The new Chartbeat, with analytics from someecards.com.

Chartbeat just announced a hefty new round of funding led by Josh Stein, managing director at Draper Fisher Jurveston, and Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures, for $9.5 million in all. Some of the funding has already been put to use, as Chartbeat is rolling out a "complete new look," CEO Tony Haile told Betabeat, with a new dashboard, two major new features, and a mobile app. 

"Thanks Saul, thanks Josh, we’re going to make you proud," Mr. Haile wrote in a blog post this morning.

The new feature is "peer stats," which show how the site is performing compared to other averaged data from other sites using Chartbeat. "We're thinking about not just your site, but your site in the context of the wider web," Mr. Haile told Betabeat.

Peer stats will show how a site compares to others of its type. "We anonymize and aggregate all the data, and then we slice it down to sites like yours so it would be like, tech blogs who have between a certain number of concurrents... and usually peak at 2 p.m. in the afternoon," he said.

The new dashboard will also feature an emphasis on how much time people are spending "being engaged" on the site with a feature called "Engaged Time." That means people who have your site open in a forgotten tab no longer count for much.  Chartbeat will also now feature what's happening with your content outside your site more prominently, Mr. Haile said."We're making social a much bigger part of Chartbeat," Mr. Haile said.

Chartbeat's "engaged time" view.

Also, Chartbeat announced a beta for its iPhone app (which may be a curse for already Chartbeat-obsessed editors). The mobile version reinforces Chartbeat's mission: real-time data. "If something happens... you'll be able to see it immediately and adapt," Mr. Haile said. "It's the same real time goodness." Chartbeat updates about every three seconds, he said.

"Obviously we're hugely excited about the round," Mr. Haile said said. "We are hiring like crazy. Back end, front end, designers, people on sales and marketing... we've been a bit resource-constrained." Chartbeat is also looking for a new office, he said, in the same rough area on the west side below 14th St.

Chartbeat spent more than a year looking for the right investors, he said, and settled on Mr. Stein because of his expertise. The three-year-old company has raised a total of $12.5 million. Its last round was in August 2010, and it raised the first $1 million of this Series B from existing investors in December.

The company, which charges between $9.95 to $149.95 per month depending on the size of the site, has been making millions of dollars in revenue for some time. Revenues have grown 3.5 times over in the last year, Chartbeat said.

"It's go big or go home time. We didn't want to slow down, but we also didn't want to take money from the wrong people. So we got an inside note to keep things pumping while we go out and find backers for a much bigger round later this year," Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile told Betabeat. 

Chartbeat's current investors, who backed a $3 million seed round in Septemeber of 2010, include Index Ventures, O'Reilly AlphTech Ventures, SV Angel, Lowercase Capital, Founder Collective and Lerer Ventures.

The company is currently hiring for:

• Interaction and UI Designer
• Frontend Engineer
• Backend Engineer
• Community Evangelist

It has expanded to its own floor above betaworks main office in Chelsea and recently began highlighting some of the fun projects it team experiments on during their 20% time on a site called Chartbeat Labs.

A universe of users

For Chartbeat addicts like us, the introduction of the new Labs page is a real problem. There is now a smorgasbord of tantalizing visuals to watch, from maps to solar systems, that represent the incoming traffic to Betabeat.

Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile says Labs is a place to highlight the work his team does during their "free" time. Like Google, Mr. Haile insists that his shop spend one out of every seven weeks working on their own side projects. "The only rule is they can't work on stuff in the development queue."

The idea is to unleash a whole range of creativity that the team would otherwise miss. "It shows me where I am missing things and what opportunities we might explore in the future," said Mr. Haile.

For a company focused around providing an analytic service, it's also a reminder that product is at the core of what Chartbeat does. "It's all about inspiring the team and helping to refresh their innovation," he said.

Tony Haile - Internet Explorer - outside betaworks

When a huge surge of traffic suddenly starts washing over a website, publishers have to act fast to capture the most value from these visitors. Yesterday, for example, Betabeat popped our cherry on a pickup by John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog, which turned on a fire hose of new readers who had never previously been to our site.

I knew there was a high percentage of first time visitors because I was using Newsbeat, a more powerful version of the real time analytic engine Chartbeat, which breaks down the percentage of new versus returning visitors. I was able to throw some additional links into the story taking these reader back to some of our best coverage on the mobile space.

As the story spread around the web, Newsbeat also gave me a look at the volume of tweets surrounding the story and let me find some of the influencers who propagated the piece across different networks. It captured a lot of info that my Tweetdeck @ mentions column missed, allowing me to reach out to those users and give a follow up link or a thanks.

With Newsbeat I can also get a sense of a stories momentum. For the first time it doesn't just show me how many people are currently reading an article, but which direction a story is trending in term of new eyeballs. This means I can focus on a story when its on the way up, but stop wasting time trying to tend to it after it has peaked. Or, viewed another way, I can know when the momentum is shifting, and change the placement or promotion of a story to get it traffic building again.

"We are predicting the path of every story and showing you how much you should be getting from direct traffic, inbound links and social media," says Chartbeat general manager and betaworks chief troublemaker Tony Haile, running a hand through his lush, golden locks. "Now we can show you where a story is headed, a measure of momentum, not mass."

One big change in Newsbeat is the way it measures direct traffic versus social. "Direct has been this bullshit black hole. People may type in betabeat.com, but no one is typing in betabeat.com/article/news-breaking/2011-5-13. A lot of what we used to record as direct traffic is actually coming from email, IM and apps, especially Twitter client, so now we break that out into its own section."

Newsbeat is the first specialized extension of Chartbeat, but Haile says versions for e-tailers and gaming companies are both in the works. "We don't want to build a better Omniture, we want to stay very real time. Hopefully we can work closely with a lot of these publisher to help build the newsroom of the future."