Hi Brandon, are you able to give us some background on the situation.

Hey, so we’ve been using Spiny for over a year, most of us in the business from the editorial team to myself in monetization and even our executives use it daily. It provides a great overview on the business and how we’re trending daily, weekly and monthly.

Especially for us in the Sports world, we tend to experience some seasonality and changes in interest within certain categories. Removing the guesswork on what’s performing has been crucial for our business.

That’s great to hear, so what specifically happened with the NASCAR situation?

Yeah, so we were looking at our changes week on week in the Spiny dashboards section and saw a big spike in the RPM (Revenue per Thousand Visitors) for the NASCAR category to $20 that week, 364% higher than our average! We also infered that NASCAR was a gateway to the rest of our site for audiences too.

At that time our editorial team was mainly focused on creating NFL and recruiting content. Seeing the numbers, we quickly grouped up internally and decided to increase the amount of content we were creating for NASCAR for the next week. We ended up making 55% more content. When we were tracking the changes, we saw that NASCAR was our clear category winner, not by pageviews, but by revenue. Overall the category made 700% more revenue week on week, spiking from $3.5k to $28k by just changing our content mix to include more NASCAR.

That sounds incredible, well done to your team on being so agile. Do you think this would have happened without Spiny?

It’s funny because if we we’re going of only pageviews or overall numbers, like we did in the past, we would have thought that recruiting was driving the most interest from our audience. Even with the increase in NASCAR production, recruiting drove 6% of our overall pageviews and NASCAR only 5%. But in terms of Ad revenue it drove 6% of total Ad Revenue veurses NASCAR’s 8%. Those are numbers only Spiny can surface.

In the old world I, like all publishers, used to use average ads per page, average out our RPM and multiple that out. With Spiny, that is no longer the case, as we can see the RPM and RPS down to each breakdown level, Audience, Editorial, Category, Authour and more. If I did that with the numbers above, we would have optimized for recruiting amoung other categories and completely missed this opportunity.

Spiny's ability to quickly surface trends, that are tied to revenue, make it easy to make quick decisions that grow our bottom line. Everyone in the business can do this both historically and in real-time right from the analytics interface, without the need for data teams. There are times we use the data to even push down production in categories like NASCAR to make our newsroom more efficient. In this case, Nascar made up 3% of overall content posted, but 20% of our revenue.

The name of the game for us is no longer just about producing lots of content and continually expanding our editorial room, it's about producing the right content, at the right time, that drives sustainable revenue for the business.