Real-Time Web Analytics for Newsrooms
On a news site the useful window is the first hour after publishing. BYOViral shows visits as they arrive, tells you which sources are sending them, and keeps traffic from hosting networks out of the totals your editors look at.
The first hour after a story goes live
A typical way a desk uses the live data, from push alert to evening wrap-up:
- First five minutesOnline Now counts visitors from the last five minutes. If a push alert or social post has worked, the number moves straight away.
- Five to thirty minutesThe live view and Referrers show where readers come from: search, social networks, aggregators, other news sites, or AI assistants.
- First hourSearch the Pages report for a path such as /politics/ or /sports/ to see how the story compares with the rest of its section.
- End of the shiftDaily totals, countries and cities show how far the coverage traveled and help plan the follow-up.
Reports a desk uses most
Scrapers and bots
News pages attract scrapers. BYOViral checks the network behind each visit and labels traffic from hosting and cloud providers, and from automation tools, as likely bots. Those visits are kept apart, so a scraper run does not show up as a traffic spike in the numbers your editors see.
The check uses network names rather than a blocklist of IP addresses, so it catches most cloud traffic but not every bot that routes through a home or mobile connection.
Which plan fits a newsroom
Daily totals are complete on every plan. What changes is the detailed visitor log. A news site fills the free plan's 500-visitor log quickly, so most newsrooms will want Premium (10,000 visitors per site, $5 a month) or Ultra (100,000, $9 a month).
Premium adds CSV export of each report, traffic spike and drop alerts, and Search Console queries. Ultra adds API access for pulling figures into an internal dashboard.
Newsroom questions
Can it handle a sudden traffic spike?
Each pageview is recorded as it arrives and appears in the live view. Traffic from hosting and cloud networks is labeled separately, so a bot surge does not inflate the human totals.
Can we see traffic by section or author?
By section, yes, if your URLs include it: search the Pages report for a path such as /politics/. Author-level reporting needs the author in the URL or a custom event.
Can we export the data?
Premium and Ultra can export each report as CSV. Ultra also has API access.
Does it count AMP pages?
No. AMP does not allow custom scripts like this one, so AMP views are not counted. Readers in the in-app browsers of social apps are counted, because those browsers run the script like any other.