BuzzFeed创始人的网络传播心经

    如果以更深入的方式创作出引人注目、打动人心的内容，其实有希望爬上一座大山。但如果只关注数据，你可能会认为自己已经爬到了山顶，因为接下来无论往哪个方向走都会导致点击率下降。但那里其实蕴含着远大得多的前景。优化可以引领你发现局部最大值，但这些局部最大值往往不是你真正想要的东西。这就是我们为什么探索不同类型的内容，从人的层面上思考问题。“这真的是优质内容吗？人们点击它是否仅仅因为他们无法抗拒，还是仅仅因为它能够带来一种混杂着负罪心里的快感？”提出这类的问题非常重要。你需要让人们创造性地试验许多不同的事情。然后，数据会变得有意义。

    我女儿正是上大学的年龄，非常喜欢BuzzFeed。你的受众是哪些人？你希望你的受众是哪些人？

    创办这家网站时，我们真的没有考虑过目标受众群体。我们只是集中精力为社交网络创作内容，共享是我们散播内容的方式。移动和社交真正融合在一起。这么说来，过去阻止内容传播的正是手机。我以前很讨厌手机。你的黑莓手机(BlackBerry )收到一封电邮时，你说，“回到办公室以后，我再查阅。”现在，移动设备上最流行的应用程序是社交应用。Facebook、Twitter的相当大一部分流量都来自移动终端。

    因此，我们专心致志地面向人们今天消费媒体的方式——面向移动，面向社交——来打造媒体。随后，当我们看到我们的等高线数字时，我们不由得惊呼：“哇！我们拥有一个超级年轻的受众群体。我们的受众群体为什么这么年轻呢？”原因在于，我们根据人们目前消费内容的方式来打造媒体，而年轻人恰好是最早使用智能手机消费媒体、同时把社交网络作为主要内容源的群体。所以，我们碰巧与这样一个读者群相遇。这些二三十岁的年轻人接受过良好的教育，拥有比同龄人更高的收入（虽然还比不上他们的父母）。他们在社交媒体上非常活跃，以非常快的速度共享内容，以一种非常贪婪的方式消费内容。

    你是否打算向年龄更大的读者拓展？你是否想拓宽读者群？这是不是你寻求做的事情？

    我想我们会的。我的意思是，未来很难预测。我猜想，年轻人的许多媒体消费行为会蔓延到更广泛的受众。我其实并不认为，我们的受众局限于某个具有人口统计学意义的群体。我们更多的是面向一种消费内容媒体的方式，我想一些老年人也在采用这种方式消费媒体。未来，他们的数量或许会增加。这对于我们来说将是一个增长点，就如同老年人是Facebook的增长点一样。

    现在有多少人登陆BuzzFeed.com的首页？它是否揭示了搜索和社交的紧张关系？

    几百万人登录我们的首页，几千万人阅读“B版”页面和文章。社交网络现在已经真正成为大多数人寻找新闻和信息的起点，比如Facebook的新闻源和Twitter的数据流。社交网络已经变得无所不在，对于年轻人尤为如此。我们正处在这些高速的信息流之中。在Facebook、Twitter和其他社交网络，我们都是最受欢迎的网站之一。

    一些人访问BuzzFeed首页在某种程度上是因为他们在自己的信息流中发现了一堆好内容，随后肯定在想：“噢，我喜欢这个网站。我为什么不直接去内容源看看呢？”我认为是这样一种情况。但也有一些人打算寻找某个可以分享的内容。所以，当人们登陆BuzzFeed首页时，他们说：“那篇文章很烂。这篇不适合我。这篇也不对我的胃口。但这篇很好啊，我要分享给我所有的朋友。”因此，兼收并蓄的BuzzFeed主页是一个福利，因为它让人们忽略那些不适合他们的内容，找到合适的内容，放进自己的信息流，让它们融入社交网络的共享洪流之中。

    If you made something that was compelling and touched people in a deeper way, you might actually… there might be a mountain that you could climb, but if you're just following numbers, you think you're at the top of the mountain because every direction you go looks like it's downward to a lower click-through rate. But there's actually something there that's much bigger. Optimization can lead to finding local maximums, but those local maximums often aren't where you actually want to be. That's why exploring lots of different kinds of content, and thinking about things on a human level and saying, "Is this actually good content, or are people just clicking this because they can't resist clicking it because it's a guilty pleasure?" is important. You need to have creative, experimental people trying lots of different things. And then the data becomes meaningful.

    My college-age daughter loves BuzzFeed. What is your audience? What do you want your audience to be?

    We didn't really start with a demographic in mind. We just were focused on making content for the social web, with sharing being our distribution. Mobile and social really converged. So, it used to be that mobile was the thing that would stop things from spreading. I used to hate mobile. You'd get the email on your BlackBerry and say, "I'll look at this when I get back to the office." Now the most popular apps on mobile devices are social apps. When we see traffic from Facebook or Twitter, it's disproportionately mobile.

    So we were focused on making media for the way people consume media today, for mobile, for social. And then we kind of were looking at our contour numbers, and we were like, "Oh, wow! We have this super-young demographic. Why do we have this super-young demographic?" The reason was that we were making media for the way people were consuming content today, and young people are the earliest adopters of using smartphones to consume media, and of using the social web as their main source of content. So we kind of accidentally ended up with this demographic of readers in their twenties and thirties who are very active on social media, who are very educated, who have high incomes relative to the peers their same age, but not relative to their parents, and who share content at a really high rate and engage with content in a very voracious way.

    Do you want to get older? Do you want to get broader? Is it something that you seek to do?

    I think we will. I mean, it's hard to predict the future. My guess is that a lot of the media consumption behaviors of young people will start to spread to a broader audience. I actually don't think we're demographically defined. It's more a way of consuming content media, and I think there are older people who do consume media that way, and they'll probably increase. That will be a growth area for us, just the same way that older people were a growth area for Facebook.

    How many people go through the front door of BuzzFeed.com? Does that speak to the tension between search and social?

    We have millions of people go to our front page and tens of millions of people go to our "B" pages and articles. Social has really become the starting point—the Facebook newsfeed, the Twitter stream—where most people are finding their news and information now. It's become something that has become more and more prevalent, particularly for young people. And we are in those streams at a really high rate. We're one of the most popular sites on Facebook and Twitter and other social sites.

    People go to the front page of BuzzFeed partly because they've seen a bunch of things in their stream, and they're like, "Oh, I like this site. Why don't I go to the source?" I think that happens. But also people are going to look for something to share. So people come to the front page of BuzzFeed saying, "Oh, that article sucks. This one's not for me. This isn't my cup of tea. But this one is perfect, and I'm going to share it with all of my friends." So the eclecticness of our home page almost is a benefit because it lets people pass over things that isn't the right content for them, find the one that is, and put that into their stream and get the sharing going on the social web.