NewsWhip, the 2012 startup that monitors the web to discover what content is popular, booked a loss of €615,000 in 2015, according to filed accounts. Accumulated losses stood at €1.67 million at 31 December 2015.

NewWhip products include Spike, a dashboard showing what’s trending in any niche or region; NewsWhip Analytics, which measures social publishing trends and billions of digital objects and stories; and NewsWhip APIs, which offer developers and data scientists machine-readable feeds of real-time and historical social data.

Launched in 2012, NewsWhip relocated to offices in 2015 on Merrion Square to facilitate hiring extra staff. The average headcount in 2015 was 14 people, up from nine the year before. Average staff pay and pension was €64,300, with founder directors Paul Quigley and Andrew Mullaney sharing €171,000 in remuneration.

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Though Newswhip Media Ltd ended 2015 with a negative net worth of €1.4m, year-end cash amounted to €1.3m.

In May 2015, $1.6m was raised from 17 investors, including some American VCs and Associated Press. The investment was effected as a loan to the company.

Customers include BBC, BuzzFeed and Yahoo, as well as brands and agencies who want to create sticky internet content. Year-end debtors expanded to €250,000 from €50,000 in 2014.

NewsWhip’s Spike product filters hundreds of thousands of digital articles, Facebook videos and Instagram posts, based on how fast audiences are engaging with them in real time.

Posts are categorised by country, topic and language. Users can create custom panels, based on their interests and set up email alerts for notifications when a story is attracting extra high levels of engagement. Spike is priced from €265 a month (two users) to €530 a month (six users), with larger customers paying more.

NewsWhip is a finalist int he Emerging category of the EY Entrepreneuir of the Year awards programme.

Photo: Paul Quigley (right) and Andrew Mullaney