NDN, the unseen power behind many of the videos on newspaper websites, says data is the oil fuelling the future of the business.

finally there’s enough information,” COO Eric Orme tells Beet.TV. “What really needs to happen… we have to be able to give back tons of data to these guys (our customers) to help them understand what are people watching, why is it doing well.”

Atlanta-based NDN is a middleman service that owns video rights and sells advertising against the clips it offers for free carriage to news partners in return for a share of ad sales revenue. It has quietly become the number-four US video content property by viewer size, according to comScore.

“We’ve got about 4,500 publishers, we’re reaching about 90% of the US audience. We just hired a chief data scientist,” Orme adds. Chris Smith joined NDN after stints at Chilli, SCIenergy and the Rubicon Project.

Orme was interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.