Parse.ly Debuts New Trends Service

Online attention tracking specialist Parse.ly has launched a trend and topic tracking service called Currents, giving marketers and publishers dashboard information on what's being discussed and where audiences for each topic are focused.

The firm, which is based in New York and backed by venture capital, says existing trend and topic tracking 'falls short of measuring true attention, relying on proxies like social shares or online searches'. Currents uses NLP and maching learning, and taps into Parse.ly's network of major media and content-driven sites, whose audiences view around 850,000 articles each day, to summarise what's grabbing attention and via which sources.

As an example, topics might include 'Prince Harry', 'Bitcoin', 'NBA Finals' or 'Black Panther', and users could check which of 'North Korea' and 'Robert Mueller' were driving more reader attention to 'Donald Trump'. Business and sports topics are among other categories grouping related topics together and ranking them. The firm says data from Currents 'can also zoom in on individual companies, people, and things: for example, internet users continue to show a high interest in the music streaming company Spotify, while user attention for the file sharing company Dropbox is waning. Looking at those two companies' respective stock performances suggests that audience attention influences Wall Street market events, such as their success in initial public offerings and their stock trading volume'.

CEO Sachin Kamdar comments 'In developing Currents, we made it possible to understand the aggregate attention of one billion users viewing the biggest media sites. These sites produce the best content and stories in the world, and we wanted to find another way to show their value'. He adds: 'Attention is the currency of the web... Rather than a world where personal data is monetized via advertising, we imagine a world where the collective real-time attention of more than a billion real internet users is used to anyone's collective advantage'. The product will be accessible from next week and will be free during beta.

Web site: www.parse.ly .