Hi, welcome everybody. Welcome to today's session on why real time centric analytics failed News. I'm john Lovett, parsley is VP of customer success. And I'm here today with Jeff chin. We're gonna get to introductions in just a moment. First, I just want to set the stage for the topic of the day. So what we're going to talk about is breaking the addiction to real time analytics, and some of the problems and benefits that real time analytics actually bring to newsrooms the question of how are john and Jeff qualified to have this discussion today? Well, I've been up personally for about 10 years, I've worked with hundreds of news and other publisher customers over that period of time, working on strategy, helping them make sense of analytics and put the right plan of action in place for their newsrooms. And I'm also and Online News Association, New York City chapter organizer. And I'm gonna pass it over to Jeff to give a little bit of his background and why he's excited about this conversation today.
Hi, everyone, I'm Jeff chin. I'm the SVP of analytics at Vox media. I've been working with publishers for the last two decades, and been leading analytics teams for the last 10. So currently, I'm at Vox media. I've been here for almost four years. And I've worked with many different analytics solutions. So been excited to talk to john about this today.
Jeff is absolutely the right person for this conversation. So I'm very excited to talk with him today. And I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more of each of our backgrounds as we go along. And, Jeff, I think maybe a good starting point is just talking about how you originally got involved with analytics and your career.
Sure, I've always been working with data. But I would say that I was working at a well, and with such a big company. And what I was working on at the time was PageSpeed performance, which is very relevant to today. But we're working on that about 15 years ago. And at the big company, I was very disconnected from the user experience, understanding what users wanted and how an organization can align themselves with what they want and what the users want. So web analytics was just gaining some popularity at the time. And I decided to make the leap into web analytics. And back then there was usually only one web analyst at every company. So it was a really exciting time to get into it.
I think a lot of businesses even still are lucky if they even have one web analyst. What is the largest web analytics team that you've worked on? And what's the smallest team?
So at the Washington Post, it was it was early, we only had three people on the team for the entire organization. And so that was that was very early in the transition to digital. My team now is the largest we have to we have about 10 to 12, folks, and also hiring to
get that plug in there. Yeah. And so you have a team of 10 to 12 right now and how large an organization are you supporting? How many different internal customers do you have, so to speak?
Yeah, we work with about a dozen different brands. In newsrooms. There's about a little over 1000 people at Vox media. And about half of that is from the editorial side, but we support both the editorial side and the business side as well.
Yeah, so even having 10 to 12 people on the team, which is a very large team. I think as compared to most organizations, the ratios are still really tough. And so there's a lot of opportunity to get spread really thin, something that I've observed. I'm sure it's something that you've observed as well.
Totally. Yeah, we have to stay prioritized and work on what's important.
Yeah. So what is important to you, and when you think about analytics, like what does analytics actually mean? From the way that you approach it and that your team to purchase it?
Yeah, we, because we only have about a dozen analysts on the team, what we're really focused on is being able to scale our team. And the way that we do that is through clear communication. But what I think analytics is, is the practice of turning data into information and communicating it clearly. So what we're focused on is really the strategic side of everything that our newsrooms and company is doing. So a one big focus is around subscriptions. and developing a deeper relationship with our readers, including newsletters, and then also just growth from all of our networks.
Yep, absolutely. So it turning toward your experience working with real time, real time analytics in particular, but also just analytics in general? What can you tell us about those experiences and how they've maybe evolved over the years?
Yeah, so real time analytics came out about a decade ago with parsley and chartbeat. And we signed on pretty early at the Washington Post to use chartbeat. I would say that I have a love hate relationship with with real time analytics very early, it was it was very good to have a lot of exposure, it really pushed analytics and understanding of what's happening on each website, into the newsroom and into the organizations. But as we matured, and we matured as, as analysts, what we needed to get out of the data was very much different than what real time analytics provided.
Yeah. So I mean, it's it's been interesting, from our perspective, being sort of the early pioneers on the real time analytics side and seeing our own growth into, you know, more than just a real time analytics provider. I think that's a component of what we do now. But certainly not all we would really prefer to be thought of but you know, let's go a little deeper there. I think and let's talk about sort of the the core topic of this session. And, you know, what are some of the benefits that you've seen from real time analytics, but also, what are some of the negative outcomes that you've seen from real time analytics over the years? Yeah,
kind of, kind of, like I said, the biggest benefit a long time ago was that it brought analytics into a much more visible position in the newsroom. A lot of people had the big boards up on where you can see the top stories, and everything was moving around. So that made it so that people understood what was happening on the website, rather than us having to communicate everything. I also think that real time analytics since people are watching it all day, that they also knew what was happening, or they felt like they knew what's happening. And that resulted in fewer questions to an analytics team that maybe the benefit wouldn't be telling how many pages something had or how many pages something had at that particular moment in time. So those are some of the benefits some of the some of the downsides, actually touched on a little bit and the Nieman lab prediction that I wrote in 2019. And it ended up being a distraction. People are paying attention to it too much people are quoting metrics that didn't align with what we're trying to do. And in the long term, so those are some of the downsides.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think, you know, what, what I've observed over my time, is just the opportunity for analytics to be a real benefit for analytics teams. And it's kind of interesting, like, in my time at parsley, because sometimes, you know, you could think, oh, an analytics team would look at an analytics tool like parsley, which is meant to be sort of this like broadly accessible, analytics platform for newsrooms, editors, audience developers, it's kind of competitive with what they're doing and their work in Google Analytics, or Adobe analytics or those other enterprise platforms. And really, like I see it very differently. Going back to the earlier part of this conversation, where you've got a small team supporting a very large team, and what do you really want those conversations with the newsroom to be Do you want it to be? Here's how much traffic you got less yesterday, last week? Or do you want it to be more strategic and advisory driven? So how have you seen those types of relationships between analysts and newsrooms evolve over your time? And ultimately, where do you want to see that in an ideal state?
Yeah. I would say early on, it was a lot of answering habit, this piece. So how did So how did that piece do, which ended up just being pulling data and not providing too much context? Where I really want it to be is that strategic conversation between a newsroom and an analytics team, which is understanding what a newsroom or what a brand wants to do, and, and measuring against that. So that requires them to, or helping a collaboration to define what tactic you're trying to do, as well as defining the metrics that align with measuring success.
Right. And that metrics alignment is extremely important. Right. I think that's one of the things that's been touched on, possibly in the Nieman article, and, you know, other conversations where, you know, how do you take concurrence and align that to a weekly goal, or a daily goal or a monthly goal or an annual goal? How did that, I guess, friction point between the metrics influence some of the things that you were doing as an organization or as a team in the past when, when you have, you know, had that sort of fracturing of metrics of importance?
Yeah, the, the, the metric name, and what it actually measured was, became a real sticking point. So at that specific time, and 20, late 2018, early 2019, we were starting to develop a position on what our evergreen strategy should be, we've always done evergreen, but how do we understand it and do it even better, was the specific focus and real time analytics was really at opposition to understanding that and also emphasize the wrong things to the newsrooms that we wanted to focus on, on evergreen traffic. So that's really when we decided that when people were talking about different metrics, that wasn't about people coming back people spending more time with you. And also understanding the shelf life of a piece of content, we understood, we kind of made the decision that this real time analytics tool wasn't really aligned with what we were trying to push. So that's when we made a switch.
Yeah, one of the quotes that I'd like to steal from a customer, though, I'll have to remember back to attributed properly it was, it can give you a false sense of what's important. And again, it's just like aligning the expectations with the consumers of the data, with the reality of what the business is actually valuing. And what the readers are actually valuing. I think that's a big part of this, too. It's not always just driven by business outcomes, but it is a reflection of what the readers and, you know, website, visitors are actually telling you, a, an audience feedback perspective, right, like data if you have the right inputs. And if you have the right expectations of who is consuming that data information, it can be really important to enlighten you on what the audience is actually telling you and in terms of feedback and their enjoyment of the content, and so on and so forth. So how does that factor into some of the work that you and your team does?
Yeah, I think something that is more and more important to pay attention to these days is any around live events. We know that people are using the internet to follow along and have some perspective from publishers on on live events, and paying attention to either sports or any other events that are happening, and how people are reacting, reacting to the stories that you're publishing, can be really valuable for either going deeper on a subject or transition to a new subject.
And that's a great example. And I think one of the things I've heard over my time at parsley is, you know, certain certain organizations have priorities around just like tracking the real time news coverage. And that is their perception of why they exist and what they cover. And you've talked a little bit earlier about the importance of evergreen content. And so there is this, I guess, question between, alright, how important is what we're doing around the news cycle that's happening right now, obviously, very important if that's the mission of the organization, but that doesn't mean that real time should be the only thing that you're paying attention to. Right? Totally.
Yeah, we see this as two different muscles that you need to exercise. And what we've learned over the last few years of building up our evergreen audience or audience focus on evergreen is that there really needs to be two types of staff that are working on it. There's a very different mindset and it's hard for someone that's focused on news. So then also do evergreen at the same time, because there's just different tactics, different styles of writing and different topics sexual cover. Yeah,
yeah. And I think from a business perspective to thinking about, you know, different organizations, like, let's take cnn as an example, or New York Times, you know, both of these are news organizations, they do some in depth coverage and reporting over time as well. But you know, a lot of what you would go to CNN for is breaking news, right, at least, that's my perception of the average visitor there. But they also have an affiliate commerce site, just like New York Times has wire cutter CNN has underscored, which is really there for more long form content, more SEO content. And it's really interesting to think about the way that the two business models can feed each other. And Vox has even more business models, which maybe you can talk about a little bit. But I think one of the points to bring it back to the session topic is the obsession with real time, it's very attractive, because it does give you that instant feedback, it can be really gratifying. But it can really silo you to possibly miss some of the other opportunities that are really important across the business, whether those you know, business functions exist or can be created. I think that's, you know, an interesting thought experiment that people could launch into. And I'm curious to hear from the box perspective, because you guys are doing so many things. How do you how do you go about like thinking about all the different priorities for the business and the ways that people are engaging, and those different priorities?
Yeah, we do have a lot of different business models. And we call them networks focus on different things. So the the affiliate world that you're talking about, we have a site called the strategist that focuses on that. So we do not focus on real time analytics at all there, that that practice is really about combining the data we get from an affiliate vendor, say like Amazon or somebody else, with the behavior on our website. So it's, it's very much a data combining effort there. We do have other networks that have split between evergreen and news. So somebody like The Verge is very much focused on building both their affiliate business, as well as their evergreen and reviews business, as well as covering the news, which is what they're really known for. So what we try to do is we have those conversations with each network, figure out what they're really tried to focus on. And then we kind of have some playbooks that we can work with each of them on but we have to tailor it specifically to each network and understand exactly what they're trying to do, how their resource and how to how to support them with reports, analytics, and constant feedback.
Yeah, I think those are great examples. Also of like, this isn't a discussion over should real time analytics exist or not? Or should it? You know, is it at odds with overtime reporting or evergreen strategies, it's all part of what a truly healthy analytic strategy should be for an organization, you have to know what's going on in the moment, that can help support some of the real time decisions that you can make to actually amplify successful pieces or, you know, look inwardly if things aren't achieving the success that you would expect based on the promotion that you're seeing. I think the point is really, that analytics should be actionable. And a lot of times, the real time obsession puts you in a more reactive state, or just like a data watching state without any real intention or action that follows. Is that something that you had observed over your career? And how do you? How do you break that trend? Cuz I think that's actually like a really, really important, you know, point for this conversation is just how to how to get to action versus just, you know, watching and observing what's happening.
Yeah, we did see that we saw a lot of watching it was, it was both with a real time in IT solution, as well as just watching conversation happened on Twitter, when we should be focusing on the Great journalism that all of our networks are putting out. The way that we really combat that is both with tooling as well as setting some, some vision around say something like evergreen or a loyal developing a loyal user, and all the programs that are needed and necessary to support that, whether it be with newsletters, or login or registration, or a product team building the right engagement tools for an audience to engage with to come back to a website. So it was really a whole company kind of effort, that everybody's in different stages. So we're still pushing.
Yeah. And I think just pulling from that the context in which data and analytics are introduced into an organization are extremely important paired with the right tools. Because if you don't have that context, if you're not building that expectation, if you're not creating the education internally, then it's really hard to just expect the teams to do the right things. They do need some guidance. I know that's a part of strong analytics team culture that your team has a box. That's part of what we do as a vendor. On the parsley side, we have an education team that goes in deeply understands the problems and guides our customers on how to use our products to successfully navigate those challenges. But you can't just throw technology at the problem. That doesn't solve it. No, no, not at all. Yeah, it'll backfire for sure. Okay, well, I think we need to wrap it up there. We're at time. Jeff, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. I think your insights and conversation were really helpful for a lot of people. Is there a Twitter account? People can follow you up? Sure. You can follow me at Jeff Chen 21. Great. Well definitely check Jeff out there. I met john and loved it. And I also want to throw a big thank you to WordPress VIP for bringing us into this conversation today. WordPress VIP is actually acquired parsley as of February. So we're part of the new family. They're very excited and happy to be participating with them in this q&a season. So I think that is about it. Thank you again, Jeff. And we will talk to you all very soon. Chairman john
