The Global Paddling Community

Who's talking about you? The Playak Factor tracks the online attention for paddling athletes and brands by scanning more than 1500 paddling sites for your personal names and brand names, and weighing the matches by site importance, clicks and text position.

FAQ

What is The Playak Factor, and what is it not?

The Playak Factor tracks who is talking about personal names and brand names in the English online paddling news.

Some important key words in that statement are:

• names: we look for mentions of full names, not handles or hash tags.
• English: we do track other languages for different purposes, fut for The Factor, we only count English sites.
• online: the tracking has to be automated, and we have to be able to link each entry, so if your name is mentioned in a newspaper, and that mention is not also available online, it will become hard to count.
• paddling: if your name is mentioned on CNN, that's fantastic, but it is not possible for us to scan all mainstream media sites, to read all the world's newspapers, or to watch all TV channels 24/7.
• news: we only track sites that have some news value: portals, magazines, forums, social media, press releases, video sites. We do not scan online catalogs, shops listings etc.

If someone mentions your full name in a blog post, it will match, and if your name is near the top of that post, the match will rank even higher. We do not count every post you write (unless you write your own full name near the title).

Here's an alternative way to describe The Playak Factor: an online paddling media attention meter.

How do I get on the list?

We started the service with a comprehensive list of athletes and brands, but we are aware that this list can never be complete. If you think your name or brand should be on the list, please let me know and I'll consider adding it. As long as your name or brand name is not too generic, there is a good chance we'll be able to add it.

Which websites are being tracked?

We track a huge list of (English language) new sites, blogs, social media, videos, press releases and forums, all of which are related to paddling. To see the complete list of sites we are currently tracking, click here.

Can I have a headline added manually?

If you get coverage in non-paddling media, that's fantastic, but in order for it to count in The Playak Factor, you will have to let us know about it explicitly. To do so, please send me a mail ([email protected]) with a little description of the media, the feature, and some proof. We will then manually add it to your score.

We also do not track online shop listings, as they may get a lot of eye balls, but they have no news value, so they just don't fit in with our concept.

How can I add my site or blog for tracking?

If you can't find your own paddling related news site or blog in the above list, please send me its address for potential inclusion. We do reserve the right to not include every application we receive. A typical reason to not include a blog is if it's 50% about non paddling topics.

What is this secret key?

As soon as your name or brand name is mentioned on one of the sites we track, we count the article in question. It doesn't matter if your name is mentioned once or twice in the same article. What does matter is the kind of site (think exposure and longevity: news sites count more than forums, forums count more than Facebook pages, etc.). News headlines that were featured in the Playak News Flash mails get some extra bonus points. Your name on your own blog counts less than your name on someone else's blog.

We take great caution to keep the results completely independent. We don't publish the exact key - on the one hand it's a pretty complex algorithm, and on the other hand we may make small adjustments in the future, which can be done at our sole discretion. Again, such changes will only ever aim to make the results even more independent.

Having said this, you can get an idea of how the key works by looking at your own list of headlines that contributed to your Playak Factor - each headline show the exact score that was used.

Why doesn't the system see a certain headline from last year?

We have been tracking paddling related websites since 2004, but if we just added a website to our watch list last week, we will probably never see the headlines that were published on that site more than a couple of months ago. We track the ongoing news stream for each site, and that data will stay in our system. If there is an important headline missing, please contact us and we may be able to manually add it for you.