Users of Currents Will Be Able to Uncover Attention Trends and Traffic Sources

Parse.ly, the first internet attention platform, introduced Currents — a new way for anyone to explore the moments that matter to people. Existing trend and topic tracking falls short of measuring true attention, relying on proxies like social shares or online searches. Parse.ly built Currents on top of its network of the biggest media and content-driven sites with audiences viewing 850,000 articles each day. Users of Currents will be able to uncover attention trends and traffic sources. Marketers, finance professionals, publishers, content strategists, and many others can now tap into a unique attention data pool.

“Imagine how you would do your job differently if you had a live view of what your target market cares about every day,” said Sachin Kamdar, Parse.ly’s CEO. “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.”

For the last seven years, Parse.ly has helped its customers track the attention of the audience that comes to their sites, uses their apps, and shares their content on social platforms. Combining this data analytics expertise with modern machine learning and natural language processing technology, Currents can tell you when, where, and how people are consuming content on the internet.

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Comparing topics and discovering trends

The service automatically groups similar articles across the Parse.ly network into millions of topics such as “Prince Harry,” “Bitcoin,” “NBA Finals,” or “Black Panther.” Topics can also be compared. Now, anyone can compare the topics driving reader attention for “Donald Trump,” such as “North Korea” vs “Robert Mueller.” Or, for those more interested in business topics, they can compare the attention paid to “Tesla” and “Elon Musk” to “Ford Motor Company.” Users can also follow categories, such as “Business” and “Sports,” which group related topics together and let users quickly discover what the most popular topics in each category are.

Publishers constantly need to know not just what topics are trending, but where the audiences for those topics are most likely to find them. For example, audiences for lifestyle topics are more likely to be on social media, while audiences for personal finance are more likely to come from search engines and financial news aggregators. 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.

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“Currents takes Parse.ly’s powerful interactive data platform and layers on information otherwise inaccessible to any one company or individual,” says Anna Gilbert, who was formerly the Director of Research at Slate, and is now the owner of Marion Street Strategies, a data and analytics consulting firm and early user of Currents.

“Attention is the currency of the web, yet there are only two companies that know what cause billions of people to pay attention. Parse.ly is now giving that insight to everyone. We bring transparency to real-time internet attention,” says Kamdar. “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.”

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