2018 Year in Review: A/B Testing
The Kinja team relies on A/B and multivariate testing for numerous reasons, including weighing the effect of changes to the platform, deciding which projects deserve further investment and uncovering issues as part of the QA process. We noted last year how important these experiments are to our product culture, and…
FMG Data Does PyGotham 2018
Members from the FMG Data Engineering and Analytics teams will be attending PyGotham 2018! Stay tuned once the conference starts on Oct 5 for our thoughts on the talks and hubbub.
FMG Superfans
From my experience in news and evergreen publishers (CNN, Men’s Health, Runners World, Bicycling, etc.), I’ve never seen such an engaged audience until I got to Fusion Media Group. The Pareto principle applies overall across media companies: 20% of audiences consume 80% of stories. But what I’m seeing is a smaller…
A Data Perspective on Kinja in 2017
Every day, the Kinja team works to iterate on the platform Fusion Media Group uses for its network of media sites. As part of our job on the data team, we provide product managers and developers with information to help them create new features that improve users’ experiences, enhance editorial’s storytelling tools…
2017 Year in Review: A/B Testing
We love A/B testing here at Fusion Media Group. We’ve come a long way since 2015, when we first started testing: in the past three years we’ve grown the testing culture from none at all to A/B tests being a key and necessary part of the product development process. Experiments allow us to measure and be confident in…
Enhance Your DFP Reporting with Custom Key-Values
Here at Fusion Media Group, we have fully embraced Doubleclick For Publisher’s custom key-values - we use them in part as they are intended: for improved targeting and forecasting around things DFP doesn’t track natively (ex: article topics, how many pages a user has seen so far in their visit.) But we’ve also been…
Run Scala In A Notebook On Your Desktop
In an effort to get better at working with Kinja’s backend codebase (which is largely in Scala), a group of us at FMG have been taking the Functional Programming Principles in Scala course on Coursera. So far I’m having a great time!
Farewell To A True Kinja Hero
On January 3, 2012, Gawker’s incoming editor-in-chief, A.J. Daulerio, wrote a post about the different Gawkers he had been asked to create. His mandate was to create a site with the digestible content of HuffPo (this made sense in 2012), attracting audiences with the influence of the Times and the community of…
Using Docker with Conda Environments
We just started using anaconda, rather than pip/virtualenv, to manage dependencies in the codebase for our data warehouse. The combination of pip and virtualenvs with requirements.txt files has served us well, but we switched because conda is more standard for analytics work, and because it’s by far the easiest way to…
Your Favorite Comments of 2016
At the end of 2015, which feels like many, many years ago, I wrote a post on the top comments of the year which started like this:
Top Posts of 2016 That Weren't Published in 2016
Around the end of the year, the data team gets a lot of requests from the editorial teams to pull which posts had the highest traffic that year. Usually, they’re looking to figure out which of the posts they wrote that year did the best - but there are always posts that were published in previous years that gain…
Final Projects, Fall 2016 Edition
Just like last semester and the year before that, my students in City University of New York’s data visualization class (IS608) have finished their final projects. You can check out all of them (from this year and previous years) here.
Building Tools For Editorial Organizations
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