Last Week at ONA15

ONA is always a blast, but Chartbeat had an especially great time this year in Los Angeles. It was, as you might say, hella rad. Our team loved hanging with you in the Midway, talking about audience building (check out the full audio recording!!) in Pacific Palisades, and meeting some of the coolest digital journalists and editors out there. You can check out the slides from our session here.

So what was everyone talking about?

Mobile-Desktop Parity

Whether it was Richard Gingras of Google News or our very own Tony Haile, everyone agreed that mobile matters. A lot. Our own research has shown that the predominant actions on desktop and mobile are not parallel — 90% of the time an event is fired on a mobile device, it’s a scrolling event even though that’s only the case 40% of the time on desktop. Even more evidence that publishers have to be quick on their mobile feet, especially with the rise of Dark Social.

Monetizing Quality Content

Mark said it best:

It’s clear that the web is recognizing attention as the true metric of success and quality content as the unwavering goal of digital journalism. Now, publishers are turning to the next logical question: how do you monetize that attention? In our Sponsored Session, “Can You Have Their Attention Please,” Nik and Tony demonstrated the power and promise of Engaged Ad Refresh as one answer to that question. By refreshing ads only after they’ve been viewed by an engaged audience for a minimum amount of time, publishers can create viewable inventory and charge premium for their eye-keeping inventory.

You can listen to the entire session here.

And we weren’t the only ones who thought this was pretty great :)

Now we don’t like to brag. But our sponsored session was truly humbling. We love to see the data nerdery spreading, and we’re always happy to talk engagement, audience building, and anything metrics.

Attention Metrics in the Classroom

At our booth, we got the chance to chat with some superb young journalists, members of the ONA Student Newsroom, and undergraduate communications students from around the country. It’s not every day we get to meet the next generation of world-class journalists. So, when we saw how excited they were already about attention metrics, we got pretty excited ourselves. As newsrooms embrace attention data, so too do journalism students.

Learning the importance and functionality of metrics early on can only prepare students to be even better writers, editors, and internet advocates. That’s why we’ve recently partnered with Camayak to give Chartbeat access to twelve campus newsrooms.

Online Harassment and Digital Journalism

Finally, if you missed the Keynote discussion on gendered online harassment, you can check out a recording here. It is important beyond describing. Go watch.

Can’t wait for ONA16? Neither can we. Until then, you can can relive the glory of ONA15 with the full audio recording of our session “Can You Have Their Attention Please?”

In the meanwhile, come find us at Advertising Week! We’ll be at IAB MIXX today and tomorrow. On Thursday, our CEO Tony will be speaking at Viacom’s “The Attention Experience,” and on Friday, our Chief Data Scientist Josh will be speaking at DataPoint NYC. Yup, it’s gonna be a crazy week.


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