How Topic Leaderboards are ranked

These new leaderboards are ordered to highlight the most influential and prolific authors covering a specific topic area. In this way, they're similar in format to the leaderboards we've offered for years, which ranked authors and publications for all Techmeme news rather than individual topics. We're therefore calling these new lists leaderboards as well, and they now reside at the same URL.

However, there's a key difference in how these new leaderboards are ordered versus our general leaderboards: Topic Leaderboard ranking is not based on the frequency of Techmeme front page placement. Instead, taking advantage of Techmeme's rich crawl data and sophisticated topic-tagger, Topic Leaderboards are based on, first, the quantity of links to articles on that topic from peers and influential industry people in social media, and second, the total number of articles on the topic that an author or publication posts. In short: being well-cited and prolific on the topic leads to a higher ranking.

Introducing Topic Leaderboard reports

How are Topic Leaderboards presented? Each topic gets a report, which is essentially the pairing of an author leaderboard and a publication leaderboard for that topic. The author leaderboard will typically include 100 or more ranked authors, and each author entry will consist of a name, a Twitter profile link if available (useful for obtaining contact details), associated publication(s), an influence score based on inbound link volume, and a short list of headlines showing some of the best recent contributions on that topic from the writer. The publication leaderboard comes next in the report, offering similar ranking details. Reports draw on the past four months of crawl data and are updated weekly, ensuring the data we provide stays timely even as authors develop or switch their beats, get hired, and change jobs.

Paid reports: Obtaining an extensive list of the best reporters for discussing launches or general relationship-building based on meaningful signals and data can be an enormous time-saver. In fact, many PR agencies and companies already devote considerable resources to the not-so-fun task of compiling information for this purpose, a process that's often more manual and qualitative than data-driven. Meanwhile, subscription PR tools that purport to organize reporters by topic are often woefully inadequate and even inaccurate, sending PR pros to the wrong reporters with frustration ensuing on both sides. To account for the value provided by these leaderboards, and to give Techmeme its first paid content offering, most Topic Leaderboards are available as paid downloads. They'll be sold individually for an introductory price of $100 each, though this price may increase as we introduce even more useful data into these reports. A purchase will give the buyer the opportunity to download in both html and pdf formats up to five times (to permit access on multiple devices).

Free reports: We also offer several free reports, covering some of the more buzzy tech news topics (for instance: Facebook and iPhones), and plan to continue doing so indefinitely. If you're wondering what our paid reports look like, just look through the free options and assess how much value you see in this format.

We want feedback!

Today, we're launching with just 20 paid and 4 free reports, but plan to grow the number of topics in the months ahead. Be sure to check back periodically to see what we've added. And if you don't see the topics you're most interested in, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave a suggestion here (there are no bad suggestions!). Second, do you have other informational needs that you believe Techmeme's crawl data may be uniquely suited to addressing? Please let us know your thoughts by emailing us .

Thank you, and now a Q&A

At Techmeme, we're thrilled to find new ways to analyze and summarize information to empower people in the industry, just as we've done all along with our news aggregation. As always, thanks for reading, and we hope you find our new offerings valuable. To conclude, here are some answers to questions some of you will have:

For instance, Yelp is now advertising against news about Google, to urge the search giant to “Focus on the User”. Crypto wallet maker BRD is targeting news about cryptocurrency to tell Techmeme readers about its free, open-source app. And cloud enterprise software maker Freshworks will target CRM news to highlight Freshsales.

Why is Techmeme the right venue for ads that react to news in this way? Because it's where readers go to see ideas in conflict. Techmeme is, after all, the arena where industry-driven news meets critical reaction and analysis. So by letting companies speak out and confront issues in this manner, we provide an additive, even entertaining experience for readers.

The benefit for advertisers from these ads should be clear enough. First, the “direct response” aspect can help companies meet immediate signup goals. But the brand associations that arise from such assertive messaging can be vivid and lasting. After all, if you can position yourself as the antidote to a well-known problem, why not take that opportunity? And the quality of Techmeme's decision-maker and “influencer”-heavy audience can help ensure that effort is worthwhile.

How do these ads work? An advertiser supplies a message, an ad budget, and matching criteria. The matching criteria can be as simple as the mention of a company in a headline, or a broader news category such as cloud computing, cryptocurrency, security software, e-commerce, machine learning, or enterprise chat. Techmeme then matches against its posted stories, placing the advertiser's message until the total placement hours determined by the ad budget are fully delivered. To support this matching, we've built out a proficient topic-tagger backed by an extensive and expanding ontology (and we'll have more to say about that in a later post). I should note the possibilities for matches go even further than what's stated above. For instance, matching against arbitrary groups of companies or individuals, against geographic areas, or even against the news outlet that Techmeme features for a given story are easily doable.

Of course, there are limits to the sorts of messages we'll place. We'll decline to feature offensive or overly gimmicky ad copy. And we won't include negative ad messages aimed at current advertisers, in effect, guaranteeing a form of competitive separation.

If you're interested in contextual ads on Techmeme, don't hesitate to reach out at .

As the tech industry expands in reach and power, the value of contesting the dominant themes and challenging established players has grown proportionately. We're hoping these new ads can play a part, while also making Techmeme a more fun and intriguing read.

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