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Meet Dadaviz: A Curated, YouTube-Style Distribution Platform For Data Visualizations

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"If I read news without dataviz I get a bit nauseous, I don't have patience for words alone anymore. Nor infographics". This helps explain why marketing expert and consultant León Markovitz co-founded Dadaviz, nicknamed by some as "the YouTube of data visualizations". Online since June 11th, it's a collection of the best dataviz selected from different sources by an invite-only community.

Want to learn the Who's Who of political relationships in the Middle East, what's the average commute time in the U.S. or where do the visitors of the Oktoberfest come from? This is the place to go.

Most of the published material is "curated" from external sources (the Middle East dataviz was taken from the Economist), but there's also a certain amount of original work. Every visualization shared on Dadaviz links to the author, original link and data source, when available, so people can find out more and get more context if they wish. If someone wants to use a dataviz, they can reach directly the creators, or type "/embed" at the end of any Dadaviz link -which gives them an embed of the image with all the attribution already in place. Or they can simply share it on social media.

Anyone can pitch himself as a contributor, emailing info@dadaviz.com, but it's not easy to be chosen, as the website's editorial staff is trying to keep the quality as high as possible. In the future, the idea is to open the doors to everybody, once the algorithm behind the platform has been refined and is able, based on user rating and views, to surface only quality content.

Dadaviz has been online just for three months, so, although the idea is good and the minimalistic, full-screen, look, serves well the purpose of letting data speak for themselves, it's still far from perfect. The team is seeking feedback from the users and trying to adjust accordingly. Some of the early critics, for instance, complained about the lack of a search feature and of a seamless mobile browser experience. The former has been solved and the Dadaviz staff is working on the latter.

There's no clear business model yet, but the Dadaviz team hopes to teach world-leading brands how to do native advertising with data visualizations. "This is a new form of advertising which is less prone to manipulation - Markovitz maintains - and is inherently good for their PR since they are making their data public". Another path to explore, now that data journalism has become trendy, is to create partnerships with newspapers and media outlets to help them distribute their visual content.

"We have approached both large and small media companies to make them aware of our dataviz distribution platform - Markovitz tells me - The response has been cautious and positive because dadaviz serves to increase the LTV of their visualizations and reach new markets, there is no threat, it's a complimentary (free) service. We are also developing relationships with dataviz software companies so they can display the works that are possible with their tools".

As for competitors Dadaviz, while standing out of the crowd for its no-frills interface, is not alone when it comes to providing access to interesting data visualizations. You may want to check, for instance, Plot.ly for charts or Infosthetics for cool infographics. The big difference is that Dadaviz aims at highlighting mainly interactive content, rather than static images.