Web technology assessment: Newspapers vs SaaS

While doing an assessment of FiscalNote’s web technology needs, I discovered a company called BuiltWith, which gathers data on website technology – basically exactly what I needed.

The site monitors the internet’s top 2 million websites weekly. For the approximately 250 million websites they track, each is refreshed at minimum once a quarter. They were nice enough to give me access to their API for a more detailed sector analysis than they provide. What was most interesting to me – what could I use to determine best practices? and how do newspaper websites stack up?

For my benchmark analysis, I utilized the AngelList API to determine 973 SaaS companies; hypothesizing that these companies are at the forefront of technology and have received venture capital denoting their abilities. (SaaS companies and their websites)

I gathered my list of newspaper websites by scraping usnpl.com, at which I discovered 3,769 unique newspaper websites. (The tech landscape of newspaper websites)

Perhaps I’ll do a three-year update in 2018. If that’s something that interests you, go ahead and comment on one of the Medium articles that are linked above.