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Automattic acquires analytics company Parse.ly
Automattic, the for-profit company tied to open-source web publishing platform WordPress, is announcing that it has acquired analytics provider Parse.ly.
Specifically, Parse.ly is now part of WPVIP, the organization within Automattic that offers enterprise hosting and support to publishers, including TechCrunch. (We use Parse.ly, too.)
WPVIP CEO Nick Gernert described this as the organization’s first large enterprise software acquisition, reflecting a strategy that has expanded beyond news and media organizations — businesses like Salesforce (whose venture arm invested $300 million in Automattic back in 2019), the NBA, Condé Nast, Facebook and Microsoft now use WPVIP for their content and marketing needs.
Both companies, Gernert said, come from similar backgrounds, with “roots” in digital publishing and a “heavy focus on understanding the impact of content.”
“We’ve really started to shift more towards content marketing and starting to think more deeply beyond just what traditional page analytics provide,” he continued. That means doing more than measuring pageviews and time on site and “really starting to look more deeply at things like conversation, attribution, areas … that from a marketer’s perspective are impactful.”
WordPress and Parse.ly already work well together, but the plan is to make WPVIP features available to Parse.ly customers while also making more Parse.ly data available to WPVIP publishers. And Gernert said there are also opportunities to add more commerce-related data to Parse.ly, since Automattic also owns WooCommerce.
The goal, he said, is to “make Parse.ly better for WordPress and best for WPVIP.”
At the same time, he added, “There’s no plans here to make Parse.ly the only analytics solution that runs on our platform. We want to preserve the flexibility and interoperability [of WordPress], and we want to make sure from a Parse.ly perspective that it still exists as a standalone product. That’s key to its future and we will continue to invest in it.”
Parse.ly was founded in 2009 and has raised $12.9 million in funding from investors including Grotech Ventures and Blumberg Capital, according to Crunchbase. Parse.ly founders Sachin Kamdar and Andrew Montalenti are joining WPVIP, with Kamdar leading go-to-market strategy for Parse.ly and Montalenti leading product.
“We’ve always had deep admiration for WPVIP’s market position as the gold standard for enterprise content teams, and we’re thrilled to be able to join together,” Kamdar said in a statement. “From the culture and people, to the product, market and vision, we’re in lockstep to create more value for our customers. This powerful combination of content and intelligence will push the industry forward at an accelerated pace.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
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Parse.ly’s new feature helps writers find topics that are (relatively) under-covered
Okay, I’ll admit it: Sometimes, I write stories because I think they’re going to be popular. And sometimes, those stories fall flat anyway.
It makes sense — both on a cosmic level, because life isn’t fair, but also in the more specific sense that some topics are simply over-covered. Yes, people seem to like reading about Apple, but are they going to read my Apple post if it’s the fiftieth story published on the same topic?
Analytics company Parse.ly is trying to address that very problem with a new feature in Currents, its free product highlighting broader audience trends. The feature is called “demand sorting,” because it points out the topics that are most “in demand” by the audience.
Demand, in this case, is determined by taking the total number of views for a topic and then dividing that by the number of articles. In other words, if a topic is in demand, it’s attracting a lot of views but has been covered by relatively few stories — creating an opportunity for a writer looking for their next subject.
In part, CEO Sachin Kamdar said this is highlighting Parse.ly’s “differentiated data, showing what people are actually reading versus what people are sharing or searching for.”
Special Projects Lead Sal Gionfriddo said it’s also taking advantage of the natural language processing technology used in Currents to identify the main topic of a story and understand the relationship between different topics.
So it’s not just a list of story subjects. You can compare the demand for different topics, and if you learn that (say) Amazon may be under-covered relative to Apple, you can also look more closely and see which Amazon-related topics are currently experiencing the most demand. And there’s historical data, so you can see the demand in past years for coverage around events like CES or the State of the Union, and plan accordingly.
When I wondered whether this will just give thirsty publications another number to chase — as opposed to focusing on what’s genuinely newsworthy or important — Kamdar replied, “It’s not like you can game this. It’s not something like slideshows, where you can generate X number of [slides] to increase your pageviews. It’s a unique person viewing a piece of content … In that sense, it stays a little bit truer what is actually of interest to people.”
I previously spoke to Kamdar about the need for new, non ad-based business models in the online news business. In our more recent discussion of Currents, he suggested that one of the ways demand-sorting could evolve is a focus on “loyalty based metrics” — so news organizations could see the topics that are driving people to return to their site and potentially sign up for subscriptions.
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