According to Internet Week’s nifty new map, Visual Revenue is just one of hundreds of tech start-ups in New York. When I attended a VentureBeat event in October, I met local entrepreneurs looking to disrupt everything from online retail customer service to taxi cabs. I have friends building online clipboards and music discovery apps. You can’t help but be impressed by the wealth of ideas this town attracts (the best of which, of course, is ours :) ). We’ve recruited engineers and sales people from Pennsylvania, Argentina, India and The Netherlands, all of whom have joined us here in New York to help us realize our vision.

VR is located on the Associated Press newsroom floor, which goes nicely with my journalism degree and our goal of becoming the Bloomberg Terminal of the newsroom. We walk past editors and reporters on our way to lunch and the giant red New Yorker sign looms over our rooftop basketball/pizza sessions. With media giants and copious talent in our backyard, we couldn’t have asked for a better place to build our company. I’m sure our CEO mentioned it when he was gallivanting with the mayor in February.

New York isn’t just a melting pot of cultures and backgrounds, but of industries and ideas as well. Oh and food carts. Visual Revenue is predictably made in NYC!

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.

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

At the beginning of 2012 we officially launched the Front Page Arrangement History report. We invested in this because we believe it’s more than just a nice to have. A publisher who sits still and doesn’t innovate in this day and age is setting themselves up for a fall. Every publisher we work with is continually tuning and tweaking their homepage or section front pages but many lack the necessary tools to help them answer questions such as:

- What if I relocate this module?
- What’s the impact of the deploying a full width Doomsday module?
- If I move this ad unit down, how are the surrounding positions affected?
- I use multiple templates which one performs better on a Monday?

The list is almost endless…and the question is to what end? How are these tweaks affecting content engagement?

The above contains sample data only 

There are plenty of tools out there that take snapshots (screenshots) of specific pages on a site and whilst this is useful, without data it’s really just a collection of images – remember the WayBackMachine! We took a slightly more advanced approach with our solution and combined both snapshots and data.

- We take full length snapshots of every front page under management
- Snapshots are taken every time you update a given front page – every time!
- Alongside each snapshot, we store a matrix view sorted by position
- Article position data and its performance during each snapshot period
- Data on the best/worst performing arrangements; current, day, week, month
- ALL snapshots and position data for the lifetime of the account are stored
- Use our API or UI to pull either the snapshots or data directly

Snapshots are eye candy on their own, but when coupled with the corresponding historical position, arrangement and performance data they become unbelievably insightful and set the stage for in-depth analysis. The arrangement history provides a meaningful backdrop for internal publisher discussions; from editorial to audience development and advertising to design, all publisher stakeholders can benefit from this level of detail.

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More than 450 companies entered and were whittled down to 150 in 19 categories. We fall into the ‘Innovation in Publishing, Media and Entertainment’ category and are up against the following prestigious companies:

• Random House Publishing
• Sunday Publishing
• The Sunday Times
• Movellas
• [Visual Revenue Inc.]

Are we happy – you bet :-)

In a nutshell there are two key components to this release:

1) Real-time Recommendations: Up until now we have packaged recommendations in 15 minute cycles – we have now removed this and provide all recommendations as they happen.

2) Collaborative Editorial Environment: Enables a media organization’s Editors to see what each other are doing from their individual Platform logins – if ‘Bob’ accepts a recommendation ‘Jill’ can see this reflected in her UI instantly.

We’ve spent a significant amount of time discussing the pros and cons of an environment that provides recommendations in real-time or in cycles with our partners, which is why we felt it was time to address this feature. Our partnerships tend to comprise of web properties that are an ‘hourly’ destination so to speak (those that provide and/or break news on a minute by minute basis – think NYTimes, USA Today) and those that are more of a daily/weekly destination (think The Atlantic, Wired, Esquire). Neither’s immediate goal is different, they all want to ensure that the right content is placed in the right position on their respective front pages – the hourly destinations will just do it more frequently than the daily/weekly ones.

Providing recommendations in real-time (and allowing these recommendations to be temporarily paused) enables both destination types to benefit equally, ensuring they have the most relevant data at their finger tips, day or night.

I’ve spent many hours sitting in newsrooms and regardless of Editorial team size the room is always in discussion. What to place in this position? Isn’t it about time we refreshed that module? Can’t you find a better article for that position? We were very keen to take this discussion online and into the platform, hence the reason for launching the collaborative editorial environment. Editors can now interact directly with the Platform, provide signals to the engine and see which of their fellow editors accepted or passed on a particular recommendation.

Thanks to the all the feedback we’ve received from our partners! Being able to take this newsroom discussion and mirror it in the VR Platform has been one of the most pertinent launches we’ve done to date .

A fair question we often receive from Editors is ‘how do you ensure that your recommendations are in-step with what we would or wouldn’t do on a day-to-day basis’? Or put another way, how can Editors maintain control over the scope of the recommendations.

This question was put to Dennis at ONA’11 and here is his response:

The three of us took to the stage and pitched our respective products to a panel of judges that included John Cantarella, president of digital at Time Inc. News Group; Charlie O’Donnell, principal at First Round Capital; David Tisch, managing director of TechStars New York;  Alexa Von Tobel, founder and CEO of LearnVest.com; and Margaret Tuohy, director of product for CNNMoney.

After the pitches were over, the judges headed off to deliberate and returned to announce that…drum roll please…

Visual Revenue had won!

We’ve spent the last two years interviewing editors, wire framing, coding, tweaking, more interviewing, alpha testing, beta testing, (more interviewing :)) and finally launching the Visual Revenue Recommendation Platform!! We’re extremely fortunate to have such an awesome team (pretty aren’t they!) and I know I speak for all of us when I say we’re truly humbled to have won this event – GREAT job all!

Sadly I was unable to attend the event, but managed to follow it on the train (on my way up to ONA’11) via Twitter. Here are some of the Tweets that were bouncing through the twittersphere:

@ctull13: Key takeaway from #StartUpCNNMoney – if you want that capital, you’d best show some pride in (and passion about) your product.

@lyndabauer:”Really having the value proposition for CNNMoney right up front is most important” Margaret Tuohy #StartupCNNMoney #nyc-tech

@CNNMoneyTech: It’s official. @visualrevenue has won the first-ever #StartupCNNMoney event. Congratulations!

Thanks to the CNNMoney Team for the opportunity to pitch alongside the great guys from Qwanz and Roboinvest and we look forward to partnering with you!

In order for us to provide our recommendations for what to put where on the front page, we use a plethora of signals as inputs for our model (our secret sauce if you like!). One of these is how well each article you promote on a front page drives further ‘down-stream’ engagement or, put another way, how deep that article drives a user into other site content once they’ve finished reading it. We choose to expose some of the metrics we use for our modeling – article engagement will join others such as individual front page position value and its real-time CTR.

As always, our approach has been a simple one for the UI – the modeling we do to come up with the engagement score itself, is somewhat more sophisticated! Simply put, the more ‘orange dots’ you have displayed the better that article is at driving your readers on to consuming more content.

Two examples:

1) Whilst this article might be a great read, it is not driving your readers deeper into your property. This is reasonably typical of new stories that have no related content or back stories:

2) This article is a compelling piece of content, it possibly has a lot of background material or has great surrounding content (an Editor’s Picks, Must Read or Don’t Miss module) helping drive readers deeper into your property:

The engagement is calculated (as with everything else we do!) in real-time, and the score can therefore change during the day.It should be noted that we separately calculate for different content types (text article, galleries and the like) – this will ensure that an article that drives readers deeper doesn’t get eclipsed by a gallery just because it is perceived to have many page views.

This is a ‘tasty morsel’ to wet your appetites and we’ve plenty more to come over the coming month!