ChartBeat Raises $9.5M

NYC-based ChartBeat has raised $9.5M in SeriesB led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson with previous investor Index Ventures. ChartBeat sells real-time analytics to large sites on the web including the New York Times to Al Jazeera as well as eCommerce sites like Fab.com and Gilt Groupe. They boast that they have been called the ‘crack cocaine of the internet’.

The company is led by Tony Haile who developed the company out of Betaworks.

ChartBeat and its competitors took on a tough challenge, manning up to free Google Analytics, which generally gets good reviews and continues to improve the product. Google Analytics recently launched social metrics. Google seems to have shot itself in the foot as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are absent.

Gigaom has a good break-down on ChartBeat’s focus: “One of the biggest differences with Chartbeat when compared to something like Google Analytics, says Haile, is that while Google and other programs only check once to see if a visitor has opened a page — and then show that page as being read until it is closed — Chartbeat continually pings every few seconds to see if the page is still open, and therefore it has a far more accurate reading of which pages are actually getting engagement from readers, as opposed to simply being open in a browser tab somewhere.”

ChartBeat goes for $10 to $150 per month, which seems low enough that if you are going to get any value out of it vs. Google Analytics its worthwhile.

Along with the funding announcement, ChartBeat also announced an update to its dashboard. For us, the most interesting thing is its peer index where it anonymizes data from like sites and compares your site to them.

View - site