You’ll never guess which major news site has been beaten to the punchline.
In August last year, @HuffingtonPost tweeted a headline asking “Who’s the richest celebrity?” to its millions of followers – and, in an idle moment, New Yorker Alex Mizrahi clicked. It was Oprah.
The thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of others who did the same closed the tab without another thought.
But out of frustration, with himself for falling for the obvious trap and with The Huffington Post for setting it, Mizrahi retweeted the link with “Oprah” before the question – and @HuffPoSpoilers was born.
The account, which now has more than 30,000 followers of its own, relieves the compulsion to click on HuffPo’s teasing headlines (“Scientific proof that...” “You’ll never guess who...” “The top five reasons to...”) with addendums that clarify, expand on or altogether dismiss the story.
@HuffPoSpoilers founder Alex Mizrahi Photo: Unknown
Some have said that Mizrahi, 30, is doing a public service, but the Brooklyn-based social media contractor just hopes he’s making people’s lives a little less irritating.
He points out that, while the response has been “incredibly passionate”, @HuffPoSpoilers’ follower count is less than one per cent of @HuffingtonPost’s.
“The most frustrating aspect is just how blatant they are in their absolute disregard for the well-being of their audience,” he told The Wireless via email. “They don’t respect their followers at all, they don’t care about what’s important and what’s not, and they don’t care about what’s news and what isn’t. And the longer I’ve been doing this, the more I’ve noticed it and the angrier I’ve gotten.”
Mizrahi’s not the first to act on his dissatisfaction. Clickbait.net, @NYTOnIt, #slatepitches, and The Independent’s series of “Questions to Which the Answer is ‘No’” also highlight – and often ridicule – the outcome of the media’s scramble for advertising dollars.
As the long and dishonourable history of tabloid journalism goes to show, there’s nothing new about salacious headlines or “human interest” stories. But in the digital age, where readers’ preferences are quantified to the nth degree, such ploys for views play a key role in the profitability of most online media.
With appeals to the lowest common denominator come the biggest, broadest audiences. Most advertisers want to be associated with sites that reach a mass readership, and views translate to revenue.
“It’s a vicious cycle which reinforces itself because clickbait works, even when you're aware of its mechanisms” – Chris, 20
It reminds Ben Fahy, editor of New Zealand’s advertising and media industry mag StopPress, of a “very accurate” Onion story about CNN.com’s decision to lead with Miley Cyrus’ controversial VMA performance (“All you are to us, and all you will ever be to us, are eyeballs”).
“If you’re playing that game, it’s a race to the bottom in some ways,” says Fahy.
The competitive market for advertising means New Zealand’s two biggest online publications, the Herald’s website and Fairfax Media’s Stuff.co.nz, are engaged in an ongoing race for clicks.
“In general, the size of audience is the largest factor in our advertising strategy, measured by unique views,” said Fairfax Media’s Nigel Tutt.
Stuff.co.nz in particular is often criticised for its increasingly tabloid disposition, which saw clickbait darling Lindsay Lohan appear in two separate places on the homepage one afternoon earlier this year.
“The Fourth Seal of the Mediapocalypse is Broken: @NZStuff front page is finally just a picture of a naked lady,” tweeted media commentator Keith Ng in May.
But while clickbait works “disgustingly well” – to quote one employee of a New Zealand online media company, who asked not to be named – its impact tends to be limited to quantity of views, not quality of engagement.
Headlines like The Huffington Post’s have a “massive” bounce rate, says Jack Cunningham, head of digital at Auckland ad agency Twenty, referring to the percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing just one page. And bounces, like views – like everything – are quantified.
“There’s absolutely no benefit to your company if someone clicks on something that doesn’t apply to them, or wasn’t what they thought it was.”
Over-reliance on clickbait can also damage a publication’s credibility, and, by extension, its commercial worthiness, when readers pick up on the disingenuous motives behind it.
“These techniques only encourage interest in showbiz news bollocks that already occupy too much of people’s time. I lose respect for a site as soon as I see clickbait headlines” – Jack, 22
In any case, as Medium’s Noah Chestnut wrote of @HuffPoSpoilers, chasing traffic is grounded in a business model that, like the age of print in which it was established, is on its way out: “The gimmick of asking a question or withholding information so we click is connected to a world where publishers wished Twitter didn’t exist.”
The banner ad, a hallmark of digital display advertising, is also becoming increasingly ineffectual.
Near-ubiquitous use of smartphones and tablets, and increasing “banner blindness”, has forced web designers to look at new ways of accommodating ads online; in May, Fairfax enlisted global ad network InMobi for this precise purpose.
“If you’re creating a website that’s responsive, you literally can’t get banners on there – they just don’t fit,” says Cunningham. “It’s pushed the whole industry forward.
“When I first started doing this stuff, it was all about getting your banner to shout out. Now, a subtle ad can be a lot more effective.”
It makes sense, then, that the new trend is about blending in.
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Native advertising, where bespoke ads are created to resemble the editorial content around them, is more or less a digital upgrade to the advertorials that have been nice little earners for print media for decades.
But as one of the most lucrative forms of revenue in an industry this strapped for cash, its power for influence is enormous – as evidenced by so-called “legacy” media brands like Forbes, Atlantic Media, The New Yorker and The Washington Post embracing the trend.
Even The New York Times, often billed as a paywall success story, is understood to be looking at introducing more sponsored content.
All are trailing in the dust cloud left by BuzzFeed as it rushed to make room for sponsored content in amongst its lists of trivia and cat gifs.
The site’s advertising creatives (not its editorial staff) work with big-name brands to create ads that are intended to be as engaging and sharable as the site’s own editorial content, like Virgin Mobile presenting the “19 Most Ridiculous Texting Fails” or Sony’s “11 Things You Didn’t Know About PlayStation”.
BuzzFeed ran 265 such “partnerships” in 2012, and is on track to do up to 700 before this year is out.
The site’s rise has been remarkable, and not just in comparison to other 21st century media. Since its launch four years ago, it has gained more than 300 employees. It is three times bigger than it was one year ago, and eight times bigger than it was two years ago.
Though it does not publicise its financial results, BuzzFeed reportedly generated around $20m in revenue last year, and its projected figures for 2013 are speculated to be around three times that. (“Many media companies feel like Dickensian orphans looking at the riches flowing into BuzzFeed’s coffers,” observed one commentator.)
In a memo published in September, founder Jonah Perretti – part of the team that established The Huffington Post, and an early innovator in the “Copernican revolution” of social – attributed the site’s success to its taking the lead on native ads.
But media commentators have raised questions as to their impact on the site’s integrity, particularly as it moves to increase its business, politics and news coverage.
On the BuzzFeed homepage, ads are shaded cream, and the brand is given as the author. But the majority of BuzzFeed’s audience access the site via links shared on Facebook and Twitter, not the homepage – and click through to sponsored content and it’s almost identical to editorial in form, structure and tone.
“I’d prefer sidebar ads to sponsored content; it feels more manipulative this way,” – Alexandra, 20
But as a thoroughly modern media company, BuzzFeed is often held separate to such “old media” principles as journalistic independence. “BuzzFeed is a modern media company; it didn’t start in those days, so it can create a different model,” says Ben Fahy of StopPress.
Victoria University student Henry Cooke, 21, who works part-time for Stuff.co.nz, believes his generation is accepting of the pressures online media is under.
“A lot of young people these days have a soft libertarian, individualist mind-set, where we go, ‘It’s a free service so I can’t complain’,” he says. “They’re quite fatalistic about it, like ‘You can’t change it, it’s how things are now, it’s the internet’.”
BuzzFeed’s readers – mostly, Perretti says, “18- to 34-year-olds who are educated, active online, and culturally aware” – seem to see its sponsored content as an irritation, rather than a conflict of interest, partly because of its entertainment focus.
But it will become harder and harder for BuzzFeed to defend its seamless integration of ads (and its “Community” section) as it works towards its goal of becoming “the leading news source for the social, mobile world”.
It’s jarring enough as it is to see a report on the US federal government shutdown one spot about “If Karen from Mean Girls had Instagram” without ads adding to the mix.
“I don’t think of BuzzFeed as intellectual, like The New York Times or The Telegraph. It’s more like a celebrity magazine or gossip tabloid” – Anna, 22
Perretti has acknowledged that BuzzFeed lacks the trust traditional news brands have won over the past 100 years – “but we are working hard to earn it, and it won’t take us 100 years to get there.”
But in May, its entire politics section was sponsored by the right-wing billionaire Charles Koch of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately-held company in the U.S. As BuzzFeed itself might have paraphrased the incredulous reaction of commentators: it was a complete “fail”.
“Many younger readers will be savvy enough to distinguish between paid-for content and stuff produced independently by the editorial staff, but many will not be,” says Hamish McKenzie, a Kiwi now based in Baltimore, reporting for the tech website PandoDaily.
“BuzzFeed should do its part to educate readers on the difference between advertorial and editorial, even as it further muddies the water.”
The absence of hard-and-fast rules about advertising’s relationship with web design means that, to an extent, the industry is moving faster than the audience.
“Web design is a mix of psychology and visual design – there are conventions, but no real rules, and people can take advantage of that,” says Jack Cunningham of Twenty. “If you get in a car, you don’t expect to see the handbrake in a completely different location. But on the web, especially since mobile, conventions haven’t had time to mature to the point where users fully understand them.”
The revenue to be had from native ads means more reputable publishers than BuzzFeed are bound to become less scrupulous about ensuring distance between advertising and journalism.
The Atlantic has already come under fire for blending church – in this case, the Church of Scientology, for which it ran a glowing advertorial – and state.
“It can be a win-win for everyone, but it can also be pushing someone’s envelope,” says StopPress’ Fahy. “If you do try to trick people into thinking it’s legitimate content, you’ll probably have a bit of a backlash. The general rule is if it fits [the publisher’s brand], it’s more palatable.”
The examples of native advertising either stand alone as good journalism, or are kept altogether separate from a publication’s editorial team and content. The Listener’s recent “Influentials” series was “unlocked” for readers by The University of Auckland (which, deputy editor Mark Broatch clarified, had no editorial influence), while Stuff.co.nz partners with the House of Travel for its travel content.
But there’s a fine line between selling ads and selling out, and some publications have opted to investigate other forms of revenue rather than risk ending up on the wrong side of it.
The Listener and the National Business Review have had some success behind a paywall, which serves the added benefit of relieving the need to court clicks.
“People won’t pay for churnalism, advertorial, or a story on Kate Middleton they can see on 10,000 other sites,” wrote the NBR’s Chris Keall. “Such non-advertiser sources of revenue are a good thing across all media.”
But for mainstream media, paywalls come at the cost of a mass audience. “The biggest sacrifice is that you lose the potential virality you’d otherwise get from sharing via Twitter, Facebook, or email,” says PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie. “If you’re not part of that everyday global conversation, then you risk confining yourself to only niche relevance.”
McKenzie believes the business model for media needs to change so as to better incentivise “slow, methodical journalism that nourishes”. He points to publications like NSFWCorp, The New Inquiry and Beacon using subscription models, and The New York Times and The Washington Post’s metered paywalls, as examples of how that change might manifest itself.
The advent of reading longform on mobile devices, too, presents new opportunities for revenue, as Longform.org has found.
“We need more experiments around small, friction-light micropayments to access particular articles; ‘all-you-can-eat’ subscription models like Netflix and Spotify; and story-specific monetised actions like “Donate to a cause mentioned in this story,” says McKenzie. “I suspect the ultimate solution is something we haven’t yet seen.”
In New Zealand, small-scale experimentation is underway. The potential for micro-payments to fund quality journalism was discussed at the internet and media conference Nethui earlier this year, and the new business and government news service Hive News is funded by a subscription of $29 a month.
Meanwhile, publicly-funded media like Radio New Zealand and, by extension, The Wireless, gets to opt out of the race for revenue.
It’s a luxurious position to be in, but not one without responsibility.
McKenzie points out that the standard of proof in media is lower than in science, where there’s peer review, or the courts, where there are lawyers, judges and juries – even though all three are beholden to the public interest.
“If we continue a ‘race to the bottom’ in the media that is dominated by the page view mentality and vulnerable to increasingly lower barriers to entry for ‘reporters’, those standards will likely deteriorate further,” he says. “And if the financial models keep crumbling, we’ll only be able to pay those ‘guardians of truth’ less. … A financially disinterested public media is more crucial than ever.”
McKenzie’s reference to the “guardians of truth” seems quaint in an era where a site that rose to prominence for its lists of cat gifs can rebrand as a credible source of news, but it’s a reminder that just because native advertising presents publishers with a stream of revenue doesn’t mean it’s in their best interests to accept it.
“I hope people get the message that you have to pay for something at some point,” says Cunningham of Twenty. “The media’s been about free for so long, when you have to pay for something, it’s a surprise.” The proliferation of online media means we have more content, available for less investment, than ever before; the question is, at what cost to its integrity.
Cover image by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
