LOS ANGELES — They say “knowledge is power,” and this was never truer than in today’s world of comprehensive analytics, Big Data, and the competitive advantages it can provide.
The problem has changed, however, from “not knowing enough” to “knowing too much” — in other words, having so much information available that making sense of it all becomes a challenge in itself.
Living on the edge of technology, adult website operators grapple with a global audience and many factors that can boost — or bottom out — their profitability. These webmasters face all of the same issues as do their more mainstream counterparts, along with additional regional-specific regulatory burdens and corporate policy restrictions that complicate the playing field and make better decisions not only a matter of success but of survival.
These decisions include those surrounding the tailoring of content to suit evolving consumer tastes as well as how and where different content types should be served based on legal and policy restrictions; along with decisions regarding the best sources of revenue, traffic, and more.
With a tagline of “Beautiful data visualization starts here,” Google says the beta release of Data Studio turns data into informative dashboards and reports that are easy to read, easy to share, and also fully customizable, allowing users to “tell great data stories to support better business decisions.”
It is a tool that has caught the eye of professional adult site operators at XBIZ.net, who note its value for both internal reporting and for sharing quick traffic summary reports with link trade partners, potential advertisers, and more — without the complexity of raw Google Analytics reports.
“[Google Data Studio provides] just the right amount of information for this sort of thing,” explains Wasteland CEO Colin Rowntree, “presented graphically so folks don’t need to drill down into a shared GA spreadsheet report.”
This ability to provide an at-a-glance assessment of facts and figures should not be underestimated, and indeed is echoed in the infographic craze, where complex data visualization takes a simple flat form that is as easily interpreted in print as it is digitally — and where “viewing attractiveness” plays a big role.
Indeed, simplicity of data visualization has long been cherished by adult webmasters, many of whom long relied on site features such as visitor comments and simple “star” or “thumbs up/down” ratings, and now metrics such as “Likes” and retweets to help determine consumer demand, as well as their success in serving this demand.
Despite the simplicity of these systems, both to use and to interpret their usage, getting a site’s visitors to actively participate through comments, ratings, and social media still requires them to do something — and motivating that action is not as easy as it may seem. Wouldn’t it be great if visitor feedback could be obtained without a visitor actively providing that feedback?
Polygram seems to think so, with the debut of its AI-powered social network featuring facial recognition-driven emoji-style ratings, which provide anonymized data on viewer’s emotional reactions to content, enabling Likes in response to smiles, among other responses to the user’s facial expressions — and then graphing the results.
Polygram’s co-founder Faryar Ghazanfari told TechCrunch the tool has value for A/B testing social media and that the company is actively working with trendsetters to further develop Polygram’s features.
“Influencers and content creators are the oxygen in this ecosystem,” Ghazanfari tells me. “We have white glove service for influencers, with full-time employees that just create custom features for them.”
“When you post a photo, you’ll see the emotional response tallies of your audience, though without names attached so you can’t get mad at a friend for looking grossed-out by your selfie,” Josh Constine wrote for TechCrunch. “You also can see exactly where around the world your viewers are and get audience breakdowns by demographic if you only care how a certain gender feels about your post.”
With adult operators (and performers in particular) so enamored with social media, it is certain that Polygram and similar technologies will hold appeal — with the app also providing a great example of how “friendliness” is coming to data visualization, and through clear graphing, elevates the informal “star” ratings of old into more actionable intelligence today.
Bringing meaningfulness and simplicity to data visualization is vital for adult webmasters as well as for any website operation, or indeed any business, especially those with limited staffing support. Thankfully, numerous new tools are coming to market that will redefine how we use and view data — and top-tier adult webmasters will be on the frontline of their use, and making better data-driven business decisions as a result.
