Nitsuh Abebe pulls the curtain back on Upworthy’s editorial process. On the site’s mission:
Much of Upworthy’s content does feel like reality TV. A lot of it also feels like advertising. This isn’t an accident; the site’s built, tactically and deliberately, to appeal to what skeptics once called the lowest common denominator. Its choices are the ones you’d normally associate with a race to the bottom—the manipulative techniques of ads, tabloids, direct-mail fund-raising, local TV news (“Think This Common Household Object Won’t Kill Your Children? You’d Be Wrong”). It’s just that Upworthy assumes the existence of a “lowest common denominator” that consists of a human craving for righteousness, or at least the satisfaction that comes from watching someone we disagree with get their rhetorical comeuppance.
In some respects, Upworthy does represent a slight paradigm shift in the constantly churning world of writing and the web. It’s really about producing writing or visuals or videos that people want to share. Their contribution to the evolution of the web, like Buzzfeed’s, is honing and finessing and mastering the tricks and techniques of getting people to share Upworthy items on their Facebook pages. One reason so many of the posts are indeed shared, as the piece points out, is not just the very catchy formulaic headlines (already expiring from over-use) but, more importantly, that they are not strident or edgy or in any way discomfiting. That way, the posts can be attached to a Facebook feed as a way of expressing your identity, of solidarity with the disadvantaged, of the appearance of caring. It really is a beautiful circle, designed, of course, to make shitloads of moolah at some point by dominating the sharable content that has become much of our common reading material.
But here’s the thing: is crafting “content” for sharing the same thing as writing or journalism? Here’s my basic test.
Does the writer of the piece select the topic because he or she believes it sincerely to be worth writing about? And does the writer want the piece to be read for its point rather than merely passed around to maximize revenues and traffic? Upworthy rather brilliantly collapses its business rationale – nothing but “evergreen standards like ‘Human rights are a good thing’ and ‘Children should be taken care of’” that will be easily shared – and its journalistic rationale – i.e. we want to make the world a better place by being nice to children, puppies, etc. The reason why it’s hard to be completely cynical about Upworthy is that the content, if anyone reads it, is so, well, uplifting. But of course, that’s the real, deep cynicism behind it.
Next month, we’re told, Upworthy will unveil its monetization strategy. So at some point, we’ll see exactly what it’s about: the money or the writing? But it’s vital to recall what Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat has discovered, illustrated in the chart above:
A widespread assumption is that the more content is liked or shared, the more engaging it must be, the more willing people are to devote their attention to it. However, the data doesn’t back that up. We looked at 10,000 socially-shared articles and found that there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content.
When we combined attention and traffic to find the story that had the largest volume of total engaged time, we found that it had fewer than 100 likes and fewer than 50 tweets. Conversely, the story with the largest number of tweets got about 20% of the total engaged time that the most engaging story received.
So Buzzfeed and Upworthy are really about sharing for money than reading for interest. We may be evolving into a web where everything is shared and nothing is actually read. And journalists are leading the charge.
The Dish 