Spiny

Pros

1. Tell me about yourself and Outsider?

Jameson Brown, EVP/Partner/Executive Editor of News Group at Outsider.com // Run point with editorial, distribution and staff for outsider.com

2. What did you do before using Spiny?

Used Google Analytics, Chartbeat and Parsley before - all of them were merely top level real time publisher analytics dashboards and there were no ties to category, revenue and in-depth audience data (both realtime and historical)

3. How did you find setting up and using Spiny?

We started building this as we started building Outsider.com

4. What Spiny feature(s) do you find most useful?

Realtime category breakdowns by CPM and real time revenue/distro breakdowns are a game changer - no other dashboard does this how we do it. Building these out even further will add a key market disruption that elevates Spiny above other companies

5. Would you say Spiny has helped to grow the business?

100% without a doubt it has. It has acted as a guide on all levels: realtime revenue, category traffic and has helped us efficiently drill down our author production accountability more than we’ve ever been able to do in the past

6. Would you say Spiny has made your life easier?

Yes, majorly

Cons

The software is still developing, so there are some features still to come that I would like to use

Pros

Tell me about yourself and On3?
On3 is a college sports digital media, data and marketing company for fans, media, coaches, and athletes. On3 combines fan sites (24 currently and growing) as well as an industry leading database and a national team of writers and editors. As for me, I’m the senior director of the national news desk at On3. I manage a team of 15 writers and four managing editors operating from 7am to 12am, seven days a week. I have 22 years of experience in the sports digital media.

How did you find setting up and using Spiny?
I’ve found Spiny to be incredibly easy to use. The live page of the app offers all of the essential data that I need in real time. I can see the top referrers, top performing stories, projected revenue, eCPM breakdown by distribution channel and referrer, articles written by author, and more on one page. Unlike Google Analytics, Spiny’s UI is intuitive and while future-packed, it offers key data in a simple interface that tells a more complete story than GA without having to navigate to multiple pages to piece it all together.

What Spiny feature(s) do you find most useful?
I use the live page of the app more than anything, watching the top stories and making editorial decisions based on the velocity of those stories. That said, I also utilize the editorial dashboard to track articles written by our writers but also the revenue that each writer drives. It's an invaluable tool as a manager to dig into the revenue data by writer.

Cons

The addition I’d most like to see on Spiny is the ability to compare data historically, whether that’s today vs. the same day last week, month, year. Or week-over-week, month-over-month, year-over-year, primarily in the area of page views, sessions, pages per session, but also the eCPM data.

Pros

From the first time I logged into Spiny, I found the UX to be highly intuitive. Between the dashboards, live view, and publisher intelligence analytics, the data is displayed in a way that has made it easy to digest while also offering extensive insights that are unavailable with platforms like Google Analytics.Currently, I use the app at all times during the day. The live view is up on my screens at all times so I can constantly track everything from concurrent users to revenue pacing with just a quick glance.
For me, I use the live dashboard at all hours. With Spiny, we have the ability to track everything from daily revenue projections to eCPMs broken down by category. Being able to pinpoint the highest earning opportunities, and make strategic decisions based on real-time data has proved to be an essential tool for our team’s success.
Also, as a manager, the intelligence Spiny provides on all of our content creators is invaluable when evaluating an employee’s performance. Being able to give every content creator a highly-detailed, comprehensive report is highly essential and has proved to be one of the most useful features on the app.

Cons

The software is still developing, so there are some features still to come that I would like to use

Pros

Spiny allows me to easily visualize our company's performance in real-time. Instead of opening multiple dashboards and software, I have everything I need to manage and make decisions in one place. I've been extremely impressed with the Spiny team. They have made numerous improvements and customizations to the software to fit our specific needs

Cons

The software is still developing, so there are some features still to come that I would like to use

Pros

I love the ability to track the success of our organization's day with the real-time revenue and production numbers. The ability to easily drill down on specific writer's KPIs has also been very beneficial

Cons

The software is still developing, so there are some features still to come that I would like to use