Media properties should look to optimize their Virtual Front Page zones in four key areas: Terminology, Placement, Emphasis, Content Selection. I’m not suggesting aggressive change- we’ve seen the reader backlash with Newsweek, Gawker and the likes but surely some uniformity wouldn’t be a bad thing? We’re not a static news audience, we’re migratory – we have our favorites but just like retail we’ll still look into other shops and, with that in mind, a Publisher has an opportunity to win us over- help me see what else is on your menu today, front and center and in a terminology and location that’s familiar.

We are looking for full stack engineers who are smart, and get things done. They need to be tenacious and wear multiple hats; these hats are colored server, browser, ops, [insert-your-engineering-area-of-choice], api, tools, automation, research, and heavily overlapping.

We recently finished more than 150 hours of real-time “real-world’ recommendations with our Beta Publishers, so it is most likely you’ve read – without knowing it – the front page of a news media destination somewhere in the world that was set based on our content recommendation technology! The outcome, a phenomenal increase in Front Page CTR

If you want to provide recommendations on how well content is going to perform in the future, you have to accept that you have very little data to model on initially and that the recommendation itself expires (decrease in value) rapidly. Knowing which Article should have been pushed on the Front Page of the New York Times Yesterday has little or no value today!

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.

Predictive Analytics World turned into my new must-go-to conference, especially for those of us who attended Emetrics over the last couple of years and are looking for a positive and perhaps a bit more hardcore supplement!