TownNews to launch Data Insights, a powerful new way for media companies to analyze and profit from their data

Jan 14, 2020

MOLINE, Illinois — Media organizations are awash in data: audience and editorial data from content management systems, traffic reports from Google Analytics, programmatic advertising revenue reports, user data from circulation systems. ... The list goes on and on. The challenge lies in making sense of it all, and using it to grow revenue, audience and engagement.

To address this problem, TownNews — the industry-leading digital services provider for local media organizations — will debut TownNews Data Insights in early 2020. Data Insights will give media companies robust new tools for gathering, understanding and acting upon the multitude of data that impacts their businesses.

"Our customers in the publishing, broadcast and web-native spaces have so much data — often more than they're even aware of — that 'analysis paralysis' can set in," said Brad Ward, CEO of TownNews. "What we're doing with Data Insights is pulling data from a variety of different silos, and presenting it in a way that makes it understandable and actionable."

"Data Insights will make it easy to draw a connection between the media company's core business products — videos, articles, and other content — and the revenue that's generated from those products," said Joe Hansen, product manager for Data Insights. "It's critical to understand how each piece of content influences your bottom line."

Hansen notes that Data Insights users will also benefit from the size and diversity of the TownNews customer base.

"Because we have more than 2,000 media customers of all sizes, Data Insights will be able to compare your site's stats against similar sites to help put your performance in context," Hansen said.

According to Ward, TownNews has even bigger plans for Data Insights in the future.

"For many of our customers, TownNews products and services are the nexus of their digital business — we power their websites, native apps, programmatic ad stack, OTT apps and so much more," Ward said. "So, we're in a unique position to not only help them make sense of all of this data, but use it to make recommendations at the point of work. We can say things like 'Similar sites have found that shortening their article titles to X words lifted eCPMs by Y%,' or 'Lowering your meter to X free articles can boost conversions by Y%.'

"We're exploring a variety of ways to put data to work for our customers, and I can't wait to see where this product goes in the coming months."

The company plans to begin launching beta customers in January of 2020, with wide availability later in Q1.