PWAC 2014 - Predictive Web Analytics Challenge : Can your team predict how popular a web page will be?

Studying the behavior of visitors on web sites is an extremely important activity: the number of visits and social media reactions to a web site are indirect measures of its influence, and in the case of e-commerce and advertised-supported operations, typically translate into income and profits.
Predictive tasks on the web are not a new phenomenon (see references). This includes, for instance, predicting the number of visits an article will obtain using signals from its content as well as from early visits to the article. Typically, such tasks are done on proprietary data because behavioral data is delicate from the point of view of privacy, but is also a highly sensitive business secret for most large-scale web sites. This has made it difficult to compare and evaluate different approaches.
This predictive challenge will allow for the first time to compare predictive web analytic systems on a shared dataset.