#parse.ly

Parse.ly Raises $5M For Predictive Analytics Platform That Helps Media Companies Decide What To Publish

Parse.ly has raised $5 million for its platform to do analysis of web site data that does natural language processing (NLP) to define semantic relationships in data, primarily for digital media companies. The funding circular was led by Grotech Ventures with participation from Blumberg Capital, ff adventure Capital, and FundersClub.

The company’s analytics platformextracts semantic data and…

Publisher analytics platform Parse.ly claims profitability as it raises $6.8 million

Parse.ly, an analytics platform aimed at online publishers, has closed a $ 6.8 million series B round of funding led by existing investors Grotech Ventures and Blumberg Capital, with participation from Felton Group, FundersClub, and DreamIt, among other angel investors. The New York-based company also said that it had recently achieved profitability for the first time. Parse.ly launched its…

We’re in the era of data everywhere. As the Web becomes more social (not there yet — see below), publishers have to look at even more touch points. We spoke with Sachin Kamdar, CEO of social analytics company Parse.ly, about some of the hurdles publishers keep tripping over.

What is biggest issue facing publishers when it comes to understanding social data? The biggest issue is being able to aggregate other metrics with social data. What publishers do right now is think about social as its own silo. How many shares on Twitter, how many shares on Facebook? How does it intersect with the audience? They need to use pieces of data to come up with a social strategy moving forward. There’s a data problem now, as they aggregate across other data areas of their property. There needs to be one data stream. It’s about being able to surface those intersections for the publishers. Is my social audience different than the standard reader that visits? If so, how do I get them to stay and then share and comment and engage with them?

What are some mistakes that publishers make when looking social data? The mistake is not going far enough; people treat social as a linear one-off thing — dropping a few social buttons on my site will be enough to get content viral. The other thing is that they just tweet out their own articles. Many publishers will treat social as an RSS feed and link to every post they have. This is not a way to engage with audience. Some digital companies don’t realize it’s not a one-way street. Content is your property; people are talking about it, so engage with them.

So it sounds like publishers need to look at themselves as brands? I would take it a step further. Not only are publishers brands but so are the content creators themselves. They (reporters) should have all the data transparent to them to understand what audience is resonating with them from a social perspective and leverage that data to grow the audience.

But do publishers have resources to do this? It takes technology to do it. When you think about this, they have to quickly pull in information from social networks into an interface for someone to understand how the data intersects. It would take someone sitting there and listening to what’s happening. There are free tools that can do an OK job; Google Analytics is a good way to start and may have to use that. But it’s more about letting content creators have their conversations about content and engage audiences in a multidirectional fashion, as opposed just posting on the site and waiting for comments.

So we just wrapped this rad video for http://parse.ly/. 

--

Dash, Parse.ly's flagship product, is purpose-built to meet the unique needs of online publishers. Dash analyzes content at massive scale to produce insights that help publishers optimize content performance on their site and across the Web.

--