Yesterday we released the latest revision of the iPad app, now with full support for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now, no matter what iDevice you use you can stay up to date on what is happing on your site in real-time!
This project has been a lot of fun. We had a few different reasons for experimenting with this platform so I thought I would give a little insight into this thought process.
First, of course, was the publisher use case outlined in my first blog post. It’s difficult to be an individual publisher because by definition you are forced to be jack of all trades. Most high profile and influential publishers are great content producers. They write things people want to read. Lijit’s publisher app helps publishers keep on top of real-time traffic behavior. Now, they have the freedom to attend to other things in life while still keeping their finger on the pulse of their site.
Secondly, we wanted to explore an alternate stats metaphor with the app. All existing stats packages tend to be roll-ups of past activity, telling you what happened yesterday rather than right now. We wanted to play around with the idea of experiencing statistics as they happen. Some of these features we are planning to roll into the web dashboard. The mobile platform gave us the opportunity to experiment in a sandbox outside our production environment and with more UI freedom than we had with the web version.
Finally, we wanted to lay a foundation for an entirely new level of audience information we could provide our publishers. In the coming months we will be rolling out more global audience information that we have insight into because we power search and ads on so many different publisher sites. We are pretty excited to make this larger body of information available to our publishers in a consumable and actionable way. Your traffic stats will expand to include more specific information about your readers including detailed demographic information and content interests.
We like to do something outside the box from time-to-time and the mobile platform for our publishers was a fun and interesting project. We intend to keep developing on the platform so that it remains valuable to publishers already using our web version. Drop us a note to tell us what you think.
