Data analytics are already a seemingly indispensable tool for the news industry. Evidently, knowing how many people are visiting your site and which articles are the most popular is extremely useful, hence the success of companies like Google Analytics, Omniture, Chartbeat and their newsroom-specific product Newsbeat.

Undoubtedly, these tools are incredibly useful; but what if there were something better, a service that could calculate how to make readers stay on the site for longer and view more content?

In fact, these services already exist. During recent months a number of companies, such as YieldBot, JumpTime and OutBrain, have sprung up offering news sites the possibility to optimise content recommendation - i.e. related links - and therefore encourage more users to stay on the site for longer. The Nieman Journalism Lab provides a detailed summary of the how these services operate and the differences between them.

So what does this new generation of analytics give you that other services don't?

Crucially, these analytics give you a real time assessment of what's happening on the site and this allows the programs to calculate how many views a story will attract when placed in a certain position on the site.

At the time, AOL's $315 million acquisition of The Huffington Post provoked skepticism and criticism all over the web. Some likened the deal to AOL's 2000 purchase of Time Warner, which proved to be a spectacular failure. However, yesterday, dire predictions were thrown off by the announcement by Business Insider that The Huffington Post has surpassed the New York Times in monthly page views - in May, HuffPo pulled in 36.6 million unique viewers against the New York Times' 35.5 million viewers. Furthermore, the Business Insider has also reported that AOL's newsroom is now larger than the New York Times'.

Can this news be considered to be concrete proof of the media giant's success?

Google is trying to take some of the social network pie away from Facebook. Last week, it launched a +1 button intended to compete with the social media giant's 'like' button. Google members can "+1" search results, which will then be available to their social circle on the site. According to Google's site, +1 is meant to stand for "this is pretty cool" or "you should check this out."

The results could be beneficial to news organizations. This new system could help them see a climb in their articles' hits and in the quality of users sent from the search engine.

Google has declared that the 1+ button isn't a like button, reported Le Point. Unlike Facebook's button, which appears directly on friends' profiles, the "+1" only appears during searches. Like Facebook, Google is working to get the +1 button directly on websites, and not just in its search results.

Users can target ads as well as search results, giving advertisers a step up. The +1 button wouldn't affect current search results or factor into Google's algorithm. The search engine just intends it to help give better results.

Take a look at this disingenuous Huffington Post "article" and everything becomes clear. As the infinite accessibility of free online news pushes some newspaper companies towards the edge of existence, the Huffington Post's arguably desperate tactics reveal a glimpse into one method of survival.