International audience engagement insights: First quarter 2019
We spent more than 400 hours analyzing subscription models—here’s what we’ve found
Chartbeat has immersed itself in research around reader revenue and subscription models this year. This work has taken various forms such as data analysis, comparing historical trends, and distilling insights…
Solving for subscriptions: How the Membership Puzzle Project addresses the paid vs non-paid divide
As revenue models shift from advertising to users, digital publishers today need to know more than ever what draws—and keeps—readers. Zeroing in on the 10% who are already the most…
Channels, conversions, and churn: Why better mobile UX is key for subscriber revenue
Publishers attempting to unlock new sources of reader revenue (most notably through subscription models) are understandably honing in on device usage, particularly when there are an estimated 5.1 billion (via…
A Chinese news app is quietly referring millions of pageviews — here’s how global publishers can take advantage
Traffic to your most engaging content can come from unexpected places. Case in point—Chartbeat’s data science team recently found that TopBuzz, a China-based news aggregation app, was responsible for a…
The Most Engaging Stories of 2018
2018 saw familiar political and social themes rise to the top, including Brexit, the Trump administration, the #MeToo movement, and climate change. But it was the deeply investigated and deeply…
YouTube outage drives 20% increase in traffic
Last Tuesday, YouTube experienced an outage for about an hour and the internet got a taste of what would happen if the platform disappeared. The results were surprising: internet behaviors…
What happens when Facebook goes down? People read the news
What would the world look like without Facebook? Chartbeat had a glimpse into that on Aug. 3, 2018, when Facebook went down for 45 minutes and traffic patterns across the…
Research Study: Only 1 in 3 publishers see a clear traffic boost from AMP
AMP traffic in aggregate is increasing, but how widespread is the impact for publishers? Chartbeat, together with The Daily Beast, collaborated on a two-part research study to rigorously quantify the…
Google’s mobile shifts driving traffic boost to publishers
In the past year, while the dialogue around platform traffic focused on the decline from Facebook, Google was quietly executing on a tectonic shift towards mobile. In February, we commented on…
The flip to mobile-first
It is official: we are finally “mobile-first.” At the conclusion of Q2, we reached the much-anticipated pivot point when all Mobile traffic (direct and referred) caught up with Desktop (see…
What we thought we knew about mobile readers
Are desktop homepage readers engaging with content more than mobile readers? New data suggests they are not.For the last several years, we’ve had the mindset that mobile readers are skimmers…
Putting research into play to prepare for 2018 World Cup website traffic
The 2018 World Cup starts in Russia next week, and your sites are bound to see spikes in traffic as readers tune in to each match over the course of…