Q&A with Emily Ingram, Director of Product @ Chartbeat
This week, The Idea spoke with Emily about recent Chartbeat initiatives on paywall optimization, Multi-Site View and image testing, tracking the supply and demand of climate change coverage, and why she thinks we should be paying more attention to mobile aggregators. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
What was your path to Chartbeat and what is your current role there?
I started my career as a journalist, working for The Washington Post for about six years. The first two of those were within the newsroom as an editor and a producer. Through that, I fell into product management because I knew how the CMS worked: when we were relaunching the mobile site, they needed someone to take CMS outputs and make it into technical requirements for engineers. For about four additional years, I wrote their iOS apps and also launched their digital partner program.
I then went to HuffPost for about a year and a half, working on a tool for storytelling. Throughout all of that, I had a passion for both product management and telling stories, and Chartbeat was the right next step for being able to work with lots of publishers. Now, I’m Director of Product at Chartbeat. I work with our team of product managers to build tools for digital publishers, like tools for paywall optimization.
What are your goals for the paywall optimization project?
I think folks often associate Chartbeat with our real time dashboard and our Big Board. Obviously, those are some of our most used tools and we continue to invest in them; but as media business models have evolved, the needs of digital publishers have too.
We think about optimization overall, like our headline-testing product, which is being used for tens of thousands of tests all across the world. One of the areas that we recognize a need for optimization is around paywall strategy. We’re in early stages of how we can help with choices about what kinds of stories make sense to market subscriber-only and working closely with a small number of publishers to help make those decisions better. Like everything with Chartbeat, the goal is to inform editorial choices but also work alongside editors to make their choices more effective.
What is a project you have worked on recently that had a lot of impact?
A feature we released last year, Multi-Site View, is doing well. We were looking to solve for organizations who have lots of sites and are often trying to coordinate coverage across maybe an entire region’s worth of daily newspaper sites. They need to be able to understand performance on multiple sites at once instead of having lots different tabs open and having to switch between them. Multi-Site View aims to consolidate things into a single dashboard with flexible roll-ups, so you could look at whichever combination of sites necessary for your role and understand what’s doing well and where the opportunities to improve are.
Conversely, what was a feature that wasn’t adopted as widely as you thought that it would be?
Folks often associate Chartbeat with their web traffic, but we also can track native apps as well as amp content. Occasionally when you look at dashboards, you recognize there’s a missing opportunity for them to see a full 360-degree view of their content. That’s something where we’re still working to improve on making sure folks are taking advantage of those capabilities.
What are the limits to using data to inform journalistic choices?
That’s something we’ve been thoughtful about from our earliest days. Chartbeat invented the concept of engaged time as a way to get the focus off clicks and to be more about genuine reader behavior.
It’s something that we try to do within the product — build functionality that guides people to use the tools in healthy ways that actually reach their end goals and not get strayed down the wrong path. For instance, one of the key metrics for our headline-testing tool is quality clicks. So, it’s not just a raw view of whatever headline gets the most wins; we’re also considering if people who clicked on that story actually stick around and read it.
We’ve always been a company that views ourselves as one of many tools for editors. We want to make sure that we have unique insights to offer them, but there are also some things that you can’t do with data and to which humans bring their unique insight to bear.
What is something surprising you’ve learned working with a diverse array of publishers?
We aim to make our tools flexible enough that they can suit different approaches. Right now, we’re working on an alpha for image testing. We already allow folks to test their headlines on a home page to understand which ones are performing best at leading folks to engage. The natural extension of creating an inviting experience on the homepage are the images associated with those headlines. The range of publishers involved in the test is quite large: you have everyone from traditional publishers non-traditional sites that happen to use Chartbeat, and they actually have similar needs.
Sometimes we also building specific things for a segment of clients. For instance, our Multi-Site View was something that’s particularly relevant given the consolidation of media and that folks are often working in centralized teams. Something I’ve learned from my time here is that there’s actually more commonalities than you might expect.
Are there trends in the media space that you wish more people were paying more attention to?
Something that’s always changing but that I think is critical to keep tabs on is constantly monitoring who you’re serving and what they’re coming to you for. For instance, we did a deep dive into climate coverage data, and one of the interesting things we found is that it’s up significantly from the supply side, but even more from the demand side. Those sorts of changes in terms of the topics that folks are most interested in are fascinating.
The other thing is mobile aggregators. Occasionally, we will see top referrers like Top Buzz and Smart News, which are companies that aren’t top of mind. Traffic from Google Chrome suggestions are also something that’s really surged in the past couple of years.
Finally, something that I’ve seen from when I was product manager at a publisher and continued to see here is how development in the phone ecosystem really changes user behavior and thus publisher experiences. The first memory I have of this is when iOS rolled out swipe left of home screen, which included a module that had news articles in it. After that, we noticed a sudden uptick in traffic that was unexplained because it was all of this dark social traffic, but it often was concentrated on these certain articles. That was something that you don’t know is coming. We’ve seen that with Google Chrome suggestions as well, where a feature built into Chrome can have a meaningful impact on what publishers are seeing on their end.
There can often be benefits to these features: Hopefully you can use some of these mobile aggregators as new entry points to maybe expose people to content they wouldn’t see otherwise. But if they change, you don’t really have control over that. So, at the same time as you try to keep tabs on that, you also have to focus on building your loyal audience and diversify your risk.
What is the most interesting thing that you’ve seen recently in media from an organization other than your own?
I think something that’s really exciting to me is the burgeoning news outlets that are starting up to serve particular niche audiences or niche purposes. For instance, I know some of the folks from Texas Tribune are starting up a news organization, The 19th, aimed at women. There’s Dejan Kovacevic in Pittsburgh, who used to be a columnist for their local paper and started a sports site [DK Pittsburgh Sports] that covers just Pittsburgh sports.
You also increasingly see niche e-mail newsletters. I’m a big theater fan, so I follow various theater-related newsletters and podcasts like Broadway Briefing, which is a subscription-based daily roundup of Broadway news. There’s a challenge anytime you’re starting something from scratch in terms of its longevity, but it’s certainly interesting to see a lot of energy around these very particular niches and what people are doing in terms of innovating on the business model for them.
Rapid Fire Questions
What’s the last podcast you listened to?
A Pop Culture Happy Hour episode from NPR. I have a 40-minute commute and some of those are perfectly timed for that.
What’s the last theater production you went to?
Hamlet at St Ann’s Warehouse.
What would you be doing if you weren’t in this role, whether it within media or outside of media?
I would probably want to work somehow in the arts.
This Q&A was originally published in the February 24th edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
