It’s not just laughs, giggles and videos of failure at the Cheezburger Network. Fresh off its recent $30 million venture capital round, the Seattle online comedy network has hired Sean Power as the company’s first data scientist.
Power — a consultant and author of the book “Complete Web Monitoring” — has worked with organizations such as MTV Northern Europe, Croplife and the Canadian Forces on social media, marketing and analytics.
He describes his new challenge in a blog post:
I’ll be working with lots of data. Cheezburger’s data is sizeable. Over a month, we’ll see things like 19 million people. 400 million page views. 110 million videos. That’s a decent amount of data exhaust to tame. And I’ll be working to find, define and refine my identity in the ‘big data space’ as I help Cheezburger with theirs.
Power also described his job to Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb:
“I’m going from the top of the stack (finance, ad, core business metrics) all the way down to the individual split tests that developers are creating. Infrastructure metrics, usability metrics, qual and quant metrics. If it has a number or is a qualifier, I’ll be interested in making sense out of it, if there’s a business reason to do so.”
As Power noted above, Cheezburger certainly has plenty of data to analyze. So, it will be interesting to see how the company known for Fail Blog, I Can Has Cheezburger and more than 45 other comedy Web sites utilizes his insights.
