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The Mobile Shift: Algorithms, Devices, Viewability

A Letter From the Editor

Josh Schwartz

This quarter, Chartbeat announced our raising of a new round of financing and released two new products, both focused on maximizing the value of user engagement. The first, Engaged Headline Testing, expands on the ubiquitous Multi-Armed Bandit headline testing by selecting headlines that drive the highest amount of page engagement, rather than those that simply drive the highest number of page views. Research has found that headlines can have substantial effects on how we read (as eloquently stated by Maria Konnikova in the New Yorker), so taking into account users’ behavior after they click is critical if we are to select the highest quality headlines.

The second, Engaged Ad Refresh, based on research we described in the previous Chartbeat Quarterly, moves the display advertising market one step closer to being based on human attention. This tool creates huge amounts of high quality, viewable ad inventory for publishers by refreshing ads after they’ve been actively viewed for a given amount of time.

As we seem to announce in every issue, our data team has grown again, and we’re proud to welcome Jeiran Jehani, who joins Chartbeat from NYU’s computational neuroscience department, and whose work is featured in this issue.

In this issue of the Chartbeat Quarterly, we focused on several major shifts: in algorithms, devices, and viewability.

Both Google and Facebook released major algorithm changes in the past few weeks, both of which had the potential to affect traffic to news sites in significant ways. Andy Chen and Jeiran Jehani looked into both, and present their findings.

It’s been about two years since our first research aimed at properly measuring engaged time, and we’re in the midst of a major new project to update our measurement methodology for the devices and reading patterns of today’s web consumer. Chris Breaux and Justin Mazur present our initial research, with more to follow in the coming weeks.

Finally, with the upcoming release of an IAB mobile viewable impression standard, Kris Harbold looked at viewability on the mobile web and presents some statistics and best practices.

As always, thank you for reading, and please do tweet or email your comments to myself and the team.

Next Story: Mobile Viewability & Advertising Challenges

about the editor / Josh schwartz

Josh Schwartz is Chief Data Scientist at Chartbeat. He focuses on applications of machine learning and optimization to help media companies grow and monetize their audience. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among others. In a prior life, he researched machine learning, optimization, and computer vision at MIT, Cornell, and the University of Chicago. In another prior life, he was a moderately successful coffee entrepreneur and a slightly less successful bicycle racer.
@joshuadschwartz / josh@chartbeat.com