Software

SaaS could boost business, but will it come with regulations?

In a recent email interview with Digital Signage Today, Paul Quigley, founder of the software as a service real-time media platform Newswhip, discussed how SaaS can benefit businesses, why the platform is becoming increasingly popular, consumer data privacy concerns and future predictions for SaaS platforms.

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July 12, 2022 by Kevin Damask — Editor, Digital Signage Today

Paul Quigley spent most of his career as a New York City lawyer, but he never lost his passion for journalism.

After returning to Ireland, his home country, Quigley founded Newswhip in 2011. Newswhip is a software as a service real-time media platform that helps users predict important news stories before they become top-trenders on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

Paul Quigley, provided

Newswhip began as an online news and features publication. Quigley, however, realized there was an opportunity in analyzing online traffic and social media to pinpoint trends. He shifted his business model for a more B2B approach. In the past 11 years, Newswhip has grown and adapted to the changing social media landscape.

In a recent email interview with Digital Signage Today, Quigley discussed how SaaS can benefit businesses, why the platform is becoming increasingly popular, consumer data privacy concerns and future predictions for SaaS platforms.

Q: Can you give some background about yourself? What led you to create Newswhip? What do you enjoy most about your role there?

A: After several years of living and working as a lawyer in New York, my objective was to return to Ireland and launch a digital media platform that would be a cross between Gawker and The Huffington Post and unique to the news media landscape in the UK and Ireland. Initially, Newswhip attracted hundreds of thousands of views and readers to the site but I quickly realized the existing business model wasn't sufficient for long-term success and growth.

Through monitoring the metrics on Newswhip's own stories, I had a "eureka" moment, where I recognized that sharing data from Facebook and Twitter could provide a live tracker of the most engaging news and information. Practically overnight, I shuttered the site's publishing arm and set about creating a schematic and APIs that could harness the power of these insights.

Over time, our focus shifted from consumer usage to a B2B model. It was becoming more apparent the influence that social media trends could have on a news story. As social media platforms evolved into the leading sources of news they are today, NewsWhip's business model evolved and adapted alongside them.

Today, the Newswhip team is made up of more than 60 employees spread across Ireland and the U.S. NewsWhip is used by brands, publishers, agencies and non-government organizations across 80-plus countries to predict the news and better understand which stories are engaging audiences on a global and local scale.

Q: What are a few key benefits of bringing in SaaS to a company's business model?

A: SaaS is a great way of funding a technology; you don't need to sell a bunch of licenses in waves, then wait to build and then sell again. Instead, you've got this continuous flow of revenue to fund your product and keep it better than competitors. Additionally, scalable software can give you a great economic engine to further invest in your product and in your company. As long as the software delivers a tangible added value to an organization or individual and keeps up with consumers' changing needs, the money keeps coming in. NewsWhip is a SaaS provider that delivers value to our clients at a very low marginal cost. As long as we're delivering that value, we can use the revenue to reinvest in building our business into a more powerful technology.

Q: How do SaaS platforms improve performance and help businesses grow revenue?

A: It's true, SaaS can greatly improve organizational performance and result in growth. By relentlessly focusing on your customer's problems and how your product can help them. Being SaaS means you do need to understand granularly how you can help the consumer. You can't just assume your basic version one will do the job forever. Continue to provide a high-quality product tailored toward consumer needs and the business will grow from there. Customers are your greatest asset and will spread the word about your product if it has benefitted them.

Q: Why do you think SaaS has emerged as a popular platform in 2022?

A:Adopting a SaaS model for your business grants you the freedom to continuously update your product as time goes on. Active SaaS platforms can deliver value to consumers while continuously improving and evolving. Additionally, you have the ease of distributing new updates to all users almost instantaneously across the world, so you save a lot of costs along the supply chain and in turn, can shift your focus on reinvestment in new areas to keep improving your service and retain customers by listening to their feedback. If you have a SaaS product that solves a problem and it's seamlessly integrated into a consumer's day to day life, you are on the right track.

Q:How does technology track human behavior and engagement online?

A:It really depends on the technology. Every website tracks your behavior once you've clicked to approve the consent. They also monitor how, when, and why you've clicked on specific content. Social networks, on the other hand, also track your scrolling behavior, where you've stopped scrolling, how long you waited, often what on the page you looked at. This monitoring allows organizations to track network web page visits and are better able to run their ad targeting strategies. Google, for example, is tracking your location for better map results in your area. What is the high-level idea behind all of this you might think? A lot of technology tracking is in fact to personalize the internet and make it a more useful tool. There's a tension between privacy and monitoring human behavior, and I think we should all be able to opt-in or out of lower and higher levels of privacy based on convenience, but ultimately this allows the internet to be better suited to our individual needs.

Q: Are there privacy concerns that need to be addressed?

A: I worry about who regulators write the laws for. Some regulators write rules specifically for Google for example, but then every other site has to follow those rules. With General Data Protection Regulation, I question how much time is wasted annually, clicking accept on endless compliance pop-ups. I don't know if that is adding much or regulating enough. I think we need to outline what are the real legitimate privacy concerns and tailor legislation, on an EU or global level, to better address those concerns. We need to define the legislation better. I don't know if anyone really asked for GDPR, but it's here and I'm curious as to what value it has added to us. I don't feel it has improved people's lives online because I don't see where or how it could have. Yes, we have fewer spam emails but they're not eradicated whatsoever.

Q: How does SaaS help brands improve their marketing efforts?

A: SaaS relies on continuous digital value delivery. Consumers are used to the SaaS model now and are subscribing to more and more products. Additionally, businesses and organizations are subscribing to more and more services. In fact, marketing departments are buying 10% more SaaS tools in 2022 than they were in 2019. There's always talk of consolidation but inventive new tools are constantly emerging that do different niche things.

Q: What do you think the future holds for SaaS?

A: SaaS services are going to continue to grow and new SaaS technologies will emerge. They're going to keep proliferating, and there will be some consolidation in the future. There will always be some new, clever little product or add-on and someone is always going to pay money for it. We're already seeing it happen. Salesforce was supposed to be everything but then Marketo arrived, followed by HubSpot then there was Yesware and Salesloft, and so many more. There are always these little sales enablers and things that keep popping up in each market. So, I think at some point, the surge in growth has to recede — but it's not happening yet.

I do hope that this new wave of predictive media intelligence space only expands, and NewsWhip is at the forefront of it. As a SaaS organization, we're hoping certain communication professionals and agencies will see the benefit of our product and the value added to their own businesses. I think we're a good example of where SaaS businesses are going in the future in that we're taking an existing industry and making it better and supercharging it.

About Kevin Damask

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