User:Vipul/Chartbeat

Chartbeat is a real-time web analytics company that started out as an internally built startup of seed stage incubator and venture capital company Betaworks. It helps provide actionable insights to news websites and blogs that they can use to make real-time decisions on what content to publish and promote on their sites.

History
Betaworks launched Chartbeat in April 2009 as a real-time web analytics tool that publishers could use to react quickly to changes in user behavior. At the time, Google Analytics did not offer real-time data. The launch of Chartbeat was part of a broader strategy by Betaworks to capitalize on the growth of the real-time, stream-based, social web. Betaworks had also invested in Twitter, Tumblr, bit.ly, and TweetDeck.

In August 2010, Chartbeat crossed the 1 million concurrent user mark, In January 2011, Chartbeat crossed the 2 million concurrent user mark.

In July 2011, Chartbeat launched Newsbeat, a version of their service for news sites.

In April 2012, Chartbeat revealed new social features, an iOS app, and a redesign. Chartbeat incorporated real-time analytics for video data in April 2013 and for native advertising in May 2014.

Funding
In August 2010, the company was spun off from Betaworks as a separate company and raised $3 million in venture capital funding from Index Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Freestyle Capital, betaworks, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and Jason Calacanis.

Chartbeat raised $9.5 million in a Series B round in April 2012, with the goal of using the new funding to change the focus of their analytics service towards measuring user engagement. The round was led by Josh Stein at DFJ and Saul Klein of Index Ventures, who had led the company’s seed round.

In May 2014, the company raised an additional $3 million.

Reception of emphasis on engagement rather than pageviews
Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile has argued for an increased focus on user engagement rather than pageview counts, in a widely cited article in Time Magazine and in interviews elsewhere.

A New York Times article on virality cited Chartbeat's findings on the distinction between the pieces that get widely shared on social media and the pieces that users are most likely to engage with.

A Wall Street Journal blog post discussed the promise and peril of news and opinion websites including sponsored content discussed Chartbeat's findings on the matter.

Impact on newsrooms and in analysis of news traffic
Al Jazeera, which uses Chartbeat, was able to identify, based on Chartbeat, the source of its rapid uptick in pageviews following the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the President of Egypt. Chartbeat successfully identified Twitter and Reddit as the main drivers of traffic.

A Chartbeat outage in April 2011 was reported as causing stats-addicted news editors to go into withdrawal, highlighting the importance of the service to newsrooms.

After Google News stopped including links to news websites in Spain, Chartbeat's analysis showing that this caused a traffic dip of 1-4% for Spanish news sites was cited by the Wall Street Journal.

Comparison with other analytics services for websites
A Mashable article in April 2012 listed Chartbeat as one of three useful real-time analytics tools for businesses, alongside Hootsuite and Parse.ly.

Chartbeat has also been touted and critiqued as an alternative to Google Analytics for real-time data.