Good idea …

… Better know a reader: Umbel wants publishers to have better data on their audience — Nieman Journalism Lab. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The company describes its product as a combination of old-school market research and new-school web analytics. Imagine a scenario where a publisher is able to cross-reference a reader’s profile on their news site with information gathered through social media profiles and other online behaviors. The product, still in private beta, triangulates all the signals we leave around the Internet to try to create a unified picture. You can see how this would be useful to a news outlet that wants to better tailor its content for readers or simply needs better ammunition to raise their CPMs. (And you can see how it might raise the hackles of privacy advocates.)