The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: JumpTime

Quick Pitch: JumpTime analyzes the economic value of content based on both its own advertising value and the advertising value of pages to which it directs traffic.

Genius Idea: A new metric for measuring content value.

At first glance, popular web content translates to profitable web content. But after setting economists and computer scientists to work on modeling the reality of the situation, JumpTime begs to differ.

The company launched a product in 2009 that measures a web page's real-time value based not only on how many times it's viewed and how much advertisers have paid to be placed on it, but also on how good the page is at directing users to other valuable content on the site. In many cases, content with low appeal to advertisers still adds revenue to the overall website by leading more visitors to pages with higher appeal.

This was the case, for instance, with one of Jumptime clients' user-generated content sections. From an editorial and brand standpoint, the publication liked the section. But the ad team couldn't sell it, and the publication planned to eliminate it — until the company measured its value using JumpTime's metric, FloPower, and saw that it was actually one of the most valuable areas of the site.

"People would go from these areas to the articles with high [ad costs]," JumpTime CEO Michele DiLorenzo says. “It was in [the publication's] best economic interest to drive traffic to what had before been considered an area with zero value.”







MSNBC.com, ESPN.com and Hearst Newspapers have all signed on for similar insights. JumpTime's dashboard shows them the real-time value of each page on their websites and helps them move content that's creating the most revenue to the forefront. Color overlays indicate more traditional metrics such as clickthrough rates.

While there are numerous tools such as Chartbeat and Google Analytics that help track website traffic data, few analyze the real revenue generated by that traffic. Better number crunching has changed games ranging from Baseball to the stock market, and web publishing could be the next.

“The only way you get this kind of insight is to use a big data solution,” DiLorenzo says.







Image courtesy of istockphoto, Jaker5000

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.