422 karma · joined April 10, 2009
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stuff to change as we learn, so please keep the feedback coming.
I do think that over time more opportunities for, at first, skinny bundles will emerge but the world isn't there yet at the scale you'd want.
Either way, I totally hear you on this stuff, first thing on the list is building members even more privacy/data controls so that if for any reason you think you don't trust us anymore, you can make sure that you're protected.
From there, making sure we can iterate on our Terms to make sure they live up to the best of what our members want is going to be key. We've been launched for less than a month so keep the feedback coming.
It's always going to be a negotiation when you're trying to work with sites rather than unilaterally act against them, but we're genuinely trying to get them to a place where they're living up to the privacy promise that a consumer would want.
I think Columbus set himself well apart from the founding fathers on any number of scores and even in his own time and with his own supporters (Queen Isabella of Spain for instance) they thought he had gone too far
Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.Having said that, it is a sailors prerogative to increase the height of waves by 10 ft for every year since their journey. :)
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 ;)
Think of it like this: Google Analytics can tell you how to better position fire hydrants and increase the efficiency of the fire engine's route to your house. Chartbeat can tell you that your house is on fire.