“Now, besides blogs, there is Twitter, social networking, and the real-time web.” – Richard Jalichandra
Technorati’s announcement this morning that they were re-inventing themselves to become relevant to today’s web was cheered by all of us at PostRank. It’s complete validation of what we’re all about, and it proves that the hard work we’ve put into collecting and making sense of social media metrics for the last two years has been time well spent. Yes, there are dozens of social hubs now — Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Friendfeed among them — which in the course of the past two years have begun to dramatically transform how users interact with and distribute content. These social sites can now be consistently found in the top three traffic drivers (competing with search and direct visits) and more and more publishers are focusing on their communities as a way to build more engaging content and conversations, drive traffic, and expand their influence.
Welcome to the distributed, real-time, social web!
Earlier this year we did a data mining experiment, and discovered two really important trends. First, the half-life of a story on the Internet today is roughly 50 minutes. In other words, more than half of any engagement a story gets occurs in the first hour after it’s published. Without a doubt, this trend is amplified by the numerous social networks, all of which value the timeliness of a story above many other factors.
Secondly, because the web has become social, distributed, and real-time, users are free to share, critique, and comment on stories away from where they were published. In fact, over 80% of all the engagement for an average story on the Internet happens off the publisher’s property; there are conversations on Twitter, votes on Digg, bookmarks on Delicious, and the list goes on. Traditional analytics don’t capture this; they’re still just measuring pageviews, links and unique visitors. Clearly, better tools are needed to measure engagement. PostRank Analytics is the first step in this direction.
Leveraging these emerging trends, our focus at PostRank has been on building a real-time ranking and monitoring platform that is relevant to the new social web. Links matter — they are a vote of confidence — but sharing, bookmarking, voting and dozens of other actions that millions of users take every day are all indicators of interest and engagement. Collecting these metrics gives a publisher a much more complete picture of audience engagement. PostRank tracks all of these metrics in real-time. It is a measure of total story engagement, on and off the publisher’s site.
When you type in a topic (E.g. Wine) on postrank.com you see a ranked list of blogs. That ranking is done in real-time based on all the engagement that each of those blogs has received over the last two weeks. It is relevant, dynamic, real-time, and it takes into account the social web.
The same technology that powers PostRank is now also powering the AdAge Power 150 list. AdAge migrated to using PostRank as their most weighted scoring factor in order to capture the feedback from the social web. The Atlantic Wire also just launched the Atlantic 50, tracking the most influential political commentators in the US, building in PostRank metrics.
New Real-time Ranking APIs: Feed Engagement & Metrics
So what’s the point? When we talk about engagement, we cannot ignore the social web. That’s the thesis of PostRank, and today we’re happy to announce that the same real-time APIs that power PostRank and our partners’ sites are becoming public.
Feed Engagement API (docs): real-time ranking of blogs based on all the social engagement data collected by PostRank (comments, discussions, votes, etc.) The API allows you to define a time interval to consider (from a day to a year), and you can even look at the daily engagement data for each blog.
Metrics API (docs): real-time metrics for any blog post. Need to know how many times a story has been shared, retweeted, or bookmarked? Metrics API can answer that.
So what does this mean? Now anyone can use the PostRank APIs to dynamically rank stories and entire feeds in real-time. As an industry, we need to move beyond page views and acknowledge the social web. Feed Engagement, Metrics, and the PostRank APIs are our contributions to this conversation.
Press Release
ReadWrite Web: As Technorati Falters, PostRank Launches New Blog Ranking Tools