BuzzFeed创始人的网络传播心经

    于是，我就开始思考如何产生收入。我从来没想过在网站上发布横幅广告，部分原因在于，我们投资这个平台是为了在社交网络传播内容。我们的团队当时使用它来创作一些有趣好玩的东西。那时还没有记者，我们只是在探索如何发现我们是不是跟某位受众连接在一起？人们是否愿意分享这种内容？如何为人们提供让他们感到兴奋、从而愿意分享的内容？

    所以，对于我来说，发布横幅广告并没有多大意义。更有意义的是，打造一个使用同一平台发布品牌内容和广告的版本。于是，我告诉品牌商，“你们必须讲故事。”这其实是杂志业数十年来非常擅长的事情——创作其实已成为产品组成部分的广告。这是网站完全没有做到的事情，很大程度上就是那些拥挤的小横幅广告惹的祸。如果你拿起一本高端杂志，撕掉所有的广告页面，它的品质往往反而会下降。你知道吗，如果你取出一本时尚杂志的所有广告，你就将失去多达一半的图片。于是，我们就真的采取了这种方式。我们说：“那么，为什么网络不能这么干呢？为什么我们不能制作拥有自己的页面，人们愿意点击、参与、分享并互动的品牌内容和广告呢？”

    我们创建了一种完全专有的广告形式。推销它真是个苦差事。许多人的反应是，“哦，看看吧，这不是美国互动广告局(IAB)标准，业界没这么玩的。我们其实也不喜欢横幅广告，但这种方式很奏效。”然而，有几个人，包括通用电气公司(General Electric)首席营销官贝丝•康斯托克，走到我们面前说：“我们打算创新，想试验一下这种方式。”通用电气是一家享誉世界的巨型公司，而我们当时还是一家非常小的网站。我们从那个时候其一直在跟他们合作。

    目睹了我们早期的成功之后，其他一些品牌纷纷表示：“如果这种广告形式适合通用电气——他们讲述了一个引人入胜的故事，获得了10倍于横幅广告的点击率，而且被不断共享——我们也想试一下。”一旦尝到了甜头，人们就会一而再、再而三地尝试。

    BuzzFeed与杂志是什么样的关系？

    我们与一些杂志网站结成合作伙伴。我们建立了一个合作伙伴网络，让其他出版商用我们的技术来探测哪篇文章正受到追捧。比方说，如果你在我们的合作伙伴之一《纽约客》( The New Yorker)工作，你就可以收到一个提醒信息，由此获知网站的哪篇报道人气正在上升。他们还可以获得一个显示内容传播方式的仪表板。

    如果你观察一下BuzzFeed首页的右侧导轨，你将看到加入这个合作伙伴网络的出版商。点击某个出版商，它共享次数最高的故事就会显示在网站上。这是我们与杂志合作的一种方式。

    你们是否将建立更多类似这样的合作关系？

    没错。网络上现在有超过4亿的独立访客。他们都在获得我们的数据科学和技术带来的某些好处。

    当你看到杂志的网站时，你认为哪些方面是对的，哪些方面是错的？你认为他们在哪些方面还可以做得更好？

    我浏览杂志网站的主要方式是，有人在Twitter上发布了某个故事，或者把某个故事放入我的Facebook新闻源。我认为最大的挑战是，一些杂志的移动阅读体验非常糟糕。用户得点击之后才能读到故事，然后会出现一些类似桌面的弹出式广告或带有小x的重叠式广告。人们费劲力气想看一看这篇故事，但在移动设备上很难发现那个能够消除广告、从而看到故事的小x。文章的底部经常有分页，9页，甚至更多。所以，大家必须要找到、点击小数字2。点击后，阅读界面又会弹出另一个广告。谁有耐心经历这样的阅读体验啊，除非你认为这篇文章足够好。

    因此，一定要在移动设备上测试杂志网站的所有东西。应用程序很重要，我认为应用是杂志业谱系的一部分——尽管这么多年来，订阅一直非常重要，但移动网络真的也很重要。原因是，如果我下载了一个杂志的应用，我往往会分享某篇文章，它就将进入Facebook。人们更有可能通过移动设备登陆Facebook，如果他们读不到这篇文章，你就失去了一个获得新读者的机会。

    你过去或者现在经常读哪些杂志？你喜欢哪些杂志？

    我真的很喜欢在网络上阅读，因为你可以充分利用所有不同的内容源。因此，Twitter和Facebook的确是我寻找好文章的主要途径。还有的时候是通过电子邮件。BuzzFeed有一个深度报道分区，也就是那些12,000字或6,000字的文章。我们定期发送一个深度报道邮件，附有每周最佳深度报道作品的链接。这是我寻找大量长篇杂志文章的另一种方式，也就是借助BuzzFeed深度报道编辑的力量，因为他们每天都在阅读各种文章。我们也有一些原创的东西，但这封电邮通常包含1篇我们自己的深度报道，3篇或4篇来自其他杂志的文章。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒   

    So I started thinking about how to generate revenue. The idea of putting banners on the site never appealed to me, in part because we were investing in this platform for distributing content on the social web. Our team was using it to make fun, entertaining stuff at that time—we didn't have any reporters at that point—and we were looking at how to really detect whether we were connecting with an audience, and whether people wanted to share this content, and how to give people content that they were excited about to share.

    So banners didn't make much sense to me. It made much more sense to build a version that uses the same platform for branded content and advertising. And so we told brands, "You have to tell a story." This is actually something the magazine industry has been great at over decades—making advertising that actually adds to the product. It's something that websites have completely failed to do, and largely it's the fault of trying to cram things into little banner ads. If you take a high-end magazine and rip all the ads out, it's often a worse product. If you take all of the ads out of a fashion magazine, you lose half the photography, you know? So we really took the approach of, "Well, why can't the web be like that? Why can't we make great branded content, advertising, that has its own page that people want to click on and engage in and share and interact with?"

    We created our own form of advertising that was totally proprietary. It was a real hard slog trying to sell it. People were like, "Well, look, it's not IAB standard, and it's not the way the industry works. And we don't really like these banners, but it's just sort of the way it works." But we had a few people, including Beth Comstock, the CMO of General Electric, come to us and say, "Well, we want to innovate. We want to experiment." General Electric is a giant company. At the time, we were very small. And we've been working with them ever since.

    A bunch of other brands saw some of the early success we had and said, "Oh, look, if it works for GE and they're getting 10X the click-through rate of banners and they're getting sharing and they're telling a compelling story, then we'll try it out, too." Once people try it, they renew and renew and renew.

    What is BuzzFeed's relationship with magazines?

    We're partners with some magazine websites. We have something called a partner network that lets other publishers use some of our technology to detect when something is taking off. So if you work at The New Yorker, for example—we are a partner with them—you can get an alert that shows that one of the stories on their website is starting to take off. They can have a dashboard that shows some of how their content is spreading.

    If you look at the right-hand rail on the front page of BuzzFeed, you'll see the publishers in our network, their most-shared stories trigger and show up on the site. So that's one way we work with magazines.

    Will you establish more partnerships like that?

    Yeah. There are over 400 million unique visitors in the network now, and all of them are getting some of the benefit of our data science and our technology.

    When you see magazines' websites, what do you think is right, what do you think is wrong, what do you think they could do better?

    The main way that I see magazine websites is someone who has tweeted a story or put a story into my Facebook newsfeed. The biggest challenge I see is that some magazines have a very bad mobile experience. You'll click to see a story, and then there will be some kind of desktop-looking pop-up ad or overlay ad with one of those little x's, and you're trying to read the story, and it's hard on a mobile device to find out where the little x is to get rid of the ad and see the story. At the bottom of the article, it will be paginated, and it'll be like nine pages or something. So you have to find the little number 2 to click that. And when you click that, it will pop another one of those ads up. It has to be a really good article for you to go through that kind of [experience].

    So, test all your stuff on mobile devices. Apps are important, and I think apps are part of the pedigree of the magazine industry, which is where subscriptions have been so important over many years, but mobile web is also really important. Because if I have an app for a magazine, and I share something, that's going to Facebook. The person is more likely than not accessing Facebook on a mobile device, and if they can't read the article, then you missed an opportunity to bring in new readers.

    What magazines do you read, what magazines do you enjoy, historically or today?

    I really like reading on the web because you get the best of all different sources. So really, Twitter and Facebook are the main ways that I find stuff. Sometimes e-mail. We have a long-form section on BuzzFeed that has, you know, 12,000- and 6,000-word pieces, and we do a long-form e-mail that links out to the best long-form pieces each week. That is another way I discover a lot of long-form magazine articles—through the long-form editors at BuzzFeed who are reading stuff. We have some original stuff, but usually it's one of ours and three or four from other magazine sources.