How Buzzfeed took eight years of messing around to own #thedress
You read about #thedress? You might have read about it on Buzzfeed. The site scooped got 27 million pageviews for #TheDress.How did they do it? Well, it’s not that easy. Paul Ford explains that what looks like a simple few posts of mindless chatter a is the result of years of trail, error, stacks of money and fun:
What I saw, as I looked through the voluminous BuzzFeed coverage of the dress, is an organization at the peak of a craft they’ve been honing since 2006. They are masters of the form they pioneered. If you think that’s bullshit, that’s fine — I think most things are bullshit too. But they didn’t just serendipitously figure out that blue dress. They created an organization that could identify that blue dress, document it, and capture the traffic. And the way they got that 25 million impressions, as far as I can tell from years of listening to their people, reading them, writing about them, and not working or writing for them, was something like: Build a happy-enough workplace where people could screw around and experiment with what works and doesn’t, and pay everyone some money.
This is not said as an endorsement of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is utterly deserving of insanely paranoid criticism just like anyone who makes money from your attention, including me. But it’s worth pointing out that their recipe for traffic seems to be: Hire tons of people; let them experiment, figure out how social media works, and repeat endlessly; with lots of snacks. Robots didn’t make this happen. It was a hint of magic, and some science.
Newspaper are playing catch-up…
Posted: 28th, February 2015 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
