Is any of this related to Chartbeats USP of it being real time? Sounds like any analytic package would show you which areas are receiving the most traffic in a time period.
It isn't like seeing trends now is different to seeing trends in a few hours given that you have to spend resources and time doubling down ...
For Mahalo, the difference was immediacy. Mahalo had a lot of existing pages that did not provide adequate information. Remember that the vast majority of Mahalo pages were created automatically by a bot or by using outsourced labor that didn't do a very good job. They were ranked but crappy.
So, when a trend hit or for whatever reason, a page started to receive traffic, you could see it right away, add a bunch of content to it and then almost magically, push up it's search engine result position to snowball the page. For topics such as "Tiger Woods Affair", recall notices, etc, it worked really well.
Generating pages with inadequate information is in the same vein as throwing crap at a wall to see what would stick. It could be thought of as SE spam, but when quickly and carefully built out it was just the way that Mahalo worked.
I see the benefits for Mahalo 100% but for the average business who doesn't make money spotting trends but instead from optimizing their site conversions it falls short of helping. Don't just show the user real-time data, show them real-time improvements they can make, now that would be cool.
Comments
Is any of this related to Chartbeats USP of it being real time? Sounds like any analytic package would show you which areas are receiving the most traffic in a time period.
It isn't like seeing trends now is different to seeing trends in a few hours given that you have to spend resources and time doubling down ...
For Mahalo, the difference was immediacy. Mahalo had a lot of existing pages that did not provide adequate information. Remember that the vast majority of Mahalo pages were created automatically by a bot or by using outsourced labor that didn't do a very good job. They were ranked but crappy.
So, when a trend hit or for whatever reason, a page started to receive traffic, you could see it right away, add a bunch of content to it and then almost magically, push up it's search engine result position to snowball the page. For topics such as "Tiger Woods Affair", recall notices, etc, it worked really well.
Generating pages with inadequate information is in the same vein as throwing crap at a wall to see what would stick. It could be thought of as SE spam, but when quickly and carefully built out it was just the way that Mahalo worked.
I see the benefits for Mahalo 100% but for the average business who doesn't make money spotting trends but instead from optimizing their site conversions it falls short of helping. Don't just show the user real-time data, show them real-time improvements they can make, now that would be cool.