analytical eyes on our deep content for every minute of the day.”
Read the full press release here »
Remaining Agile While Using Analytics
Pierre DeBois - Business Agility, December 6th, 2011
One paper operated for years, programming its front page carousel of varied articles based on the belief such decisions encouraged reader engagement. The platform instead revealed that a second position in a secondary listing near the carousel was the most valuable in attracting and retaining readers. The position, and the solution, proves that attention does not have to be splashy to truly garner a reader’s attention.
A number of publications have noted the overflow of data, but more than likely we’ll read and hear more about decision making through 2012. Better decisions lead to better flexibility and faster capability to meet an increasingly shortening decision window.
Foresight Is 20/20: Predictive Analytics And The Business Of Certainty
David Zax - Fast Company Inc., September 29th, 2011
“Scott Cohen, Digital Executive Editor of the New York Daily News, who has been programming front pages of websites for seven years, says of Visual Revenue that “we rarely make a move without consulting it.” Over the years, he encountered editors who were skeptical that some algorithm could help with editorial decisions: “‘That’s Big Brother. That’s my job. I don’t need something like that to tell me what’s working,’” they’d say. “Well you know what, you do,” he counters. He finds himself more trusting of VR’s real-time analytics, but says its predictive suggestions are more often right than wrong, calling it “radical to have a predictive engine as successful as it is.” (Disclosure: Fast Company uses Visual Revenue, among other analytics services.)”
And the winner is …
Stacey Cowley - CNNMoney Blog, September 23rd, 2011
“You can get a playback of the event through Twitter on #StartupCNNMoney thanks to @julpepitone’s tweet play-by-play and the steady stream of commentary our audience offered up. And the judges’ choice was …
Visual Revenue! Which looks to me like Chartbeat on crack (I mean that in a good way): It throws a whole bunch of metrics into its secret sauce blender and spits out optimization recommendations for how, where and when to highlight stories on a news site to maximize reader engagement…”
Ron Conway In A New York State Of Mind
Lizette Chapman - WSJ Blogs, September 22nd, 2011
“Now he’s hot on New York start-ups. Conway said that since 2009, the percentage of SV Angel investments in New York-based start-ups have increased from 2% to 20% and he expects that figure to only continue to grow. He said Los Angeles and Chicago were also emerging as top tech markets.
SV Angel’s recent investments in New York start-ups include: Visual Revenue, which makes a predicative Web analytics tool for media companies…”
CNNMoney Startup event tomorrow — here are the finalists!
CNNMoney Blog, September 21st, 2011
“For the past few weeks, we’ve been working on something new and different for us. Tomorrow CNNMoney will host its first startup event, at which three entrepreneurs will pitch their ventures — and talk up how their companies will help our brand.
We received more than 100 submissions, and winnowed it down to three finalists: Qwanz, Roboinvest and Visual Revenue. They’ll face a panel of CNNMoney experts, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who will shoot off questions a la the Spanish Inquisition.”
How to Predict (And Improve!) Your Future Traffic
David Strom - ReadWriteWeb Cloud, September 7th, 2011
“Second is a nifty service that is focused on the editorial content (rather than the keyword and ad side of things) by Visual Revenue. They have developed some analytics that look at what the traffic on your home page (or other prime site real estate) will be a few minutes into the future. They told me that for sites like ours that post oodles of content all day long, figuring out the placement of that content isn’t really for the present but for the visitor that is coming in the near future.
Visual Revenue were the folks behind the technology later sold to Yahoo Analytics…”
New generation of Web analytics applies ‘big data’ to newsroom decisions
Jeff Sonderman - Poynter, August 19th, 2011
“Visual Revenue also makes its recommendations “within a framework of editorial instructions,” Mortensen said. So each news organization can give it detailed guidelines, such as specifying a blend of local, regional and national stories, no more than 20 percent from wire sources or all less than 18 hours old.
Implementing a system like this forces newsrooms to be strategic about what exactly their home page should be.”
Visual Revenue adds science to editorial decisions
Ellie Behling - eMediaVitals, July 28, 2011
“Visual Revenue predicts the performance of stories on the front page in order to help editors make decisions about story placement. It can also operate independently on pages without editors, but founder Dennis Mortensen said most news organizations prefer to use it as a tool to inform decisions. He compares it to how the Bloomberg Terminal is used by stock traders. “We want to be that Bloomberg terminal of the newsroom,” he said in a recent interview.”
Visual Revenue secures Series A Seed Funding
The Team, July 27, 2011
“Visual Revenue Inc., the market leader in predictive analytics for online media, today announced that it has secured $512K in funding led by Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Kima Ventures and NYC Seed and joined by 10 individual Angel investors. This investment will primarily help fuel the Company’s product development.
Visual Revenue offers media companies a first-of-its-kind Front Page Decision Support System for online Editors. The solution, which can predict the performance of a piece of content about 15 min. into the future, provides real-time recommendations on what content to place in which position on a Front Page and for how long.”
Read the full press release here »
Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
Dawn McMullan, May 13, 2011
“Consider a company like Visual Revenue. The New York based company “provides editors with actionable, real-time recommendations on what content to place in what position right now and for how long, using predictive analytics that allow media organisations to proactively manage the cost of exposing a piece of content on a front page, whilst maximising the return they expect from promoting it,” the company’s Web site touts.
The company launched in early 2011. Its analytics tell editors what people are most interested in at the moment, by the minute or by the hour, giving them the knowledge they need to make decisions about moving content around.”
Purchase/download the publication here »
New York’s lean, mean startup machine
EILENE ZIMMERMAN, April 4, 2011
“In New York, the lean startup movement is the result of a confluence of recent trends: the emergence of a more “virtual” work force, the rising cost of office space and, most important, the availability of cloud technology, creating a host of free or nearly free Web-based applications for accounting, meeting and project collaboration.”
Dennis Mortensen: Are news orgs worrying too much about search and not enough about the front page?
Dennis Mortensen – for Niemanlab.org, March 2, 2011
“The front page is indeed still an enormously powerful engine of traffic. We now know that about half of your article views can be attributed to the primary front page or the section front pages — and with it a huge chunk of any news organization’s online revenue. The question, then, is what kind of processes and optimization methodologies have you applied to take advantage of this fact?”
Data Driven Editorial
Rich Young – for IPRA.org, March 2, 2011
“So why is this a game changing analytic tool for editorial professionals? It augments one of the most important skill sets required of a top-notch editor – having a nose for news.
After all, news organizations are using algorithms to create story ideas, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that despite the heat they’re receiving. So, why wouldn’t editors and content producers use predictive analytics to devise the most effective online news page?”
Setting the Perfect Front Page – an interview with Dennis Mortensen (Visual Revenue)
Bijgespijkerd.nl, February 3, 2011
- “What’s the business case when working with your solution, how does this earn money for your clients?
- Revenue opportunity; we generate this opportunity through e.g. an increase in page views. See how we get to $1,300,000 revenue opportunity in this Boston.com post of mine.
Cost saving opportunity;we provide an opportunity for the Editor to do the same task faster (to the point of full Automation) at a fraction of the cost.
- On top of this, we are able to move the organization towards being slightly more data driven, as we have an ability to illuminate true performers and honest but unavoidable failures as well – NOT on page views!.”
CEO Mortensen Says Visual Revenue Is Optimizing Front Page Performance For Publishers
AdExchanger.com, January 31, 2011
“Looking at your startup, what problem is Visual Revenue solving?
We increase the Front Page performance for online media destinations like the NY Daily News, Telegraaf and similar. The increase comes from Editors using our predictive analytics platform to recommend what story goes where on the front page and for how long – in a manual or automated setting.”
Analytics for News Editors: Visual Revenue Launches
Rich Young – Lewis PR, January 7, 2011
“…building a platform that ultimately serves readers and not solely search engines (obviously there’s a significant financial value proposition for publishers).
So why is this a game changing analytic tool for editorial professionals, in my opinion? It augments one of the most important skill sets required of a top-notch editor – having a nose for news.”
Predict your pageviews?
Christine Lagorio – Inc.com, January 7, 2011
“Leagues of bloggers and SEO scavengers are about to make a New York City start-up very successful. The New York Observer reports that Visual Revenue has developed software that can tell you which articles to place on your homepage in order maximize traffic to your site.
According to CEO Dennis Mortensen, the recommendations provided by Visual Revenue via their Front Page Automation Platform resulted in a 29 percent traffic boost for its beta publishers in November.”
Forget Real-Time, NY Startup Predicts Pageviews 15 Min Into the Future
Adrianne Jeffries – Observer.com, January 6, 2011
“…apparently the New York Daily News and eight other publishers are testing something edgier. Visual Revenue, a New York-based startup, claims it can predict how well a story will do on the front page 15 minutes in advance.
Visual Revenue then recommends where to place the story on the page and for how long, and calculates the dollar value per hour for each item.”
A Crystal Ball to Boost Page Views?
Ellie Behling - eMediaVitals, January 5, 2011
“The new platform is most useful for news-oriented, larger publishers, from blogs to newspapers. Visual Revenue has tested the product with a handful of clients (including the New York Daily News), all of which agreed to follow the recommendation engine for story placement.
Mortensen said the platform results in a 29 percent lift in front-page traffic. On a micro scale, that means the average reader visiting a front page went from reading three articles to four articles.”
Read the full interview here »
