DataSift, the company that recently partnered with Twitter to bring archived analytics of Twitter content dating back to January 2010 to its customers, is now announcing a new partnership that will also deliver insight from over 750 news sources to its users. By teaming up with news content licensing firm NewsCred, DataSift gains access to both print and online content from sources like Bloomberg and The Guardian.
In an interview with BetaKit, DataSift CTO and founder Nick Halstead said that the deal provides DataSift with access to full data of all published content from the newspaper sources licensed by NewsCred, complete with contextual information and tags that help make immediate sense of the data.
“Unlike with social media, a lot of these content providers are much more sensitive about people scraping their content and deriving value from their content, including monitoring that content,” he said. “We’re now able to leverage this content in a way where legality is not a concern for our users.” Halstead also pointed out that whereas scraping content results in a lot of errors and generally poor quality of information, DataSift’s licensing agreement ensures they’re starting with the proper product straight from the source.
Just like with DataSift’s social media monitoring products, the news media content will be able to be analyzed for sentiment and individual subject detection. That means, Halstead explained, that its users will be able to see differing sentiment around various subjects within a single article, and that DataSift will also be able to identify other subjects raised in a piece – useful if brands want to check out in what context their products are being discussed.
Since DataSift also offers its social media monitoring, the two sources can be combined to track how news coverage affects social media reaction, or vice versa. Competitors like Cision also offer both news and social media monitoring, but not with the degree of integration DataSift presents, according to Halstead. The NewsCred deal, which is based on a revenue sharing agreement between the two companies, is definitely a significant add-on to DataSift’s existing value proposition, which has attracted big name customers, including 100 of the Fortune 500, as brands put more focus on analyzing the effects of their online presence.