Over the past couple of decades, this war for eyeballs has been fought across an ever-expanding territory. With the advent of the modern web, online publications and blogs competed to dominate your laptop screen. But with the rise of mobile, the battleground has become infinite. No matter where you are or what you’re doing—eating, drinking, watching a movie—the news has access to you. Stories roll in on push notifications and social media streams in a nonstop look-at-me barrage, all of them lighting up the same small screen. There is only one true channel now, and it’s probably in your pocket (or hand) at this very moment.
What’s more, everyone has access to it. Everyone can program it. The media has been so completely flattened and democratized that your little sister can use the same distribution methods as the world’s most powerful publishers. She has instant access to you—potentially to everyone—and she doesn’t need to invest in broadcast towers or a printing press, satellites or coaxial cable. Neither does anyone else. That little vibration in your pocket could mean that we are bombing Iraq again or that a massive typhoon is headed for the Gulf of Thailand or that your father has tagged a photo of you on Facebook. (Nice Boy Scouts uniform.) Even Hearst never had to compete with corgi videos.
But the thing is, the media isn’t just competing with your little sister—it’s co-opting her, using her as a vector to spread its content. She is the new delivery mechanism. We don’t learn about the world from The New York Times, we learn about it from the Times stories that our family and friends share or that show up as push notifications four minutes before one from The Guardian does. Thirty percent of American adults get news from Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center, and more than half of Americans got news from a smartphone within the past week, according to the American Press Institute. And these metrics are just going up, up, up. The question for news publishers is no longer how to draw an audience to their sites, it’s how to implant themselves into their audience’s lives.
These dynamics have unleashed a new breed of media company that is racing to master these cutting-edge distribution systems. Much as Hearst, Henry Luce, and Ted Turner figured out how to amass huge audiences using newspapers, magazines, and television, the latest would-be kingpins are learning what kinds of stories resonate with readers on phones and Facebook. Instead of hiring newsies to scream at you in the streets, they are enlisting social media experts to scream at you on Twitter. Instead of investing in satellite trucks or paying for prime placement at the corner newsstand, they are reverse-engineering Facebook’s algorithm to ensure their stories dominate your News Feed. (...)
The vibe at BuzzFeed headquarters in lower Manhattan is young and antiseptic. Everything looks too brand-new. The walls are white. Great Big Screens are mounted everywhere. Where the data team sits they show charts and numbers. And at each of the editors’ desks, dashboards display the ebb and flow of its stories’ popularity on BuzzFeed itself as well as across social media. And those numbers are moving relentlessly, inevitably, always and forever up.
BuzzFeed is best known for its lists and quizzes— many of which are gauche little trifles designed to shock, like “29 Things Everyone With a Vagina Definitely Should Know”—or those too-cute compilations of cat pictures and corgi GIFs. But over the years it has muscled into other genres: breaking and investigative news, service-oriented lifestyle stories, long-form narrative, and video. It’s growing like a well-fed toddler, building out bureaus both domestically and internationally, and has launched a motion picture studio in Los Angeles. It’s also creating a new division, BFF, that will make content that lives only in the apps where kids are, like Vine and Snapchat and Imgur. Noted VC firm Andreessen Horowitz just invested $50 million in the company, giving it a reported valuation of $850 million, which it is using to extend its reach even farther. The much larger New York Times Company is worth $1.9 billion. But with profits declining, the Times is slashing its workforce yet again, while BuzzFeed is hiring. Dear God, yes, it’s hiring!
“BuzzFeed News has the potential to become the leading news source for a generation of readers who will never subscribe to a print newspaper or watch a cable news show,” explains the company’s CEO, Jonah Peretti. It’s not hard to see BuzzFeed as the next great media empire, something like Time Warner was in its prime, publishing news, entertainment, and even games. But unlike Time Warner, its growth doesn’t come from lavish ad campaigns or newsstand placement but from social media. Its stories—be they quizzes, listicles, or investigative news—are engineered to come to you. They exist as free-floating agents, cruising along as links in social media streams and finding readers via shares and retweets and email forwards and pins. To do that effectively, BuzzFeed’s staff has to understand why people share things. They have to understand what makes a story go viral and then try to apply that understanding to all sorts of media.
What’s more, everyone has access to it. Everyone can program it. The media has been so completely flattened and democratized that your little sister can use the same distribution methods as the world’s most powerful publishers. She has instant access to you—potentially to everyone—and she doesn’t need to invest in broadcast towers or a printing press, satellites or coaxial cable. Neither does anyone else. That little vibration in your pocket could mean that we are bombing Iraq again or that a massive typhoon is headed for the Gulf of Thailand or that your father has tagged a photo of you on Facebook. (Nice Boy Scouts uniform.) Even Hearst never had to compete with corgi videos.But the thing is, the media isn’t just competing with your little sister—it’s co-opting her, using her as a vector to spread its content. She is the new delivery mechanism. We don’t learn about the world from The New York Times, we learn about it from the Times stories that our family and friends share or that show up as push notifications four minutes before one from The Guardian does. Thirty percent of American adults get news from Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center, and more than half of Americans got news from a smartphone within the past week, according to the American Press Institute. And these metrics are just going up, up, up. The question for news publishers is no longer how to draw an audience to their sites, it’s how to implant themselves into their audience’s lives.
These dynamics have unleashed a new breed of media company that is racing to master these cutting-edge distribution systems. Much as Hearst, Henry Luce, and Ted Turner figured out how to amass huge audiences using newspapers, magazines, and television, the latest would-be kingpins are learning what kinds of stories resonate with readers on phones and Facebook. Instead of hiring newsies to scream at you in the streets, they are enlisting social media experts to scream at you on Twitter. Instead of investing in satellite trucks or paying for prime placement at the corner newsstand, they are reverse-engineering Facebook’s algorithm to ensure their stories dominate your News Feed. (...)
The vibe at BuzzFeed headquarters in lower Manhattan is young and antiseptic. Everything looks too brand-new. The walls are white. Great Big Screens are mounted everywhere. Where the data team sits they show charts and numbers. And at each of the editors’ desks, dashboards display the ebb and flow of its stories’ popularity on BuzzFeed itself as well as across social media. And those numbers are moving relentlessly, inevitably, always and forever up.
BuzzFeed is best known for its lists and quizzes— many of which are gauche little trifles designed to shock, like “29 Things Everyone With a Vagina Definitely Should Know”—or those too-cute compilations of cat pictures and corgi GIFs. But over the years it has muscled into other genres: breaking and investigative news, service-oriented lifestyle stories, long-form narrative, and video. It’s growing like a well-fed toddler, building out bureaus both domestically and internationally, and has launched a motion picture studio in Los Angeles. It’s also creating a new division, BFF, that will make content that lives only in the apps where kids are, like Vine and Snapchat and Imgur. Noted VC firm Andreessen Horowitz just invested $50 million in the company, giving it a reported valuation of $850 million, which it is using to extend its reach even farther. The much larger New York Times Company is worth $1.9 billion. But with profits declining, the Times is slashing its workforce yet again, while BuzzFeed is hiring. Dear God, yes, it’s hiring!
“BuzzFeed News has the potential to become the leading news source for a generation of readers who will never subscribe to a print newspaper or watch a cable news show,” explains the company’s CEO, Jonah Peretti. It’s not hard to see BuzzFeed as the next great media empire, something like Time Warner was in its prime, publishing news, entertainment, and even games. But unlike Time Warner, its growth doesn’t come from lavish ad campaigns or newsstand placement but from social media. Its stories—be they quizzes, listicles, or investigative news—are engineered to come to you. They exist as free-floating agents, cruising along as links in social media streams and finding readers via shares and retweets and email forwards and pins. To do that effectively, BuzzFeed’s staff has to understand why people share things. They have to understand what makes a story go viral and then try to apply that understanding to all sorts of media.
by Mat Honan, Wired | Read more:
Image: National Venture Capital Associastion, First Look Meida, Circa, Atavist
