John Niedermeyer - Buzzfeed

Hi. That was a very nice introduction. Thank you. Makes me sound very old, but that's okay. First of all, thank you guys for inviting me here. I've been so inspired by all the speakers in the program the last day or so, and I'm looking forward to everything today. You'll notice in your program the title of my talk is simply BuzzFeed. That was sort of a placeholder that I never quite filled in, but I am here to talk about BuzzFeed and to talk about how media consumption is shifting. And how we as designers and creators can adapt to these realities and help find and grow new audiences. So first, let's start off with a question. Show of hands, how many of you guys check out the homepage of a news site on a daily basis? Wow. How many of you use the news app on your smartphone every day? That's pretty good. So if you're a publisher, you care a lot about those people that raise their hand. And I'm one of those people, too. But they are your most loyal customers. They're the ones that turn to you when news is breaking. They look to you for authority, and they really go out of their way to seek you out. But that committed audience is getting smaller. It's getting older. And when you couple it with the economics of online advertising, which is very diminishing returns, it's harder and harder to make money off of them. These were the good old days. Publishers put a paper out every day, and everybody read the same thing. In the same way, the same time. So when the internet rolled around, these traditional print outlets saw the web as just another medium for the same content in the same format. So there were many 1,000-word stories, no matter what. You published once a day. And on the web, maybe you put a medium-sized photo at the top for a little visual pop. But this was a strategy that didn't fully appreciate the advantages of digital in the web and later apps, what they offer. So what are the digital advantages? First, things on the internet can be updated more than once a day, which is crazy. In the early days, working for publishers, it was sometimes an argument you had to make. But it makes it possible to cover a breaking news event as they unfold and get people information quickly. You can just pull out your phone and follow along with a live event. The second advantage, it's free for users. That's great. The cost of publishing on the internet is basically free. There are no gatekeepers anymore. When I was growing up in the 80s, we had three or four TV stations. We had a local paper. Maybe there were a handful of national newspapers and magazines, and that was it. But since then, there's been an explosion of sources online, some quality, some not. But these legacy news brands no longer have a monopoly. Digital is also global. You can reach millions of people around the world, which is something my local paper growing up in Buffalo, New York, could never hope to do. And it's also social, obviously very important to BuzzFeed. It's personal. I can find things that my friends like, have a conversation with them, with the publisher not even part of that conversation. So publishers and platforms that can embrace and enable that relationship between your friends and family are going to attract more and more people. But there are also challenges. So unless you're a news geek like me, you don't have the New York Times homepage open in a tab on your desktop. You're not compulsively refreshing throughout the day to see how things are changing and what's new. You've got a life. And you've also got a phone in your pocket that makes it a lot easier to discover and consume stuff. So as a publisher, you no longer own that one-to-one relationship that we did in the days of newspapers. And then you've got these platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. That make it more convenient and engaging than any one individual publisher can do on their own. So, I mean, like you, I'm more likely to tap on something my friends post on one of these social platforms. And more likely to engage with it, like it, share it, you know, have a conversation around it, than just going to the New York Times or going to the Guardian. This is also a challenge. It's free for publishers. That's a challenge compared to print rates. Online advertising is worth only a fraction of what it was long ago. So if publishers rely on ads to keep the lights on, they have to aggressively grow that audience. They've got to get bigger. And that means reaching younger, more global, and diverse demographic. The other option, which we tried at the New York Times, is a subscription model. And what happens there is your most loyal users are willing to pay. And while that does generate real money, and it helps retain those hardcore users, it doesn't really scale. Because the abundance of free news out there, for most people, free is good enough. It's also concise. A newspaper like the Times, where I worked for almost nine years, had more than 150 years practice writing, editing, presenting the news in very similar format. And they take this quite seriously. They see it as sort of a first draft of history. So there's a very formal tone. And again, there's a lot of these things. There's a lot of these thousand-word articles, whether or not that's actually the best vehicle for telling a story. So again, as they started publishing pieces online, basically the thinking was, well, what works in print will work online. We'll just do it first for print, and then the kids will put it up on the Internet. Sounds great, right? But no. If I'm on my phone, why would I want to wade through all of that just to get a piece of information that I'm looking for? So what you started to see maybe 15 years ago, 10 years ago, at least in the States, was digital-only blogs popped up like Huffington Post, Gawker. And they would just read the long articles and then summarize them in a very conversational tone, just tell you what you need to know, and put it out there. And you could pull out your phone, read, understand, and then move on. So that was a challenge. It's also personal. Again, a publisher is not going to have that bond with readers that they already have with their friends and family. So as a result, again, I'm more likely to seek out and engage with stories that connect with my identity or stories that my friends and family share. So in the print age, everybody got the same package in the same form. It wasn't tailored to me as this particular identity or you as that particular identity. So again, I think publishers need to find a way to meaningfully tap into those relationships and encourage it. Still with me? I know this is a design conference, and you're probably expecting not to have media criticism class here. But I do believe that design is not some artistic endeavor. I don't really have an artistic bone in my body. As designers, we have to apply our creativity and our smarts to problems and provide solutions. So for me, understanding the challenges and opportunities up front is very important when I try anything. So I'm going to walk you through some projects that, to various degrees of success or failure, try to embrace this new paradigm. And I should say up front, it's going to be very U.S.-centric because I'm American, but there's no reason not to think that the same forces at work that I've seen throughout my career aren't in play all over the world. First, who am I? It was a lovely introduction, but I would just say I'm a designer. I live, I work in New York. Brooklyn. I love it. Been there almost, well, a little over nine years. Once I get to 10, that means I'll be a real New Yorker. That's how they measure you. And again, most of that time was spent working for the New York Times in a variety of roles. I was both on the product side, working on section redesigns and apps and that kind of thing. And then the last four or so years, I was down in the newsroom working on daily news cycle stuff. So I just want to go back in time really quickly and rush through some of the earlier, like experiments that we were trying to think through and try to play some of these things to sort of start to shift the culture of the place from traditional print mindset to digital. And the first one is just this cute little app. First project, it's probably five or six years ago. It's an iOS app called The Scoop. Very journalistic branding there. But it was a going out guide to New York. Had restaurant recommendations, event listings, other kinds of activities, things to do. And you could get a lot of that content every day in the paper if you read it every day and you wanted to carry around all these print papers in your bag. When you needed to find a place to go, you could just pull out a... Yeah, that's not going to work. So what we wanted to do was give you something in your pocket that would help you find things to do and really try and deconstruct those typical newspaper reviews and articles and sort of rearrange the parts. And do something more compelling for your phone. So we took the same critics and reporters and we sort of tasked them with curating lists, write short blurbs, you know, like kind of Twitter length you can see, like blurbs that just kind of give you a sense of the place. We could include service-y things like maps, directions, phone numbers, all that kind of good stuff that you might need. And it showcased beautiful photography. The Times takes this beautiful photography and only a small bit of it finds its way on the news. It's not online or in print. So we had access to a lot of that. And, you know, you could tap and swipe in. And it sort of took advantage of all the bells and whistles that native platforms offered. And, of course, we did link to the review. It's there. You can go and read it. And it's, you know, a thousand words or whatever. But it wasn't sort of like core to consuming and using the app. It was just sort of like an extra thing. We also added social integration with Facebook Open Graph because that's what you do. We did in 2011. Everybody rushed to get, you know, OG tags into their apps and pages. But we thought of it as a way to really try and enable, again, that friend-to-friend social connection. So maybe you're on Facebook and you see your friend likes ABC Kitchen and you'd start up a conversation and maybe go to dinner. That was the thinking. It was a little naive, but that was our hope. So this was very early days. But I want to talk a little bit about the lessons that I learned from this, what I learned. First, I thought it was a great experiment for the times to try to embrace some of these opportunities of digital distribution and these amazing devices that are in our pockets. The format was tailored to the device, which was new. It wasn't a newspaper article just pasted online or whatever. And it was written very concisely. And the presentation was intuitive. I really love this app. I used it a lot. But there are other lessons. And one is that it didn't really scale. And there's many reasons for that. First of all, it wasn't comprehensive. It was, by design, a curated list of a small amount of great things you should want to do. But if you're competing with apps like Foursquare, which I love, Yelp, TripAdvisor, all those kinds of things that you find through search and Google, if you don't have the comprehensive thing, then that's another barrier of entry for people to want to seek you out. The other thing is it wasn't live. We only updated the app with new lists or updates to those lists every couple of months. We would try to run down these critics and reporters and be like, you've got to update this group. It just wasn't core to their daily job. They had to put out polished reviews and all that. And it wasn't central to our daily work. This was sort of a side project we were playing around with. So I think a lot of people found it useful. And we got lots of great feedback and email and love, but the numbers just really weren't there because we weren't giving them reasons to come back. And the other thing is distribution of it was still centralized. You had to be, again, a very committed person to first come to the New York Times, see the ad, or understand that, ooh, there's an app I can get. Download the app, and it was iOS only. And then you had to remember when you were walking around to launch it. So that's a lot of... friction in order to engage with it. So we tried adding social layers. We tried to build out a web view that you could open on Android phones or on your desktop. But the barrier to entry was still too high. Again, if you Google, give me the best NYC restaurants, you'll get a nice result that's probably good enough. It's also labor intensive. It's kind of expensive. We were a small team. It's one designer, one product lead, an editor. We had a tutorial lead who tried to wrangle people to write content. And a few developers. But it was still a big investment. And again, although I think it was a good experiment, at least internally, at trying to craft something that could potentially reach bigger audiences, ultimately because it was New York City and for all these other reasons, it was just too narrow. It was good to learn. A few years later, they would sort of double down and expand on this experiment. My colleagues worked on this great app, NYT Now, which is now no longer with us. But instead of listings, the goal here was to really tackle the day's best news, but in a much less formal, much more open way. It was very nicely tailored to your phone. It wasn't 100 articles a day. It was like 10, 15. And it was very live. And they even, rather than waiting around for the New York Times to rewrite some story, if Reuters or some other news agency, had a great piece, they just linked off to it. And that was revolutionary to have that sort of in the flow of things. And it was free. You still had to know to download it. You still had to bring it out. So there were a lot of challenges there. But it was another huge step forward. Yeah, so they shut down that app recently. But I think they took a lot of those lessons, and they are starting to fold it into the core New York Times app that has the 100 articles a day or whatever. And I think as a result, that app is now far more engaging and compelling. It's a great experience because of these experiments. So, still back in the time machine. This is 2009. It was a section redesign we did for the Opinion section, op-ed section of the New York Times online. I'm proud that this was the first time we brought the branded web fonts to NYTimes.com with the help of Typekit. It was very exciting. But these template layouts sought to better showcase some of the amazing illustration and art direction that was in print every day and just was not getting used very well online. And just to bring a more refined look to the section homepage. But it's just kind of a coat of paint. We added some little UI devices that made it harder, or sorry, harder, easier to find more of your favorite columnists or whatever. But ultimately, it's not reaching a new audience. People still have to go here. It has to be part of their daily habit. This isn't going to get millennials excited, right? We were still thinking of this kind of thing as a destination page. Like, oh, they're going to want to come here every day and check back as we update it. But you start to look at analytics, and obviously pretty quickly we realized most people come in to article pages. And we didn't even touch these in the redesign. So they'd end up here, whatever the mobile web version was. Maybe they come in from Twitter or Facebook. They see this. Maybe they read. Maybe they don't. And they hit their back button and they're gone. So we're starting to realize that this is probably the layer that needed some more attention and where we could really elevate what we did. I mean, that looks really boring. You can read it. It's great. But there's just so much more potential there. So this is another early experiment. Sorry, it's a little blurry. I had to pull it out of the vault. This is a project for a magazine story, a very long package of articles about food, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, other people writing really interesting things. And in the magazine especially, there's always these beautiful images. And they get all the cool fonts, and they can do all these amazing layouts. And then we put it on the web, and there's Georgia and Ariel. So we wanted to get in on this action and try to elevate this article level. But it really was just visual design, flair, visuals. I got a little fancy with the graphics. I got a little fancy with the grid there and offsetting columns and stuff. So it brought a lot of those cues from the magazine. But it wasn't very well optimized for performance, which I can tell you why. The way we did this, because the normal article template is just spit out of the CMS, and the normal Georgia, we thought it would be a great idea to take some JavaScript and when the page loads, just dump that and then reconstruct the page. So, yeah, it wasn't very optimized for performance or your phone. But, hey, it was hacky, and it got out the door. And I think we learned a lot from this. We got a lot of frantic calls from the technology leadership, though, because when they realized what the hell we were doing, they were like, You can't do that. And I'm like, I did. But it really proved that we could experiment with format at a story level, however minor here. Like, yes, it's still the same text. We didn't do anything to really shape that. But we could get in the mix there a little bit. And we did a lot of this. We could take important stories like this one about a homeless family in Brooklyn and elevate them through design. This was just a little prototype I made in Keynote or something and worked with a developer on. There's this lovely 30,000-word story about a deadly avalanche, which we were able to do some really lovely videos. My colleague, Jackie Mint, spent a lot of time playing around with this. And our friends in the graphics department got real weird and crazy 3D with trying to really take you there and show you where these mountain passes were and where the avalanche happened. At least here, you're adding something that you can't get in print. Sure, you can have a static version of that in print, but this really at least gave you something more than just visual design. But imagine reading 30,000 words on your phone, right? You lose your internet connection and it refreshes and you're like, Where did I leave off? So, you know, it was clear. I think at that point that coming in at the end of the process, when you have a print article that looks lovely and they're like, Here you go, digital kids, make it cool. We needed to get involved earlier in the conception process and get really dirty with the editors and really try to experiment before it's like a baked thing. So this isn't like a hugely visual, amazing thing here, this article, but just some background. You guys know what the Affordable Care Act is, right? The Affordable Care Act is in the United States. We don't have universal available healthcare, so most people get their care from employers and there's some patchwork programs for the poor. It's been a big political issue back and forth for the parties in the States for 60, 70, 80 years. But one thing Obama proposed early in his presidency was to try to pass something that could get at making it easier for people to get healthcare. So that went into effect, I don't know, 2013, something like that. And a year later, we wanted to do sort of a roundup, like how is it going? You'd see things on social media or on cable news that would say, Oh, it's a big failure, it's not working. This is liberal Democrats, blah, blah, blah. And then you'd have other people that were like, Obama can do no wrong. So really what we wanted to do was, I mean, originally it was conceived as, I don't know, eight or ten print articles sort of looking at the facts and trying to explain whether or not it was working. But again, if we had just followed that old playbook, posting several 1,000-word articles on the web and in an app, it would be very hard for readers to follow along from one. Maybe they would go to one or two and then they would just bail. So it's really not the same as reading a newspaper. So what we tried to do instead was bundle the whole project in one concise package and for the first time really focused entirely on the mobile interface. Didn't worry about desktop at all. So you see a very direct headline. I wish the headline said, Is Obamacare Working? But we had a long argument with the copy desk about standards and how that's not what the Times calls it. But that would have been a better SEO or people would have recognized that better. But you get a headline with a great prompt, a little short introduction, and then the frame of this thing is asking questions. Even before tapping in, you even get an answer. So has the percentage of uninsured people been reduced? This is a question people had. And right there, before you even tap in, before you read any more, it says, Yeah. The number of uninsured has fallen significantly. Again, not the most fun interface, but it was very casual by time standards. So this is it. It doesn't look like an article. It's just a mobile web page. Concise bullet points. Tap in. And we've even got helpful little graphs. And it's just very concise bullets. And if you want to go into the full article that did appear in print, it's there. It's many layers down. I doubt many people got down there. But again, it wasn't critical to understanding the piece and getting what you needed to get out of it, which was answers. So you could throw this on Twitter or Facebook. Come in. Very Ajax-y, refresh-y. There's not lots of URLs. There's just one URL. And I think it worked really well. And again, desktop. Same thing. We didn't even worry about it. We didn't try to do some fancy thing for desktop. We're like, You know what? This is our frame. We're mobile first. We're going to do it. So this is what you saw on the desktop. So I'm talking a lot about The Times. I know this is supposed to be about BuzzFeed. Love The Times. Love BuzzFeed. So they continue to do an amazing job every day with visually driven journalism, mobile experiences. They've come a long way. I felt like I helped in the early days get things moving there, but they are running away with it now. Again, returning to our lessons frame, what did we learn? I learned anyway as a visual designer and lover of these things. Nobody loves bespoke typography and beautiful imagery more than me. But once we applied our skills earlier into a story conception, we started to really unlock the promise of the digital potential. And this is something that I always was trying to stress to people. It took a lot of persuading to convince editors to approach things differently. But the simple framing of asking questions and answering them turned out to be a really great constraint. It enabled them to write very directly in clear language. More of a conversational tone, not so formal. And it felt more personal. It felt more relatable. And again, it was a lot more easy to consume on your phone and through social media. So again, I love my years at The Times, especially the last few in the newsroom. But there was something very interesting to me about a company like BuzzFeed. Not total opposite. I mean, it still has quality news and that kind of stuff. That kind of thing. But it is a very different culture. It was digital only. There was no old way of doing things. And they seemed to be wholeheartedly embracing new platforms, new formats, and doing fun stuff alongside serious news. So about a year and a half ago, I joined up. And I manage a small team of product designers, a subset of these guys. This is the whole design team. And I was struck by how liberating it felt. Like just walking around the building. The culture is much younger. It's much more diverse. There's such an emphasis on that even in the tech org to reach out to all communities and bring people in. And it's just a lot of fun. Unlike The Times at times where it felt like we had to really obsess about the one right thing and get it out and not make any mistakes because we'll be attacked. We had this weight of history or whatever on us. At BuzzFeed, experimentation is at the heart of everything we do. So as a creator, you can make ten posts and we'll put them out there. And if one goes viral, that's great. And what we want to do in addition to experimenting is learn from that. So study that. Why did it work? Understand it. And then figure out a way to repeat that frame. So we've produced a lot of these fun listicles and videos. Videos are becoming increasingly important. So yeah. 16 things you'll only understand if you think blue cheese is fucking gross. I like blue cheese. I'm from Buffalo. We like blue cheese there. But there's cute animal content. This is actually social news. So one of our editors found these pigs on Instagram and have sort of made them famous now. And again, I'm showing these all within the context of the Facebook browser. Right? So for most people, that is how they experience BuzzFeed. Entirely within the context of their friends and family on Facebook. Maybe they follow BuzzFeed. That's great. But we feel like that's okay. If you go back to what I said earlier, you no longer have that push relationship between publisher and reader or viewer. You're not going to have a stronger bond than readers have with their friends. Right? I keep saying that. So what follows from that is to reach new people that you already don't reach. You need to find a way to engage them in their lives, in the apps they're already using, and focus on what they care about. For instance, on the right here, focusing on stories that connect with people's identity. On the right was a video. I wish I could have captured the video. But it's a woman talking about being queer in a sorority. Sorority is sort of, I don't know if you know, do you have sororities over here? It's like a college club or whatever. I think of it as kind of conservative. So it's like an interesting frame. And it appeals to an audience. So you can build communities around those frames. And again, reach new people. Which is the goal. We also can tell serious news stories in between the fun. This is obviously near and dear to my heart. On the left, we've got a video about women riding bikes as a form of protest in Iran. In the middle, Facebook is censoring Facebook accounts. Facebook accounts of Palestinian journalists. And on the right, you have really moving images of a protest in North Carolina. I don't know why these are all protest related. But it was the same day, the same news day on Facebook when I took these screenshots. They're just in your feed. So come to BuzzFeed for the cat pics and the lulls. And every once in a while, you're going to get important information. And I think that builds a trust. That helps build the brand. So that's some ways that we think about what we make, how we make. And again, if we truly embrace that idea that to reach more people in the apps and networks that they use every day. It frees us up to take advantage of the features of those particular platforms. In case you can create, sorry, in fact you can create content specifically for platforms. Say for Instagram. It's like totally different paradigm than a Snapchat platform. So on Instagram, you know, we have a bunch of amazing illustrators on staff. Like we don't use freelancers. We hire these amazing illustrators, comic book makers. And have them make these like very bite-sized things. Like you couldn't put this on an article page and say go to BuzzFeed. It's just like one, you know, bite-sized meme-y thing that makes you laugh. And you know, it's in between pictures of your kids or your friends partying or whatever. can do meme-y funny things. Like this is a screenshot of a tweet. So tragic. Makes me laugh. And my favorite, because I'm a huge Harry Potter fan still. This one basically tricks you. It uses the UI to trick you into liking the photo. It's like, oh, yeah, like double tap and you're going to get something. But like double tap and Instagram will heart and make you like it. So you can see 189,000 likes. But then like, yeah, that might be annoying. But then we're like, oh, yeah, comment below. So it's like an invitation to like vent or talk below. And it's like a way to engage people on very bite-sized pieces of content. Ah, another Snapchat. How many of you guys use Snapchat on a daily basis? Not on a daily basis? Are you hooked? You guys like it? You get it? It's an incredible playground for experience. I know we're like a brand and it's, you know, maybe it's not cool that brands are on Snapchat. But you can do a lot of things. You can make traditional sort of like list posts. You know, this is like just like any other thing. You can use motion and sound. You can make quizzes on pizza backgrounds. And this takes advantage of Snapchat's like tap to snap. So like you just wait. I'm a Capricorn so I'm not going to wait until it gets to the end here. But like you can get to Pisces and hit tap and then snap that out to your network. And it's like just playing around with like the paradigm in Snapchat. I mean, there is no, I don't think there's any quiz format in Snapchat. But our editors were like clever enough to like take that BuzzFeed idea and make it work within the context of this offsite platform. It seems to be a pizza meme this week. There was a lot of pizza content. But if you guys don't follow BuzzFeed stories, you should. It's really, really fun. So what about live? I mentioned live earlier. We're not publishing one newspaper a day or one magazine a month. This is the Internet. So what kinds of things does BuzzFeed do to connect with its audience in real time? I mean, news is a good way, right? And the news team started doing something really interesting with Twitter. There's a fast-moving breaking situation. Think of like Charlie Hebdo attacks or something like that where you don't quite know what's going on. And there's little bits of information coming out. Sure, you could tweet out, hey, here's our live blog with updates. Come to BuzzFeed.com. And like you're in Facebook and you're like, nope. Or you're in Twitter. So that's a strategy. But like again, like how many people are going to really go through that? Probably just your hardcore audience. So they sort of like got into this idea of these bundled at replies. This is like probably how Twitter intended this. You know, these are two friends of mine from San Francisco talking about dog stuff. But they're sort of out of the, like the reply is out of the chronology. But like the app is smart enough to kind of like know that, oh, you're at replying her and you're answering her. So like let's show that to users together so that they can like more easily like follow the thread. So they take ideas like this and they're like, oh, we can do that with ourselves. So, you know, it's like the death of former is the death of the past. So, you know, like the Israeli leader Shimon Peres, you can at reply a string of updates and take advantage of all these like cards and images. And, you know, once you get to like a few, three, four, five, it starts to roll up. So it only shows like the original one and the last one. And it just, the platform takes care of itself. So it's like a very, very cheap way to experiment because you don't have to design or build anything. It's just making smart use of existing platform features. And we've been partnering with Facebook on Facebook live streams. I think one of the first ones was we had an interview with President Obama in the White House. It kind of crapped out so we had to switch over to YouTube. But we've also had a lot of like actors and musicians stop by our office. I get to see like B-list, C-list kind of performers. But it's really fun. It's really fun. You walk down to your desk and there's someone like Shaggy performing. But on the first day of Facebook live, launch day, something amazing happened. It seemed totally random, I think. Caught a lot of people off guard. And maybe not what Facebook had in mind for their product. But did any of you guys see this? Come on. Is there a sound? No? Wah, wah. We got more than 800,000 people to simultaneously watch these two Buzzfeed employees stretch rubber bands around a watermelon for 45 minutes. Everyone waiting for like the watermelon to explode, right? And like it was excruciating and annoying and like you could not look away. You're like when is it going to happen? And again, 45 minutes later. We were waiting too. Like we were all like standing there with our phones. Wave for me. Hold on. Is this going to play? Oh, here. And you could tell these, they're like, oh, God, I don't want to do it. I want to. The sound is really nice. I wish the sound, I mean, I didn't capture the sound. But it's really hilarious. What's going to happen? She's like really, oof. Just building this anticipation in this audience. And like this is the kind of thing you're like, yo, you got to check this out. Take your phone out. Like go on Facebook. So satisfying, isn't it? So yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a stunt. But I don't think it's as stupid as people might think. You know, when we're presented with new platforms for expressing our ideas, we dive in and head first and experiment and see. Like again, is this what Facebook wanted the headline to be on? On launch day? I don't know. But we made some press. And I love Jack Schaefer on the right here. He was replying to some criticism in the New York Times. Media columnist was like, ooh, is this the future of journalism? And like he came back with like, yo, your paper is like a long history of writing about cats. So like we're going to be fine. Like calm down. It's not the end of the world. Anyway, that's a look at how we play with format, tone, framing, that kind of thing. How BuzzFeed is BuzzFeed. I like to ask again, like, you know, what did we learn through all this experimentation? Well, we learned how important it is to try things out, see what works. Throw a million ideas against the wall. Measure them. Watch them. You know, depending on the platform or the kind of content, whether it's a video or a post or a snap, you know, you might look at share rates. You might look at content views. Different platforms mean different things. But like once you have some metrics and everybody is like playing by this sort of analytic learning game, you can find out what works best and see what resonates best and make more of that stuff. Again, make things people want to share. If our goal is to find and grow new audiences and harness the advantages of social media, then we have to make things people want to share. Okay. Does it necessarily mean clickbait headlines? Because I think people are smart and they catch on to that strategy pretty quickly. I think even Facebook and Google might penalize you for using those tactics. Because you don't want to get a reputation for being inauthentic and not credible because who's going to share that garbage headline? So, we just try to focus on making enjoyable and informative stuff. Take it from there. Make it personal. Again, identify communities like LGBT or kids that grew up in the 90s with bad music and make engaging stuff for them. This is where, again, having a really diverse young staff can help generate a range of good ideas. I did really bad on this test despite being a very big 90s music fan. But we also employ a personal tone for news coverage. Instead of having to scroll through headlines and reading headlines, we can just kind of quickly catch you up. Because we know you're not pulling that app out every ten minutes. You're going to pull it out in the morning. You're going to pull it out at lunch or when you're in the elevator. So, giving you a little catch up at the top that updates throughout the day is good. And sprinkling in some emoji for texture is also good. I love when news notifications come through and they have emojis in them. It's so cool. Duh. Go where users already are. Again, earlier in my career at The Times, we were so focused on we've got to get more people to come in. And we're going to build this beautiful stuff and put it out there. And that's going to make them come to us and drive advertising up and drive subscriptions. You can get some success out of that. But users aren't sitting around refreshing your homepage. They're not pulling your app out probably unless you're some of the people in this room. So, again, to grow, you have to be okay publishing online. And even more, you should tap into the unique characteristics of those platforms if it better helps you tell your story and reach your audience. Make free work. Easy, right? I know this is like a main pain point for a lot of publishers these days. One of the reasons BuzzFeed can't afford to be less concerned about display advertising and our business model. Sorry. Our business model is a little bit different than traditional outlets. We basically make money directly producing posts and videos for brands. We use the same techniques and tools that the editors on the editorial side use. I should say that teams are completely separate. And the news department would never be involved in creating ads. But, you know, the creatives and the editorial staff, they do see what each other does and they do talk and they share ideas and they follow what works. This post looks like a plausible BuzzFeed post. It's 10 historical badasses you're probably unaware of, right? Scrolling down, it's got these lovely illustrations, these short little vignettes. It looks like a BuzzFeed post. You kind of don't even realize it's an ad, right? It's like very beautiful and inspiring and interesting. You know, it's that same listical format. They make it in the same CMS that they'll make a funny editorial post in. And when you get to the bottom, you know, there's another disclaimer about, oh, this was, you know, created for a political action. Organization client of ours. And I know a lot of people think that there's something distasteful about mixing ads in with editorial content. But the way we look at it, since we're the ones creating them, we're coming up with the ideas. Like we don't really, brands don't come in and pitch us. Like we pitch them. We can apply our standards, same techniques that we know work. And I think it brings real value to advertisers. And for that, they'll pay more than they will pay for a shitty banner ad on the corner of your article. So we promote these on our site. And we will purchase ads on platforms like Facebook. But a lot of people just share these on their own. And that's like free. That's like, oh, you're sharing our ads out. This is like free ad distribution. So it's a much more sustainable business model and one we can scale. You know, we're starting to push into countries around the world. And the first step is to try to build an audience there. But like Japan for instance. Or in the UK. But what follows then, if that works, and we do crack that audience nut, we then start hiring up creative teams and start selling. And that's sort of like the growth pattern. Which brings me to Global is Next. I didn't talk much about international other than just now. But I know, I've seen numbers. I can't remember quite what it is for platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But they have more daily users outside of the United States than in. And that's been a huge vehicle for their growth. So like everybody in the United States had a Facebook account five, ten years ago, whatever. You can't really grow that more. So where they went to grow was outside the US. And it's been huge. That's not really yet true for content companies like Buzzfeed. I think it's harder. It's more expensive. You've got to start opening offices in places like London and Berlin and Paris and Rio and Tokyo. But, you know, we're doing that in a small way. And we're starting to make those personal connections with new people in their language and culture. And trying to adapt the best of what other offices are doing and adapting it to the local culture. So stay tuned on that. I think that that's going to be a huge thing for growth. There's a lot of room to grow there. That's Buzzfeed in 2016. Maybe this wasn't the lighthearted frivolity you were expecting from a talk called Buzzfeed. But I wanted to really convey the amount of thought and effort that Buzzfeed has made. And the amount of effort that goes into creating these moments that we enjoy and share every day. A lot of publishers are trying to copy things we do. Like the listicle format was 16 random headline things to write. You know, they try to get click-baity. But what I don't think they can copy is the years of experimentation and data feedback loops that informs what we do and how we do it. And I know probably most of you don't work at big media companies like me. Like I have most of my life. Maybe this talk is not directly applicable to your job. But obviously you consume this stuff and you share this stuff and you live with this stuff. But if there's one thing I can leave you with that's a little more general is, again, as designers, creators, we can bring delight and insight to people with the things we make. But we can also play an important role in building a growing business if we fully understand the challenges, the opportunities in front of us. Listen to our customers. Listen to our users. And be willing to adapt. So that's it. Thank you.