Abstract
Seven things you need to know about Buzzfeed and the latest viral media including listicles, sharing and taking on TV
If you've never heard of Buzzfeed, these randomly collected recent headlines should give you a clue of what to expect:
Launched eight years ago in New York by the Huffington Post cofounder, Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed started as a “viral lab” – an experiment in exploiting social sharing, populist content for a young audience and experimental advertising on social media platforms.
Around 60 per cent of Buzzfeed's 130 million monthly unique users are 18 to 34-year-olds, for whom the Buzzfeed style has become synonymous with the populist web. In the nomenclature of the age, Buzzfeed calls itself a “social news and entertainment company”, and this points to its bigger ambitions. It has more than 400 staff, produces almost as many stories every day and has expanded the much-derided lists into investigative journalism, investing in some heavyweight reporters in politics and foreign affairs.
The Buzzfeed recipe is being imitated to varying degrees of success across the web, with social sites like Upworthy (founded by MoveOn.org Eli Pariser), Now This News (a video news site) and Quartz (business news) among others. For those most comfortable with the journalistic standards and advertising models of established print and broadcast, Buzzfeed is a world apart, just one of a new breed created of and by the internet era. And it already has an audience bigger than the BBC online.
There's no sorcery involved, but a clever use of the site's performance data – who's reading what, where and when – to steer the subjects and publication times of stories. The 400 staff write across news and popular culture, leaving behind many of the conventions of established news and developing conventions of their own.
1. Lists and the efficiency charm of bullet points
It has been difficult to avoid “listicles” in online news, not least because traditional news organisations have felt the need to compete and started spewing out their own lightweight, news-as-bullet-point stories. It's a phenomenon not unfairly attributed to Buzzfeed, but in truth the list format is more a development from the informal writing of blogs, a sophisticated understanding of how search engines work and more than a little appreciation for the time-poor online reader.
Faced with 20 stories of 1,000 words, a reader can go to Buzzfeed for a story condensed into a 400-word list – and with big pictures. That said, the balance of stories is still very much with entertainment over news; at the time of writing, playful takes on David Cameron's cabinet reshuffle and Malala's 17th birthday campaigning in Nigeria are competing with “49 thoughts every sloth has” and “A whole bunch of people thought Steven Spielberg killed a real dinosaur”.
Lists break with established news writing techniques and certainly with those of newspapers. Just as blogging liberated writers (for better or worse) from the inverted pyramid, lists don't require segues or a narrative arc. They might be more efficient for the writer and the online reader, but even accompanying a weightier piece, a list alongside – or panel, if you like – can contextualise the story or the subject.
Social sharing is the lifeblood of Buzzfeed. Where other sites perilously rely on blessings from Google's search results to send readers their way, it is Buzzfeed's readers who make the stories successful. That said, one anti-list tweak of Google's algorithms and Buzzfeed would suffer significantly.
2. Sharing and the power of emotional triggers
Five years ago, online news executives were consumed by the debate about paywalls, agonising over whether to opt for a smaller, paying subscriber base online or leave the site open to the search and sociability of the web. For Buzzfeed and friends, being part of the conversation is essential. Crucially, the site has mastered in its headlines the ability to flick an emotional trigger in its readers – the impulse to share the ridiculousness or the tragedy with friends.
Given the social structures of the web now, a share is only a click away. No surprise then that 75 per cent of Buzzfeed's traffic is generated by social sites. Read “This story of a dog's last day on Earth is beautiful and utterly heartbreaking” and try to resist sending it to someone you know.
Those emotional triggers might be resonant of tabloid techniques, but the tone adopted by Buzzfeed and its contemporaries is less confrontational, more faux familiarity, designed to feel approachable and “ownable”, as if to invite readers to take control of a piece and where they want to send it.
3. Dandelion seeds and colonising the web
For those same news executives, the discussion should now be about the dandelion seed philosophy. It is not enough to optimise every pixel of a story for the web to pull readers into your site. Instead, to colonise news audiences, perhaps content should be thought of as dandelion seeds being scattered on the wind, labelled and crafted just the same, but allowed to form new clusters of audience across the web.
“People don't get that we started as a tech platform, one that's fairly agnostic about the content that it spreads – reported news, branded content – and that the world needs a platform like that because the way people consume media is changing,” Peretti told Wired earlier this year. “That's different from making a magazine and putting it online. It's hard for a magazine to have better content than my Twitter feed.”
In the randomised, unique feeds that most of us can dip into each day on social media, video plays an increasing part; Buzzfeed claims 100 million monthly video views, and the format is a powerful presence on social media. Led by the internet celebrity Ze Frank, Buzzfeed's videos typically peak at the same part of the day as conventional prime-time television.
“Online video is competing with the best TV programming out there,” he told a webinar in late 2013. Sharing can make even a seemingly niche subject reach a large audience. Frank describes different “share statements” or motivations: emotional support or connection, identity-based (so using shared interests or identifiers) and informational content designed to show that the sharer knows or has discovered something.
4. Optimisation and making important stuff engaging
Lesson one in online publishing is in optimising headlines for the web. Rather than rinsing them of any of the magical headline sorcery of the sub-editor, web news demands different expertise; puns don't work and headlines need to be powerful, punchy and literal. From the outset, Buzzfeed and Upworthy have used analytics tools to monitor headlines that appear to be failing, so stories will be pulled back in, headlines rewritten and stories relaunched. Upworthy notoriously will do this dozens of times on a story if it needs to.
Buzzfeed and others have developed sophisticated bespoke tools that give a data dashboard to every story – how many page views, how many views in UK versus the rest of world, how many mobile views, how many shares on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, how many clicks through to other stories on the site, how many clicks in to the site from Google.
The challenge for digital editors it to balance this overwhelming amount of data with a classic instinct for a good story; the data is only as good as its interpretation. And when it comes to serving readers with that mix of entertainment and news, it can be hard to surface the important pieces – the journalism – in an environment so full of the quirky, cool and easy.
“Unless we figure out how to make the important stuff engaging, I don't know that it reaches a broad audience,” said Eli Pariser, founder of Upworthy, at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas in March this year. “News junkies have never had it better, but people who don't seek out content about important stuff, and expect to just have it surfaced in their media environment, may be having that happen less. And to me that's worrisome.”
5. Mobile: thumbs and the dopamine trick
It had become a long-running joke in the tech community that for about 10 years every year was predicted to be “the year of mobile”. For those with vested interests it was worth the wait, thanks to a combination of cheaper components, improved infrastructure and connectivity, and a steadily building consumer appetite for smartphones.
After the launch of the iPhone and a slew of similarly powerful Android devices from 2007, mobiles became the indispensable, always-connected personal mobile computer; Ofcom data for 2013 estimated that 94 per cent of the UK's population owned a mobile phone and 56 per cent of those were internet-connected smartphones. Sales of desktop computers have declined steadily for several years, with technology research firm Gartner predicting that tablets will outsell PCs for the first time in 2014.
Online publishers have been grappling with the mobile challenge for some time. Technically, it means many have invested significantly in apps or “responsive” sites, which automatically resize to fit whichever desktop computer, tablet or mobile is being used to access them. Handheld devices also encourage different behaviour in readers. Scrolling down with a thumb is far easier than clicking, which has seen many sites, notably Facebook and Buzzfeed, develop “infinite scrolling” of their main page. Buzzfeed says 50 per cent of its traffic is from mobile devices.
This cunning piece of compulsive navigation feeds an almost primeval instinct to keep hunting for something interesting, a neurological process in which discovery is rewarded with a shot of dopamine. Mail Online's infamous “sidebar of shame” does the same thing; our brain rewards each tantalising discovery, keeping us stuck to the screen and scrolling.
6. Native advertising and the testimonial of sharing
Advertising too has adapted to the world of social sharing, most notably in the form of “native advertising” which has been broadly derided by the journalism industry. Sponsored content by another name, “native content” has become the currency du jour for many social news sites, trying to exploit the seeming intimacy – and knowledge about the location, age and preferences – of their readers on social media and charging more to brands that can better target the most relevant people.
Advertorial is nothing new, but labelling is often less obvious and described as “powered by”, “in association with” or Buzzfeed's preferred “promoted by” – as in “The 23 most Australian things that ever happened, promoted by Fosters”. Buzzfeed adopted this label earlier this year in an effort to distinguish its sponsored pieces clearly; despite continued scepticism from traditional publishers, native social advertising revenues reached $2.4bn in 2013 in the US alone, according to media research firm BIA Kelsey.
Sharing is a modern day word of mouth testimonial and brands want their product to be part of that conversation. Case studies for Virgin Mobile and Taco Bell show significant “brand lift” – a statement of positivity about purchasing intent. The site is on schedule to run up to 700 similar campaigns in 2014. Upworthy and CollegeHumor use similar tactics, but the New York Times, The Guardian and Forbes have all begun to explore new advertising formats. And as long as advertisers want to spend on native advertising, the trend is only set to continue.
7. Long form
Perversely, the rise of the sharable, disposable news story has also fostered a desire for something more substantial. Not long after Buzzfeed and company settled in the media landscape, and again after at least the trend-setting technology industry had tired of blogging, several longer form journalism projects sprang up, not least high-end minimalist blogging site Medium. More publishing than blogging, Medium set a high standard for writing and cleverly curated its first few years by limiting access to a small pool of strong, high-profile writers. It's a sign of online publishing growing up.
Legacy news sites all too easily get caught up in the idiocy of the online news cycle, where dozens if not hundreds of near-identical stories are published online. The internet should be an opportunity for experimentation, not distraction; experimentation is the only way to understand the potential of the web. That liberation from a fixed and outdated business model has been key to Buzzfeed's success.
But as the honeymoon for viral content wears off, the focus is once more shifting to originality, to brave and powerful reporting that takes hard work and persistence to pull off. Publishers cannot afford to ignore the vast potential of audience or open conversations, of crowdsourcing and of audience insight that web publishing brings, but in the human craft of pushing, building and finalising a story, the established news organisations hold the ace.