81–90 of 102 posts
They make money by virtue of number of users rather than quality of the product.
This explains why FB sucks so bad and still makes a lot of money.
Relevant... I got told a few days ago that: "Buzzfeed writers have to generate at least 1 article per day. There is no minimum limit on words on the article, and the topic can be anything (within reason)." Once I knew this, the prevalence of low-quality Buzzfeed links all over the web suddenly made sense.
Unfortunately, that means the 'best' way to become popular in the media business is to throw quality out of the window and try and write as much shallow, junk as possible to cash in on the latest news trends and social media fads.
This dogmatic and unqualified belief must be revised by the technology industry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cranking out one buzzfeed-grade article a day doesn't seem like much work. I'm pretty sure I've already put more thought into this comment than they put into most of their articles.
Automate it, a mad libs job haha, pick a random topic from the news, fill it in with data, wonder how poorly written it would come out.
There is a perception in right wing circles that this is also related to trumpism, after all this crash is happening with the stock market at an all time high. A lot of these publications are at the 'progressive' end of the spectrum and they may have misread the market, even for their core readers. Specifically the media (and in particular digital media's) response seems to have been one of all out activism against h…
> People don't explicitly want to be told what to believe. The idea that "telling people what to believe" is a phenomenon unique to one side of the political spectrum is absurd. What's been the most watched cable news network in recent years? "People don't want to be told they're wrong" is a more realistic claim, but a very different one. But this is happening to non-political media too, so the idea that it's politic…
This is true, but there's an asymmetry here, and it's best summed up by Conquest's Second Law: any organisation not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing. So in the US nowadays we have right-wing media outlets, which are right-wing, and we have everything else, which is left-wing.
Breitbart is right-wing, and Salon is left-wing, and that's fine -- people go to those sites explicitly because they want news from that perspective. It's what the readers want, and it's what they provide. But GQ is a magazine, dating back to the 1930s, ostensibly about men's fashion and suits and watches and cars and things... so why is it filled with left-wing political content and Trump bashing? It doesn't seem to be a sensible business decision, it just seems to be driven by the personal opinions of the editors.
That, I think, is what the OP means about people not being told what to believe. They don't mind it when explicitly political outlets push a political point of view, but when neutral territory (like GQ or football or Entertainment Weekly) gets politicised then that really turns off at least half the population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Automate it, a mad libs job haha, pick a random topic from the news, fill it in with data, wonder how poorly written it would come out.
You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.
Relevant... I got told a few days ago that: "Buzzfeed writers have to generate at least 1 article per day. There is no minimum limit on words on the article, and the topic can be anything (within reason)." Once I knew this, the prevalence of low-quality Buzzfeed links all over the web suddenly made sense.
That's how it is for the average writer in digital media. Small daily articles keep the lights on and fund bigger investigative articles and feature content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's something with a bit more detail about how the author has approached the revenue issue: http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/07/with-11000-subscribers-talk...
I'll add it to my reading list, thanks. Although this is the most overused fucking trope in digital media: > “The idea of publications totally based on advertising is, I think, an illusion. Some can do it, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be a sustainable model for most publications.” Like TV and radio never even existed.
I personally never believed in new media's limitless newconomy rise to the stars. Nobody wanted to pay for newspapers anymore but web journalism was going to be different?
Internet advertising is growing up.
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You're coming at this from a SaaS point of view. Imagine if you're a rather large brand like Fedex. You can't tie your digital ads directly to a conversion because the conversion happens offline. But their advertising department is supposed to make it seem like they're spending money and driving "brand awareness". So getting fake clicks, fake ad video views -- all of that can get reported up so they can make themselv…
Have you noticed how many brick and mortar stores ask for your email or phone number at the register during a purchase? They absolutely can tie offline purchases to online activity with that information (not to mention your credit card).