At one end of the debate are skeptics who think comment sections are cesspools of trolls and cretins. At the other end are publishers like Gawker’s Nick Denton and New York magazine who believe reader contributions should be a core part of their editorial strategy.

Are readers who look at comments worth more than regular readers?

It’s no surprise that Disqus is in the “reader comments are great” camp — after all, the company not only sells commenting tools but is also building up a second line of business dedicated to turning comments into a forum for advertisers . The service, called “Promoted Discovery,” does this by perching links to paid-for content right next to reader comments. It’s already appearing in the comment sections of sites like Mens Health and the Observer and it looks like this:

As you can see above, the tool lets a website surface its own content on the left side while selling space in the right hand “recommended for you” box. In trying to tap this market, Disqus is competing with market leader Outbrain which also helps publishers and advertisers buy and sell web traffic.

Disqus’s big pitch to advertisers is that someone who takes the time to read the reader comments of a story is likely to be passionate about the topic — and more likely to click on, buy or otherwise engage with the proposed content. In its December “report card,” Disqus claimed readers who dwell in comments are more likely to visit other pages and spend more than twice as much time on the site. Meanwhile, reader comments overall are being treated with a new seriousness due to recent studies that suggest they shape perceptions more than we thought.

Big money from “native advertising?”

Disqus is also betting its promoted content will gain traction as a form of “native advertising.” The concept, hailed by some as a magic bullet to solve falling online ad prices, involves selling ads that mimic the content around it — for instance, sponsored tweets on Twitter. In the case of Disqus, the American Express story in the above graphic is a “native” ad. The company is so confident of the concept that it’s betting that the advertising scheme will soon become the bulk of its business.

“We expect advertising revenue to grow from less than 5% in Q4 of 2012 to over 60% of our revenue by the end of this year,” said the company’s CEO, Daniel Ha, by email.

It’s an ambitious goal but can Disqus pull this off? It has a number of factors in its favor, including the presence of veteran VC and native advertising champion Fred Wilson as one of its investors. The company is also in a good position to sign up clients due to the fact that it already has access to millions of websites.

On the other hand, the company’s quest to turn reader comments into gold faces some obstacles. One is Disqus’s capacity to find relevant content. When I visited several sites using “Promoted Discovery,” the suggested stories it proposed often had nothing to do with the article I was reading. A Disqus spokesman responded by saying the product is brand new and that its capacity to propose content will improve rapidly with use and as inventory grows. This seems a fair response — it’s likely Disqus will improve with scale.

The longer term challenge to making money from content is likely to hinge on publishers’ willingness to offer a service that will take readers away from their own website. For now, though, the websites are likely to simply welcome the extra money they receive from Promoted Discovery; Disqus says the first batch of checks is going out this quarter. It will be interesting to see what type of revenue-share arrangement Disqus and other middlemen will ask going forward — a Disqus spokesman wouldn’t disclose any specifics, saying the firm’s take is “industry average.”

And, finally, Disqus’s bet that comments will be an advertising gold mine could also be affected by competition from much larger players such as Tumblr; its founder, David Karp (who is speaking at our paidContent 2013 media conference in New York on April 17), recently said the site downplayed comments in favor of “a beautiful design and no jerks.”

(Image by ollyy via Shutterstock)

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For over 20 years, I’ve led technical strategy and product initiatives for databases, information integration, analytics and big data. Today I work at Apigee, where we help organizations embrace the exploding app economy built on mobile apps, defined by APIs and powered by massive streams of data. I can say that few businesses are prepared to effectively use the new sources of valuable enterprise data that is being generated “outside” the enterprise today in the app economy.

A growing number of businesses are successfully building new channels through APIs and third-party applications that tap their data and Web services. As a result, all kinds of important customer interaction is happening in apps written by other people (partners and developers), far away from the enterprise core. There are three ensuing new sources of data that organizations must be able to capture, measure and analyze to get a complete view of their customers and businesses:

• The first is the data that is generated around the use of the APIs exposed by that enterprise. This data reflects API calls, correlating Web traffic and contextual data that adds color to the API traffic.
• The second is the data that is generated by the applications that make calls to the enterprise APIs. These applications also make calls to various backend-as-a-service APIs, creating performance- and behavior-related data that reflects user and app behavior.
• The third is relevant, contextual data generated by the use of other enterprises’ APIs — such as Github, Twitter, Stackexchange — all of which annotate and add color to the specific interactions with the enterprise in question.

These three new categories of data have important characteristics that make them very different from the traditional enterprise data. For instance, traditional enterprise sources have well-built structures that enable the data sources, and the analytical processes around them, to be well modeled, enabling ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) and warehousing efforts to become mainstream. With the three new types of data, ETL and warehousing is dead on arrival. Since data changes continuously, its shape is evanescent, and the analytical needs change day by day.

This loss of control requires new data marketplaces and data syndication models that few enterprises are currently prepared for, but there are a few important steps organizations can take today to start.

Step one is to have an API so you can exercise control over how your partners and third-party developers access your data. This seems obvious, but you’d be shocked to learn how many companies are getting their websites scraped and have no control over how their data is getting used.

Step two is to surround your APIs with other services (such as user management, state management, event handling, etc.) that either you provide or that you can access through relationships with the providers of those services. This will help ensure the success of the apps built on your APIs — and make it easier for you to directly capture or infer the usage of those apps.

Step three is to determine the value of other people’s APIs and the data that sits behind those APIs. Just like you are exposing your APIs and making your data and services available, other parties in the app economy ecosystem are doing the same. The business strategy around this quid pro quo is something organizations will have to master.

Finally, having access to the data (your APIs, the apps built around your APIs, and other third parties) is still just that — data. You have to stitch all of this data together to create powerful signals. A good thing about this new data is that stitching is actually easier, not tougher, than in core enterprise systems. Data is more verbose, information is meant to be shared and hence better described, and more data creates opportunities for better stitching.

Business leaders should be concerned that they don’t have full visibility into how customers are using their services in the new channels created in the app economy. The truth is, most of the analytics and data and insights you get today are wrong. You simply don’t own all the data anymore. Every enterprise has to rethink their data platform for this new world. Enterprises that can capture and analyze new big data outside of the enterprise will succeed in the app economy, those that do not, will fail.

Dr. Anant Jhingran is vice president of products at Apigee. He joined Apigee from IBM, where he was vice president and CTO of IBM’s Information Management Division and co-chair of the IBM-wide Cloud Computing Architecture Board. At IBM, he was responsible for the technical strategy for databases, information integration, analytics and big data, and he helped deliver IBM’s PaaS capabilities. 

Jhingran will discuss the Cambrian explosion of APIs at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference next week in Amsterdam.

Image courtesy of Flickr user jeff_golden.

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In a blog post sharing the data, Chitika suggests that businesses targeting mobile users should still favor iOS due to iPhone owners browsing more than their Galaxy S III counterparts. What explains the different in web traffic between the two devices? “Record-breaking sales numbers, along with new 4G browsing speeds which encourage data usage, are the most likely explanation for this tremendous growth,” says Chitika. I’m not sold on the 4G LTE support as a huge influence here though: Samsung’s Galaxy S III launched with LTE support in U.S. markets, just as the new iPhone 5 did.

Normally, these types of web usage studies show iPhones exceeding that of Android devices, so I’m not questioning the data. In fact, where Chitika sees the data as a bad sign for Samsung, I’d counter that to a degree, it’s actually not so bad. Why? Because this is the first time I can remember seeing a single Android handset model being even close to competitive to Apple’s iPhone in any statistical research. Android as a whole exceeds iPhone sales but Apple fans are quick to point out that no single phone can compete. At least one does now.

Regardless of whether you see the glass half full or half empty, I asked Chitika for additional data on the top mobile sites that both phone groups were browsing. I’m curious if some of them are simply more popular and geared towards one platform or the other that could be adding weight to either phone.

Chitika couldn’t provide the specifics due to contractual agreements with advertisers but said:

[B]e assured that our network is composed of hundreds of thousands of publishers within the United States across a diverse set of verticals.  As such, our network studies are a representative sample of U.S. Internet behavior.

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Instead of massive streams of data moving back and forth across entire networks each time people request a web page, a video or a digital download, data is getting sent to a content delivery network and kept at the edge of the network. Thus, when it’s called up by a user, it doesn’t have as far to go. But there are two significant things that are changing how the internet is “shaped,” for lack of a better term.

The 1999 Internet had a hub with two fat spokes.

First, the growth of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and caches mean the traffic patterns look more like a river flowing downhill to a reservoir as opposed to millions if creeks spreading out to feed each user. Internet exchange points are giant data-center like buildings where different networks connect and exchange traffic. Content can be cached in local IXPs or even further out at the edge of the network in specific ISP’s central offices.

Two, the growth of broadband access in the rest of the world means that places like Latin America and Africa, which used to depend on getting most of their bandwidth served from U.S. or European providers are gradually beefing up their supply of internet exchange points. (IXPs) They get content reservoirs too.

More content but more caching as well.

This has been the case for years when it came to content such as movies and graphic-rich web pages, but as the basic delivery of bits became commoditized, players like Akamai and Limelight as well as newer companies like Edgecast and Fast.ly sprung up to deliver newer types of content. Now, even Facebook is getting in on edge caching, joining Google, which has had edge network servers for a couple of years.

In a paper released yesterday, UK analyst firm Analysys Mason estimates that 98 percent of internet traffic now consists of content that can be stored on servers. This combined with deeper penetration of IXPs and caching means that the way traffic flows across networks is changing too. The paper was written to persuade governments that the proposed ITU regulatory changes would hinder the growth of the web, but the report is well worth reading as a way of understanding how the web has changed over time.

Those conclusions are also backed up by similar analysis from Craig Labovitz, who documented that roughly 45 percent of internet traffic today is content from CDNs. That analysis emphasized, however, how few companies control web traffic, while the Analysys Mason report focused on how deeply the internet has penetrated different areas of the world.

As an example, the Analysys report takes a close look at how connectivity has changed for Africa:

While in 1999, 70% of bandwidth from Africa went to the US, by 2011 this had fallen to just a few percent, and nearly 90% went to Europe. This does not mean that over time Africans began to rely almost exclusively on European content, but rather that much of the content originally from the US began to be stored on servers in Europe as providers began to build out their networks. This shows how traffic can shift in response to changes in bandwidth costs and local conditions, as Europe liberalized its telecom networks and IXPs developed to host the content, and demonstrates how in future similar shifts could localize traffic in Africa to further reduce latency and costs.

To bolster this example, the Analysys report notes that bandwidth to the U.S. has fallen from over 90 percent of total international connectivity in 1999 to just over 40 percent in 2011. And as the internet becomes far more global and content spends much of its time at the edge, it changes the way we should think about and regulate the web.

The internet is like a cockroach.

The report is focused on the looming ITU regulations, but the key point is one that was raised time and time again during the worries over the SOPA and PIPA legislation in the U.S.– the internet has no borders, and governments must recognize that. It’s like our monetary system, our food supply and myriad other complex ecosystems we depend on for our modern life. That’s why we’re seeing a rise of treaties and international bodies attempting to create rules governing these systems, because regulating the web in the U.S. is like trying to solve a cockroach infestation by fogging a single apartment in a multitenant building.

As the internet has advanced, it’s become exactly what it was supposed to: An interconnected series of networks that have organically grown to meet demand at the edge. Like cockroaches, it can survive in hostile conditions. But unlike roaches, it’s something most people want in their lives, so news of its growing resiliency and localization should be good news.

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As the CEO and co-founder of WooThemes, a theme and infrastructure provider for WordPress sites, I’ve been involved with WordPress for years now. My co-founders and I were designing and developing for it long before we started WooThemes in 2008. And as WordPress has grown and evolved, so has WooThemes. As builds change and use cases evolve, we’re one of the first to know.

WordPress started as a simple blogging platform and open source project. As the platform and the themes running on top of it grew more sophisticated, WordPress became a full-fledged content management system somewhere around 2004.

These days, WordPress acts a lot more like a development framework or a PaaS (Platform as a Service). The full WordPress stack is not just integrated, it’s mature. And in the last year, several new services have sprung up to provide the missing pieces that today make WordPress a platform in the truest sense of the word.

So, what were those missing pieces, and how have they propelled WordPress forward?

1. Better analytics

I’m as big a fan as anyone of Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Parse.ly and other sites that measure traffic.

However, native WordPress analytics have always been lacking. Bespoke tools that uniquely address the structures and behaviors of the WordPress platform make all the difference when you’re making the decision between WordPress as a mere CMS and WordPress as a more holistic choice.

The best example of next-generation WordPress analytics is PressTrends. Full disclosure: I’m an adviser to the company and received a small amount of equity for those services. I’ve also been a user of its tools for over a year.

PressTrends is the best way for developers, designers, consultants and publishers to understand how their themes, plug-ins and entire sites are being used in real time. And its dashboard helps you track multiple WordPress instances side by side. People use PressTrends to make decisions on everything — from which module to include to what color of text to use, all based on real data. You can see at a glance how many folks are using a given theme and what version of that theme they’re using. You can see who is commenting on your posts and how many comments have replies. And you can see how many categories you’re publishing to and which categories have the most inbound links.

The reason all this matters is because PressTrends isn’t just measuring traffic (like Google Analytics). It’s not just measuring content performance (Parse.ly). Instead, it’s measuring the performance and engagement around the platform itself — the unique functions and elements that only WordPress has, and only WordPress needs.

PressTrends will offer improvement suggestions based on your history. Is it time to move the search widget to a more prominent spot? Did the new theme installed over the weekend spike engagement? How popular is the carousel for content compared to the “suggested stories” section?

In that sense, it’s actually the qualitative aspect of analysis that makes “WordPress as a Platform” possible. We’ve always had quantitative tools, but those tools only give an outside-in perspective. Qualitative analysis puts those numbers in context with your site and WordPress itself.

2. Dollar dollar bills, y’all

Another key driver of the platform vision is the arrival of commerce on WordPress. WooThemes has its own horse in this race, but the broader trend of money changing hands on and through WordPress reflects the sites’ serious evolution.

First, executing transactions involves a level of technological competency, not to mention privacy and security, that is well above the simple posting of text and images.

Second, the involvement of multiple payment gateways, complex check-out processes, handling cost flows and table-rate shipping extensions that account for different countries and weight brackets — well, that’s a mouth full of jargon that makes my argument for me, doesn’t it?

And what if you need to check your store’s overall performance? What if you need to drill down into daily and monthly sales, individual product performance, top sellers and top earners? And finally, are you ready for maximum scale? Are you ready for the holidays?

The arrival of commerce on WordPress is as good an indicator as there is that we’ve achieved a new plateau. Commerce represents a set of tasks that you never before would have assigned to WordPress, or thought WordPress was capable of. And yet, WooCommerce already has 130,000 users, and we’re just one segment of the market. This stuff is real, and it’s here.

It is one thing to throw up a “buy now” HTML button that redirects to a shopping application, but it’s quite another to build a professional shopping site with world-class designs and powerful customizable features natively in WordPress.

You used to have to pay a fortune or use an old fashioned e-commerce system. Over time, WordPress may swallow other verticals too. But for now, the fact that millions of dollars are changing hands through the platform is validation enough that companies large and small see WordPress as mature, and viable longterm. You don’t entrust your money at the point of purchase to just anyone.

3. The hosting challenge

For the longest time, a big gap stretched between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and there was a vast middle ground where customers’ needs were underserved. On the high end, there was WordPress VIP, a turn-key solution that was worth the money, but only feasible to the largest sites and services. On the low end, self-serve and self-host options were unappealing to those who wanted better performance and better configurability.

Enter new companies, such as WPEngine, which let you have your cake and eat it too.

WPEngine is kind of like the Acura of WordPress hosting — it’s simple and yet powerful. It offers everything you need and nothing you don’t for a reasonable price, and the assurance of some of the best WordPress technologists in the world. Competing services like Page.ly offer similarly well-managed WordPress hosting for anyone who is getting serious about WordPress for the first time.

And importantly, these players offer a lot more than just “hosting.” They include hassle-free backup, curated plug-ins and themes, automatically configured caching for surprising scale, and integrated content delivery networks with insane speed.

This means that the rich middle-ground of WordPress — the vast majority of those 75 million websites and counting — now enjoy a cadre of hosting options that match WordPress’s own maturity in scope and tenor.

WordPress’s early DIY culture was wonderful, and it’s the reason for its continued success. But these days, WordPress developers and consultants are finally backfilling core pieces of the stack. This allows the rest of us to focus on great design and new applications, so that we can move the platform forward.

Conclusion

Are we there yet? We’re close, but not all the way.

Today, I’d argue that we have all of the elements we need to make the true “WordPress as a platform” vision a reality. But what’s missing is integrations — API calls and shared data models that can integrate these new offerings into a singular experience.

I’m not suggesting that these companies shouldn’t remain independent and laser-focused on what they do best. But, the characteristics (integration with third-party services beyond plugin architectures, up-to-date asset deployment processes with heavier consideration for performance, etc.) that have made platforms like Heroku, AWS and Azure so compelling are still nascent in the WordPress ecosystem.

Even though the parts are pretty damn impressive right now, WordPress can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Adii Pienaar is the CEO and co-founder of WooThemes, one of the largest theme and infrastructure providers for WordPress sites. He is also the founder of the Rockstar Foundation, a non-profit organization which aims to empower disadvantaged girls in South Africa through superior education. He is an active advisor, mentor and investor to other startups and the author of Rockstar Business. 

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Image courtesy of Flickr user johnharveytolson.

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Polar Mobile already covers a wide range of mobile devices. Its SMART platform provides turnkey solutions for launching native apps on iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry OS, PlayBook, Windows Phone and Nokia devices. It’s definitely a leader in terms of white-label native-app solution providers, but the new funding, led by Toronto-based Georgian Partners, will help it extend its reach further still.

Polar Mobile CEO Kunal Gupta told me the planned HTML5 integration of MediaEverywhere will help Polar Mobile’s clients access not only mobile platforms like those listed above, but also the new wave of connected devices, including gaming consoles, cars, TVs and household appliances, as well as social networks like Facebook. At the same time, it will also offer media companies more opportunities to “leverage audience intelligence (data and analytics) to enable higher engagement and monetization,” Gupta said. He thinks this will help companies improve delivery of personalized recommendations, leading to more profitable business models.

The beauty of MediaEverywhere is that it doesn’t force content providers to choose between apps and web-based offerings; it can work with both app- and browser-based media delivery, depending on what solutions Polar’s media company customers choose to target. When it comes to the debate about whether native apps trump cross-platform mobile websites or vice versa, Gupta isn’t taking sides. He says while “apps include richer advertising experiences, distribution channels and homescreen icon presence,” browser-based distribution offers “discovery and referrals from social networks and search engines, which for many media companies now accounts for over half of their incoming web traffic.”

Polar Mobile’s success is based on the recognition that users want their media accessible anywhere, on any device they happen to be using. The launch of MediaEverywhere will help the company extend the reach of its clients’ products further still, in a connected future where people will seek out the things they love on whatever happens to be in reach, via both the web and native apps.

In addition to launching MediaEverywhere, Polar Mobile also plans to use some of the funding to fuel its international expansion. The company expects to double in size from 40 to 80 people in 2012, and open new offices in New York City and London.

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Everyone knows about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but did you know December. 21 will be a big online traffic day next year?

Here, most courtesy of data center power Equinix, are other  big data and heavy traffic dates to prep for, in chronological order:

February 5: Super Sunday,  Super Bowl XLVI. This year, the big event will even be live streamed! Need I say more?

February 12: The 84th Annual Academy Awards. Eddie Murphy fans may stay away; the rest of the world will show up. Always a big event.

March 6: Super Tuesday. With seven primaries and two caucuses slated, Super Tuesday will be a big day, even if pundits are already calling it “less super than usual,” since many states have accelerated (and some have moved back) their primaries in hopes of maximizing clout.

April 29: The first anniversary of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Gird yourself for the memorial plates. The main event last April may not have broken the Internet, but it certainly did break records.

July 27: Opening day of the London Summer Olympics. Or “The Games of the XXX Olympiad” as they would doubtless prefer to be known. The games will run until August 12, so brace yourself for a brisk mid-summer.

August 27-30: The Republican National Convention. Doubtful this will come close to the 2008 Obama inauguration stats, but political junkies will be online in force. Last time around, the traffic to sites like the fivethirtyeight blog was off the charts.

Sept. 3 through 6: The Democratic National Convention. There won’t be a nominee fight, but the true political fanatics will still tune in. (See above.)

Nov. 6: Election Day. After all the build up, including the seemingly endless Republican debates, you’d think people would stay away. But they won’t.

November 23. Okay, so Black Friday this year was a shadow of its former self, ceding top shopping spot to Thanksgiving, but it’ll still be a day to reckon with. Old habits die hard.

November 26: Cyber Monday.  Also had an off year in 2011, but it could regroup in 2012.

December 21. For those out of the loop, Dec. 21, 2012 marks the end of the world per the Mayan calendar.

Wildcard dates: Then there are some events we know are coming but can’t narrow them down yet. As in:

• The Apple iPad 3 launch.
• The Apple iPhone 5 launch.

On the other hand, there isn’t a World Cup this year, so we’ll be spared that crush.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Elmo H. Love

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Here’s what the company said about the chart on its blog:

The answer is that yes, there is a substantial increase in traffic the day after the update was released. We host the Apple update content locally on AkamaiCDN servers in our datacenter, so this doesn’t affect our network edge, but you can see the bump in traffic from the CDN cluster itself here.

Last Wednesday Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 5. Apple confirmed that 25 million users had already upgraded to iOS 5 by Monday. Localytics then reported Monday that one in three devices that could be upgraded to iOS 5 were, within five days of the OS’s release.

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The issues, which sidelined customer sites from about 11:45 am PDT/2:45 pm EDT to 1:00 pm PDT/4:00 pm EDT, were widely reported on Twitter. Akamai confirmed that it was an issue related to DNS servers not being able to be resolved that was causing customer outages.

While Akamai is widely known as the 800-pound gorilla in the content delivery space, the outage shows the trouble that comes with a single-CDN strategy. That’s something that companies like 3Crowd and Conviva try to warn against. Those companies make it easier to either manage multiple CDNs or to allow publishers to roll their own.

Here’s a few graphs showing how the issues affected some of Akamai’s biggest clients, thanks to web monitoring firm Catchpoint:

Update: A spokesperson from Akamai writes: “Our data shows that it was approximately 0.3 percent of normal daily Akamai traffic that was not served as a result of this incident. Our customer’s sites we’re impacted for less than 30 minutes.” [Ed. note: email reprinted verbatim]

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Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Social Media Market Share

For months, Facebook has been the biggest social media site that drives web traffic in the United States. Those days are over– for the moment, at least.

Web discovery engine StumbleUpon is now the biggest traffic driver among social media websites in the US, according to global web analytics service StatCounter. The company unseated Facebook at the top during June 2011, according to the latest StatCounter social media data. StatCounter tracks hits to over 3 million websites, and its social media data is gathered by analyzing every hit referred by a social media site.

This is certainly not StumbleUpon’s first brush with Internet fame. The company, which finds and recommends relevant web content, was originally founded in 2001 and sold to eBay for $75 million in 2007. But like so many big M&A deals, the acquisition did not go as smoothly as hoped. In 2009, StumbleUpon co-founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith bought the company back along with a group of investors.

In the two years since then, the company has been working quietly and diligently at its comeback. StumbleUpon closed on a $17 million funding round in March to expand its product offerings to the mobile and television spaces. The company has also been working on its revenue strategy, with the development of a “paid discovery” offering for advertisers. StumbleUpon briefly surpassed Facebook in StatCounter hits for two weeks back in February, but Facebook quickly regained the top spot.

This time, StumbleUpon’s turnaround is gaining traction at exactly the same time that Facebook’s new user numbers are reportedly slowing down, and Twitter seems to be dealing with stickiness problems. Clearly, something about StumbleUpon’s strategy is working very well. It remains to be seen how long StumbleUpon can retain the top spot — its competitors in the social media space aren’t known for going down without a fight.

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