Next-gen Web analytics, beyond pageviews

The Founders Fund's Singerman helps us dissect analysis companies

The Founders Fund venture capitalist Brian Singerman joins me and Ezra Roizen as this week's guest host to look at the quickly-evolving Web analytics landscape. As many observers know, pageviews fail to provide a holistic picture of engagement and contribution on a Web site. At The Founders Fund, which has invested in analystics company Quantcast, Singerman is looking at a number of such deals. So we asked him to help us look at two emerging companies in this field: Nuconomy and ClickTale. 

Nuconomy is an Israeli-based company that raised $3.3 million in funding, from some heavy hitters, including UK ad giant WPP Group. Nuconomy says helps capture engagement and contribution. 

Bottom line, this was our favorite of the two companies. But not because ClickTale isn't a good product. But because Nuconomy appears to be going after a real pain point.

"If you can see who comments the most, who can post the most blogs, who contributes the most content, who participates the most, who comes back the most, and what are the sources of that segment of your audience, which is the real, high-powered group… I think that gives you all kinds of new views,” said Ezra.

The challenge is getting advertisers to place ads against such metrics. “Trying to figure out an ad model while they’re engaging with the site is tricky," said Brian. " The new economy doesn’t really get yet... It seems to me it [what Nuconomy will face] may be an adoption problem.”

As for ClickTale, we all liked the idea of capturing the way users navigate the site in a movie, which is what ClickTale offers. This could be useful for UI designers, said both Ezra and Brian.

As for which company was more investable as a VC-returned opportunity? You'll have to watch.