Others Online Blog

Affinity Analytics Beta Launch

We're pleased to announce the beta launch of our Affinity Analytics service for publishers and networks. This is not like any other Web site analytics you've seen.

Traditional web site analytics tell you about visits, page views, sources, etc. but nothing about your visitors. Our free Affinity Analytics service tell you about your audience and the topics/interests they care most about, based on how they browse not only your site but our whole network.

It takes seconds to sign up. Once you're approved, we'll provide you with simple HTML (Javascript) to copy and paste within your Web pages. That's it -- we then provide you with web-based reports (we also offer a data feed and API service) which show you the topics that your audience cares most about, and for each topic your audience's level of interest (average affinity strength score of 0-100), the commercial value of that topic in the advertising world, and how much of your audience cares about that topic. Here's a screen shot ...

You can also click on any of the topics to see trending data/graphs over the past 7 or 30 days. This helps you understand total unique visitors and page views for any given audience segment, allowing you to target them by their interests and affinity strength.

Updated Web Site Launched!

Now that we've posted the video on our site, it's official -- we've launched our updated Web site. The launch reflects a shift in our business strategy from B2C to B2B. Whereas we still have the consumer-facing products and features, we are now primarily focused on helping medium/large Web sites and networks better understand, target and monetize their audience.

In my opinion, one of the most difficult things to do in a technology startup is to communicate clearly what you do. It's so easy to communicate too much information, explain the technology aspects too deeply, or make it too complex. "Simple and effective" communication is not easy.

We knew at Others Online that we were hitting a pain point in the market, and also knew our Web site was in desperate need of an update -- to better communicate what we did. In order to (a) communicate what we do very simply and effectively, and (b) convey a warm, consumer-friendly feel (instead of a cold technologist-friendly feel) to what we did, we chose to use a video.

What do you think of the video!?

New Partner Application Form Issues

Hey, just a quick note regarding a mess-up on our end. If you've signed up to partner with Others Online anytime from July 17th through mid-day the 25th, then we have NOT received your application!

It's our bad. We migrated to a new data center, did all that fun testing you're supposed to do (with success), but then somehow the hostname within our new environment was not set to our public DNS name, which made a bit of Java code execute wrong.

I'm not the engineer, so the explanation is probably a bit weak, but I've asked our team to post all this stuff on our blog from now on. We've only just recently come out of hiding, so we have to remember to post more often now!

Blog Post Catch Up!

For the millions that visit this blog, thought I'd confess that we just added 6 blog posts -- all back-dated to make our blog look less stale! These are cross-postings from my blog actually. (This has to violate some sorta blog etiquette, yes?)

We're just about to release a major update to our Web site, reflecting a shift in our market strategy. Over the last 6 months, we've achieved quite a bit of traction deploying our technology with online media companies. So we're updating our messaging to convey our shift to B2B from B2C.