VIDEO: Chartbeat CEO John Saroff On Building A 360-Degree View Of Content

As audiences fragment across owned platforms and social video ecosystems, media companies need real-time insight into how their content is actually performing. In this Q&A, TVREV Publisher Jason Damata speaks with Chartbeat, Inc. CEO John Saroff about how Chartbeat—and its acquisition of Tubular Labs—is giving publishers a 360-degree view of content performance across sites, apps, and platforms like YouTube and TikTok, helping them expand reach and make smarter distribution decisions.

Jason Damata: Tell me about Chartbeat, Inc.

John Saroff: We've been around for about 15 years now. It's hard to believe. And most of the major media companies in the world, we have about 700 customers and about 10,000 media properties as clients, use our software to understand in real time how audiences are interacting with content on their owned and operated properties, whether that's a website, an app, a video player, et cetera.

In the last couple of years, we've also expanded. We acquired a well-known company in the video analytics spcae called Tubular Labs. And now we really present a 360-degree view of content that media companies are creating.

JD: What is a good use case for Chartbeat and Tubular?

If you're a major television network and you create a piece of video, let's say it's a sports highlight package and you put that on your website, you want to understand how that's performing relative to another sports highlight package.

I'm a big hockey fan. There's a New Jersey Devil's package and there's a New York Islanders package and you want to understand which one is performing better because you want to give it more premium placement. Maybe you want to promote it on Facebook. Maybe you want to promote it on YouTube itself.

Our software enables you to understand how it's performing, where it's performing, both geographically and in terms of what kinds of users, and also where the users are coming from. Are they coming from search? Are they coming from social? Are they coming direct to you? With our new capabilities, since we've added Tubular, what we're finding is that a lot of media companies are using YouTube, Facebook Reel, Facebook Video, Instagram Reels, and TikTok to essentially expand their reach, right?

My kids are not getting the Devil's highlight package on ESPN.com. They're getting that package on TikTok. And one of the things that we're seeing with the most successful media companies is that they are expanding their reach by leveraging all of these platforms, especially in video.