Oops, there go some journalism jobs.
We recently wrote about how Chartbeat gives reporters superhuman powers with its real-time pageview monitoring service.
But apparently the New York Daily News and eight other publishers are testing something edgier. Visual Revenue, a New York-based startup, claims it can predict how well a story will do on the front page 15 minutes in advance.
Visual Revenue then recommends where to place the story on the page and for how long, and calculates the dollar value per hour for each item.
“We have the ability to predict the performance of an article on the front page into the future–and empowered with that information we generate real-time recommendations on what articles to place where on the front page,” CEO Dennis Mortensen wrote in a blog post.
Following Visual Revenue’s recommendations resulted in a 29 percent traffic boost for its nine beta publishers in November, Mortensen said in an email. If readers were reading an average of three stories on the homepage, for example, they started reading four.
ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries
