BuzzFeed的下个大动作：长视频

    你是喜欢自己拥有分销渠道还是外包？

    自己拥有分销渠道无疑是有好处的，但是我对这些优势的看法和传统人士的看法并不一样。我并不倾向于垄断渠道，那种日子已经过去了。但是拥有渠道意味着你可以获取更多数据。理想化的方式是混合式渠道，你既有大量观众，同时又有自己掌握的部分。

    你们的哪些工作做得最好，哪些根本没有效果？

    我们在设立这间工作室时，最大的赌注是在运营和管理方面。我们从短片团队内部抽调人员成立了团队，他们都是多面手，而且我们希望他们每周至少可以制作一两部视频。其次，我们否定了那种把宣传调门定得很高、把标准定得很低的观念，并且试图让大家觉得媒体总是关注他们想要解决的问题。

    这是两个定得很高的理念，而且最让我感到惊讶的，是它起到的效果。它催生了一支非常自主、热忱而且有很多不同愿景的团队。它是一种在组织上让大家放手去干的形式，同时它也教会我，现代媒体界的复杂性可能无法被每个个人所理解。它一定会复制网络本身的复杂性。我们需要在最高层面从不同的观点思考这些东西。

    听起来好像只是很混乱。

    令人吃惊的是，它并不混乱。有意思的是，如果我走出来看看大家在做什么，很少有人告诉我他们在制作哪一个单独的视频，而是会跟我说一些更大的问题。比如他们会说：“我在做后文字主义的视频，我在视频中减少了对某一种语言的依赖，而且通过它在国际上的增长看到了它的成功。”这是一个非常困难的问题，而他们会做6到10个视频，然后研究其效果。

    其它一些问题是什么？

    内容的交付机制如何在某种程度上改变内容的展示方式。比如Facebook的自动播放，这并不是小事，而是一次非常重大的调整。曾几何时，你制作的内容甚至是没有声音的，因此你必须重视它。内容如何构建以及内容的顺序都会产生影响。另一个问题是移动设备与声音有着很有趣的关系。有很多人关心如何做不依赖声音的内容，但是加上声音就等于加上了一些价值。

    他们会注意观众的一些反应以及数据的异常，然后他们会跟进并试图理解究竟发生了什么事。旅行视频一般会在“80后”一代中引起巨大的反响，所以现在又有一类视频叫做“80后的渴望”，下面还有一个小类别叫“旅行热”。所以我们想知道为什么会有这种情况。

    约拿提到，你们俩曾经分享过为什么视频会走红的一个哲学方法。

    我是在2007年做视频博客时走红的，当时也有人买我的作品。我工作的方式，以及越来越多进入好莱坞的人工作的方式，都是快节奏的，是重复的，内容的制作和销售在同一天。而且他们也与观众进行实时互动并获取数据。显然不论我想在这座城市做任何事，都得牺牲掉那种工作方式。在某种程度上，我所建立的正是我当时就想拥有的一座工作室。

    Would you prefer to own the distribution rather than outsource it?

    There are definitely advantages to owning distribution pipes, but I don’t tend to think of the advantages in the same way that I think traditional folks think about it. The idea is not a monopolistic intention. Those days are gone. But owned distribution means you can get a lot more data. Ideally it’s a blend where we’re looking at lots of audiences, but you also have a segment that’s owned.

    What have you done that works best and what doesn’t work at all?

    The biggest gamble that we took in setting up this studio was on the operational and managerial side. We architected teams within the short-form group that were generalists and faced with the expectation that they’d produce one to two videos a week, if not more. The second thing was we took away the idea of pitch up and approval down, and tried to get people to think along experimental lines where the media is always focused on a problem they are trying to solve.

    Those are two high-minded principles and that’s one of the most surprising things to me is the degree to which that worked. It has created a very autonomous, but earnest, team that has lots of different visions. It’s a form of letting go, organizationally, but what it’s taught me that I don’t think the complexities of the modern media landscape can really be understood by individuals. It has to mimic the complexity of the network itself. We need lots of different viewpoints thinking about this stuff at the top level.

    That sounds like pure chaos.

    It’s surprisingly not. What I find fascinating is if I go out and walk around and see what people are doing, rarely do people tell me the individual video they’re working on, but the bigger problem. They say, “I’m doing post-literate pieces, where I’m reducing the reliance on what language the video is in, and can see the success by its international growth.” It’s a really difficult problem and these folks are doing six to 10 videos and studying the result.

    What are some other problems?

    How the delivery mechanism changes some of the ways you might think about the presentation of the content. Things like autoplay inside Facebook. That’s not trivial. That’s a pretty massive adjustment. There’s moment of no-sound presentation of what you’ve made and you have to take that seriously. That has implications of how you set things up and the ordering of the content. Another one is that mobile generally has an interesting relationship to sound. There are a lot of people thinking about how you can do things that are non-sound reliant, but where adding the sound adds some value.

    People will notice something in the audience reaction or a spike the data and then they follow it up and try to make sense of what’s happening. Travel videos around travel in your 20’s are resonating huge in Gen-Y, so there’s now a format class called “Gen-Y Aspirationalism, Subclass: Wanderlust,” and so people are focusing on trying to figure out why that is.

    Jonah mentioned you both shared a philosophical approach to why things go viral.

    I came out where in 2007 in the middle of producing this year-long video blog, and I was shopped around. The way that I worked, and increasingly, the people that are coming to Hollywood to work, is fast-paced, it’s iterative, the production is the same day as the distribution, and they’re interacting with audiences and getting data in real time. It was obvious that I had to sacrifice that way of working in order to do anything in this town. In a way, what I’ve built is the studio I wish existed at that time.