The Forecast and Analytics of Social Media and Traffic (Fast) is a platform that analysis in real-time the life cycle of news stories on the web and social media, providing predictive analytics that gauges audience interest.

Fast integrates different user interactions to a news article, including website visits, social media reactions and searches, in order to forecast the number of page views an article will receive during its affective lifetime.

The QCRI said the underlying algorithms accurately monitored the overall traffic an article will receive by observing the first 30 to 60 minutes of social media reactions.

Al Jazeera English’s head of online Imad Musa said: “Analytics, in predicting the future trend of a web story, is a crucial component in understanding web traffic and this initiative is a component we welcome.”