4 ms·

Chartbeat gets $3m from Index, Calacanis, Conway, Clavier, Sacca

31 points by arctictony 16y ago

paraschopra 16y ago
This is an interesting announcement. Chartbeat may have $300k annual revenues (2500 * 10 * 12), 5 employees and a ton of competitors (GA, Clicky, and tons of other web analytics tools). And they raise $3m. Probably they have interesting plans ahead.
maxklein 16y ago
The market for these kinds of services is going to be great over the next years. If you want to make a startup, do it off those principles: We have all this unstructured data and information - make sense of it, and give it to me in a useful instantly understandable format.
- paraschopra 16y ago
  Can you expand on this? I had blogged about how I would like future of web analytics to be: http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/what-web-analytics-should-actually-be/ http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/what-web-analytics-sh... Hearing your thoughts on this will be interesting.
jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
I've been using chartbeat for the past few weeks. It's absolutely awesome and I recommend it to anyone here. FYI, I have no affiliation with their team + don't even know the team there.
d2viant 16y ago
These guys will get snatched up by Google. It would be a perfect complement to Google Analytics.
- RBr 16y ago
  It sure seems like a good fit... Charbeat focuses on real-time analytics while Google delays stats. Adding Chartbeat's real time capabilities would be interesting. I don't know if Google would take the performance hit of Charbeat's code though. It would make more sense to me for Google to simply build in Chartbeat's real-time block of popular pages into a new section. Add in "conversation" options to track Twitter, Facebook, etc and they'd have a new interesting social aspect. Chartbeat has a way to go if they really want to be bought by Google. My money is on Google simply recreating the best parts of it with an eye toward performance over features.
samg 16y ago
Chartbeat is very cool, but I wonderful how useful it actually is. Is the idea to modify content on the fly as it gains traction? I just don't really see how this service adds value (read: increases my revenue, pageviews, xxx), besides some nice live updating charts to look at.
- nostromo 16y ago
  I've used it for several months. It's not a replacement for Google Analytics as some have implied. However, it is useful for getting early feedback on your marketing spend. For example, if you turn on an expensive Google SEM campaign, you can start watching the visitors in real time. I've used this to find negative keywords and block them instantly, without waiting for Google Analytics reports to catch up.
RBr 16y ago
Chartbeat was uber powerful for Mahalo. I'm not surprised that Jason Calacanis invested in it. Mahalo lives-and-dies in grabbing headline traffic and monopolizing on both short and long-tail trends. Chartbeat shows exactly which pages are hitting. It's an easy to follow formula for updating pages on Mahalo. The system not only shows which pages are hot, but which pages are talked about on Twitter and shows very early trends from the SE's. Jason would regularly encourage folks to use it before his investment. Seems like a good snag for him.
- jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
  You are 100% correct. Last year we would see trends like StarCraft 2 come out, so we made pages like this: http://www.mahalo.com/starcraft-2-wings-of-liberty-walkthrough http://www.mahalo.com/starcraft-2-wings-of-liberty-walkthrou... Which we spend and make thousands of dollar on, and then double down by making videos on our Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YzhojCvUYA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YzhojCvUYA Some SEO folks claim we "spam" search engines, but the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views a month on Mahalo and we then spend $500 to $5,000 building it out. The reason we are the #170th largest site on the web (and profitable), is because we use Chartbeat to find our winner and we DOUBLE DOWN on original content. After we double down you know what we do? We double down again! :-) I love Chartbeat. It rocks. It's also helping us build out vertical Q&A sites like www.ipad-answers.com. We have three or four pages that break out on a site this every month, and we send amazing talent to those page and blow out amazing answers. Again, double down and double down again. When you got the nuts you pound it.
  - pclark 16y ago
    Is any of this related to Chartbeats USP of it being real time? Sounds like any analytic package would show you which areas are receiving the most traffic in a time period. It isn't like seeing trends now is different to seeing trends in a few hours given that you have to spend resources and time doubling down ...
    - joncarder 16y ago
slig 16y ago
I really love chartbeat. It's very useful and addicting, so you have to be careful to not waste loads of times watching it.
jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
I've been a fan of Chartbeat since day one, and I've been a consultant to the company for a year. I was thrilled to be invited as the first investor into the company, and the sky is limit for this startup. ChartBeat is Google Analytics on crack. :-)
joncarder 16y ago
I think chartbeat on a cool factor is high but on a useful factor it's low and therefore I passed. What web analytics needs is to go beyond just showing the data (real-time or not) into helping you understand WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE in order to IMPROVE your website objectives. To be more specific: Tying in a/b testing with user flows and analytics like - ranking pages by abandon rate so you can see where your loosing people - tracking funnel processes like sign up and shopping cart to identify problem areas - ranking links based on clicks to show what users really care about and what is just taking up space on a page - enabling exit interviews and real-time chat with users to collect feedback - and on top of identifying problems it would be really useful for it to present suggestions to help solve the problems. Analytics are just a means to an end but for some reason analytics companies think analytics are the end. Big disconnect here as most of their customers don't have the sophistication to take the analytics and know how to improve their site from them. The analytics company that provides an idiots guide to fixing problem areas and optimizing your site will be a game changer.
- arctictony 16y ago
  Hey Jon, I'm the GM of chartbeat and totally appreciate your point. Everything you say is super appropriate for the traditional role of static analytics which was to look at usual behaviour on fairly persistent architectures over time and optimize that. However, real-time analytics is almost the antithesis of this. It's focused on exploiting unusual behaviour now often across transient content. With this kind of content and the kind of user flows we are seeing more of across the sites we track (more spikes and troughs than ever before) you can seriously boost your traffic by reflecting user behaviour in the site and (as Jason suggested above) doubling down on what's got the edge in that moment. The page that's driving the majority of your traffic today might not have existed yesterday and might not be looked at tomorrow so purely trying to apply traditional analytics methods to it has diminished utility. So you should totally continue to use traditional analytics for optimising the persistent architecture of your site (I'd highly recommend Kiss Metrics), but think about chartbeat as a complement to that, helping you adapt the transient content on your site to the flows of user behaviour. There's a reason almost every major publisher has integrated chartbeat, some spending thousands of dollars on us a month, and it ain't just because we're pretty ;)
lukestevens 16y ago
"Real-time analytics" is a contradiction in terms, imo. Analytics isn't day trading. Who takes action in response to data in "real time"? What does that even mean? Even Jason Calacanis says "...the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views a month..." (my emphasis). There's a lot of novelty value in blinking stats, but I concur with the general sentiment here that we need better analytics that makes sense of the data, not "real time" analytics that just pumps it out faster.
- jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
  Sorry, I didn't explain clear enough. Chartbeat acts as an early warning system as to what those pages will be. so, if we are watching out big winners and suddenly see a new page jump into the top 50 pages we can double down on that THE MOMENT it spikes. this is uber-powerful.
dataminer 16y ago
Khan Academy on Chartbeat http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=032eb5f1ea0b68a948634d6af8a6ee8e# http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=0...

31 points by arctictony 16y ago

This is an interesting announcement. Chartbeat may have $300k annual revenues (2500 * 10 * 12), 5 employees and a ton of competitors (GA, Clicky, and tons of other web analytics tools). And they raise $3m. Probably they have interesting plans ahead.

maxklein 16y ago

The market for these kinds of services is going to be great over the next years. If you want to make a startup, do it off those principles: We have all this unstructured data and information - make sense of it, and give it to me in a useful instantly understandable format.

paraschopra 16y ago
Can you expand on this? I had blogged about how I would like future of web analytics to be: http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/what-web-analytics-should-actually-be/ http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/what-web-analytics-sh... Hearing your thoughts on this will be interesting.

jasonlbaptiste 16y ago

I've been using chartbeat for the past few weeks. It's absolutely awesome and I recommend it to anyone here. FYI, I have no affiliation with their team + don't even know the team there.

d2viant 16y ago

These guys will get snatched up by Google. It would be a perfect complement to Google Analytics.

RBr 16y ago
It sure seems like a good fit... Charbeat focuses on real-time analytics while Google delays stats. Adding Chartbeat's real time capabilities would be interesting. I don't know if Google would take the performance hit of Charbeat's code though. It would make more sense to me for Google to simply build in Chartbeat's real-time block of popular pages into a new section. Add in "conversation" options to track Twitter, Facebook, etc and they'd have a new interesting social aspect. Chartbeat has a way to go if they really want to be bought by Google. My money is on Google simply recreating the best parts of it with an eye toward performance over features.

samg 16y ago

Chartbeat is very cool, but I wonderful how useful it actually is. Is the idea to modify content on the fly as it gains traction? I just don't really see how this service adds value (read: increases my revenue, pageviews, xxx), besides some nice live updating charts to look at.

nostromo 16y ago
I've used it for several months. It's not a replacement for Google Analytics as some have implied. However, it is useful for getting early feedback on your marketing spend. For example, if you turn on an expensive Google SEM campaign, you can start watching the visitors in real time. I've used this to find negative keywords and block them instantly, without waiting for Google Analytics reports to catch up.

RBr 16y ago

Chartbeat was uber powerful for Mahalo. I'm not surprised that Jason Calacanis invested in it. Mahalo lives-and-dies in grabbing headline traffic and monopolizing on both short and long-tail trends. Chartbeat shows exactly which pages are hitting. It's an easy to follow formula for updating pages on Mahalo. The system not only shows which pages are hot, but which pages are talked about on Twitter and shows very early trends from the SE's. Jason would regularly encourage folks to use it before his investment. Seems like a good snag for him.

jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
You are 100% correct. Last year we would see trends like StarCraft 2 come out, so we made pages like this: http://www.mahalo.com/starcraft-2-wings-of-liberty-walkthrough http://www.mahalo.com/starcraft-2-wings-of-liberty-walkthrou... Which we spend and make thousands of dollar on, and then double down by making videos on our Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YzhojCvUYA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YzhojCvUYA Some SEO folks claim we "spam" search engines, but the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views a month on Mahalo and we then spend $500 to $5,000 building it out. The reason we are the #170th largest site on the web (and profitable), is because we use Chartbeat to find our winner and we DOUBLE DOWN on original content. After we double down you know what we do? We double down again! :-) I love Chartbeat. It rocks. It's also helping us build out vertical Q&A sites like www.ipad-answers.com. We have three or four pages that break out on a site this every month, and we send amazing talent to those page and blow out amazing answers. Again, double down and double down again. When you got the nuts you pound it.
- pclark 16y ago
  Is any of this related to Chartbeats USP of it being real time? Sounds like any analytic package would show you which areas are receiving the most traffic in a time period. It isn't like seeing trends now is different to seeing trends in a few hours given that you have to spend resources and time doubling down ...
  - joncarder 16y ago

slig 16y ago

I really love chartbeat. It's very useful and addicting, so you have to be careful to not waste loads of times watching it.

jasonmcalacanis 16y ago

I've been a fan of Chartbeat since day one, and I've been a consultant to the company for a year. I was thrilled to be invited as the first investor into the company, and the sky is limit for this startup. ChartBeat is Google Analytics on crack. :-)

joncarder 16y ago

I think chartbeat on a cool factor is high but on a useful factor it's low and therefore I passed. What web analytics needs is to go beyond just showing the data (real-time or not) into helping you understand WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE in order to IMPROVE your website objectives. To be more specific: Tying in a/b testing with user flows and analytics like - ranking pages by abandon rate so you can see where your loosing people - tracking funnel processes like sign up and shopping cart to identify problem areas - ranking links based on clicks to show what users really care about and what is just taking up space on a page - enabling exit interviews and real-time chat with users to collect feedback - and on top of identifying problems it would be really useful for it to present suggestions to help solve the problems. Analytics are just a means to an end but for some reason analytics companies think analytics are the end. Big disconnect here as most of their customers don't have the sophistication to take the analytics and know how to improve their site from them. The analytics company that provides an idiots guide to fixing problem areas and optimizing your site will be a game changer.

arctictony 16y ago
Hey Jon, I'm the GM of chartbeat and totally appreciate your point. Everything you say is super appropriate for the traditional role of static analytics which was to look at usual behaviour on fairly persistent architectures over time and optimize that. However, real-time analytics is almost the antithesis of this. It's focused on exploiting unusual behaviour now often across transient content. With this kind of content and the kind of user flows we are seeing more of across the sites we track (more spikes and troughs than ever before) you can seriously boost your traffic by reflecting user behaviour in the site and (as Jason suggested above) doubling down on what's got the edge in that moment. The page that's driving the majority of your traffic today might not have existed yesterday and might not be looked at tomorrow so purely trying to apply traditional analytics methods to it has diminished utility. So you should totally continue to use traditional analytics for optimising the persistent architecture of your site (I'd highly recommend Kiss Metrics), but think about chartbeat as a complement to that, helping you adapt the transient content on your site to the flows of user behaviour. There's a reason almost every major publisher has integrated chartbeat, some spending thousands of dollars on us a month, and it ain't just because we're pretty ;)

lukestevens 16y ago

"Real-time analytics" is a contradiction in terms, imo. Analytics isn't day trading. Who takes action in response to data in "real time"? What does that even mean? Even Jason Calacanis says "...the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views a month..." (my emphasis). There's a lot of novelty value in blinking stats, but I concur with the general sentiment here that we need better analytics that makes sense of the data, not "real time" analytics that just pumps it out faster.

jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
Sorry, I didn't explain clear enough. Chartbeat acts as an early warning system as to what those pages will be. so, if we are watching out big winners and suddenly see a new page jump into the top 50 pages we can double down on that THE MOMENT it spikes. this is uber-powerful.

dataminer 16y ago

Khan Academy on Chartbeat http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=032eb5f1ea0b68a948634d6af8a6ee8e# http://chartbeat.com/dashboard2/?url=khanacademy.org&k=0...