Ahead of our fearless CEO Tony Haile’s talk at the Guardian Changing Media Summit, he gave some time to discuss the state of the real-time industry and the ways Chartbeat is working with our thousands of media client-partners to move us forward — away from just a faster way to chase page views and traffic numbers and toward metrics that measure quality and map that quality of content and audience to the value of the business.

In the print world, it was pretty clear that your job was to make sure that people came back and bought a second copy of your newspaper. So your motivations were clearly aligned between creating quality and being a great business.

For a long time, I believe we lost that on the digital side of things. We started chasing page views or impressions and we started using link-based headlines and creating slideshows of questionable value. One of the things that is starting now and is a huge debate in the US, especially among the thought-leadership publishers, is how do we start to reunite the idea of quality and being a great business. How do we find the right metrics to use? What are the right business models that mean that we can make enough money by creating quality content? That is something that only now we are starting to wrestle with in a pragmatic way. For a long time, we accepted this separation as being the necessary way of things and this is not true at all.

Read the full interview and let us know if you’re heading to the Changing Media Summit in London in a few weeks. Would love to see you there.