I left Yahoo! after two great years spent on the IndexTools integration as the Director of Data Insights – and am happily back as a bootstrapped Entrepreneur. I incorporated under the name Visual Revenue Inc. and are actively working on a software as a service solution that can increase the front page performance for publishers – in particular News Media.

Autumn 2010 marked the end my Yahoo! adventure – an adventure which was absolutely amazing, from the day we got acquired, to re-branding, launching v9.5, writing my book, setting up a Partner Network etc. However, it is indeed time for NEW entrepreneurial adventures. What’s next? (a Recommendation engine for News Media) – You’ll hear more about this in a separate post though.

Article Lifespan can be viewed as a coarse summary of a news property’s operation. It reflects the staffing level, processes, and strategy a news property has established to put out content at a particular rate. News Properties should align this as closely as possible to their readers’ reading habits to maximize readership while minimizing cost. I would argue that each new property has an optimal average Article Lifespan.

I personally tend to work with 5-8 Article Traffic Source segments when discussing data with news media publishers – sources like Search, Social Media, but also News Aggregators and News Originators. Some of these segments are de-facto defined by todays Web Analytics solutions, but News Aggregators and News Originators are rarely if ever included in that mix. The apparent black and white classification is achievable without much debate, but it is those news media properties on the fringes that need a proper rule set for classification, where one can prove whether it is indeed an Aggregator or an Originator.

I was recently in talks with a set of publishers about a set of specific Revenue Opportunities, where one of the most evident (and honest) dialogues was about how to quantify the potential revenue increase. I believe it is possible to replace sophisticated revenue models with simple monthly eCPM values, to calculate believable publisher revenue opportunities.

I was reading an article in the New York Times, which suggest that work place burnout, starts at a younger age, in the world of online news media. I do not agree with the article’s main point, but I instantly fell in love with the authors examples of ruthless environments, a perverse opposite of the intent I guess. He assembles some of the pioneers in the marriage of Data and News Media. Find a pool of excerpts from the article.