- 05.08.13 - Wired
Evan Williams, founder of the new publishing platform Medium. Photo: Andrew White/Wired
NEW YORK CITY — Personalization is as much a buzzword nowadays as disruption, big data, or the cloud. It might also be part of the solution to pull the publishing industry out of the downward revenue spiral it’s been stuck in for years.
“On social media, the reader is the one that provides the lede,” said BuzzFeed CEO and Founder Jonah Peretti during a talk about how all media is (or should be) going social today during the fifth annual Wired Business Conference in New York City Tuesday. “We think that sharing is the highest bar of quality, more than a click, more than a pageview.”
New media lets readers interject their opinions, which can enrich stories and promote discussion. It mirrors the back-and-forth we enjoy when we sit down to coffee or a drink with a friend to discuss personal stories or politics. News media should complement that. Peretti gave the example of a recent BuzzFeed post of a series of photographs with teens holding signs detailing why they didn’t support marriage equality. The ‘story’ didn’t contain any text, he said, which allowed each person to relay a different message depending on her stance on the issue.
Likewise, on Evan Williams’ newly launched publishing platform, Medium, a big focus is on sharing and collaboration. Articles are arranged by themes so that readers can contribute and gravitate toward content that fits their likes. The comments are set up to aid in that too. They’re not at the end of the piece, but sprinkled throughout, paragraph by paragraph. The aim is to foster dynamic discussions around what you’re interested in.
“The crowd can actually improve the quality of the content,” says Williams, who also co-founded microblogging site Twitter. “Our goal is to create a better place to read and write.”
Of course, both BuzzFeed and Medium are businesses that need to make money. At Medium, the business model is still unclear. It recently acquired long-form science journalism startup Matter, which has a subscription or pay-per-article model. For BuzzFeed making money means having sponsored content, a strategy that has been criticized by some because these advertorials could be mistaken for news items by readers. But Peretti stresses, he’s only looking to enhance the user experience.
“If you looked at Vogue or the Superbowl and stripped the ads, it would be a worse experience,” he said. “Why isn’t there something like that for the web? … We set up a system where brands can share content on the site.”
It won’t likely be happening at the New York Times says Executive Editor Jill Abramson. The Times sells trust, that’s at the core of its business model, Abramson says. And what Peretti and BuzzFeed are experimenting with could run afoul of that. “You should know it’s advertising, there should not be purposeful confusion,” Abramson says. “Native advertising seems to be for the conference set. It’s the buzzword for 2013.”
But it doesn’t all have to be a advertising bait-and-switch. When users share, they drop hints about their preferences, which companies can use to target them with ads, so now it’s up to more traditional news outlets to catch up to the personalized advertising trend that’s working well for sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter or to adopt revenue strategies that harness the powers of their crowds by selling them items — stories, podcasts, pictures, videos — they’re likely to keep buying again and again.
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