Reflections on the title of the party king to the media

Now many media watchers are accustomed to reading "title Party" experts, such as Upworthy and BuzzFeed (founder Jonah Peretti have had a successful 7-point summary of BuzzFeed). The use of such media to drive huge traffic to fill the "attention gap" style of the title and other tricks are also familiar. But the great thing about Emerson Spartz and his Click Factory Network is that they can make these sites look like the New York Times.

Research starts at age 12

Who's Emerson Spartz? I believe few people have heard of it, even in the online media. And the names of the websites he started are often changed. But it doesn't matter, because:

The Company (Spartz Inc.) Handles 30 Web sites that have no uniform aesthetic standards. And some of the home page is also messy, full of old links, the above may not appear to have spartz signs; traffic is almost entirely generated by Facebook, so brand awareness is less important. Most of the company's innovations are not about the content itself, but about how to sell and package the content.

SPARTZ12 began to study the working mechanism of online content. At that time he made one of the biggest and hottest Harry Potter fans of the website of-mugglenet. And then rely on the site to earn the first bucket of gold and set up a series of web sites, some of the media network fans, some talk about Soul chicken soup, and some of the astonishing facts. And Spartz currently relatively stable operation of the main station is called Dose.com (formerly called Brainwreck).

Spartz really care about is the flow, as long as it can bring traffic, form is not important. His 35-person team in Chicago, which runs more than 60 million monthly visits to the 30 sites, dose.com contributed half. Last year Spartz Inc. got 8 million of dollars in funding and created 7 million of dollars in advertising revenue, and the biggest source of revenue comes from Facebook. Some even gave his company a 200 million dollar valuation.

Is the source important?

It is not surprising that Spartz organizes viral content in a similar BuzzFeed way, but the traditional media are shocked by Spartz's arrogance (BuzzFeed also criticized) for not giving sources. This may be due to his belief that the actual source of content is worthless:

If you want to develop a successful virus, you can start from scratch from tissue DNA-or more efficiently, by using a known powerful virus to mutate it a little bit and then show it to a new audience ... The more original things are more time-consuming to integrate, we find that we no longer want to click.

It is immoral not to give a source of information. But the truth is that many readers don't care about where the content comes from, or even whether the content is genuine or not. We don't judge whether this is right, but it is true, and Emerson Spartz is using the advantage of understanding this fact.

Another scary thing about Spartz is that he doesn't care about objective metrics of content quality, his only concern is that content is shared by no one:

The way we look at the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: If someone shares it, it's quality.

What the reader wants

Media professionals are certainly more likely to judge content quality with the industry awards they receive or by the specific audience they are concerned with. But realistically, Spartz is right-you can make the best of what you want, but if the content doesn't reach the reader, it's a failure in a way. How does the content reach the reader? Emerson Spartz and Jonah Peretti are obviously doing better than many traditional media.

But does that mean we are addicted to the title party? Not too. But we have to pay attention to how content is streamed online and shared, which means you need to invest the resources in those places. BuzzFeed the data around the issue so much that he recently hired his own data team leader Dao Nguyen as the issuer. Mashable has no front page editor, and its front page is based on who the reader is and what is being shared, and then through the algorithm.

Media companies are still accustomed to thinking they are in control of content, deciding how and when to reach readers, but this is just an illusion. The kind of control they have over distribution channels has been lost-and the channel is now controlled by Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Content is already unrestricted, just like a virus escaping a test tube. Are you ducks or are you, like Spartz, studying the virus mechanism to understand what it wants? The answer is self-evident.