Matt Burns’ “The Black Friday Survival Guide” is original content as it should be: Clever, funny, provocative, and unique. This piece of craftsmanship, posted yesterday to TechCrunch, stands apart from the dribble that all looks alike, because it is—lazy aggregators copying news someone else reports, or too often similarly regurgitates. Puke is gross. Let’s not remake and rebake as dinner.
His piece of brilliance evokes the classic survival guide recast to the urban landscape, where dangerous predators roam shopping malls huntings deals and around whom anyone with even 10 meters distance risks being collateral damage. The safest place to be on Black Friday is somewhere else. But if you must go out, Matt has your back.
Buzz Cutter
In my book Responsible Reporting: Field Guide for Bloggers, Journalists, and Other Online News Gatherers, I spend beaucoup paragraphs emphasizing the importance of building audience by way of creating original content. I must admit that some of the best stuff has little redeeming value, but it does entertain.
That’s good segue for BuzzFeed, which editor-in-chief I admonish alongside Sarah Lacy for their roles raking Uber. Both border hardline conflict-of-interest, given that some of their venture capitalist backers also invest in Uber rival Lyft. That alone discredits both—Ben for, ahem, accidentally on purpose reporting off-the-record comments and Sarah for taking an activist role ripping new A-holes into Uber execs she claims are, well, A-holes.
Ben gets good treatment in my book for efforts to turn BuzzFeed into an honest-to-Heaven, legitimate news site. Some of today’s front-page headlines speak to his—well, you know, ah—success:
- “This Is What The Kardashians Look Like Without Makeup” (and I thought they were bad smathered with Cover Girl).
- “24 Times Quotation Marks Totally ‘Changed’ The Meaning” (and the ones I place around the headline aren’t among them).
- “Are You On Fleek?” (hey, the weird eyebrows on Vine thing is too hard for mere mortals—e.g. non-millennials—to explain).
Share Me
The only thing these ditties have in common with TechCrunch’s survival guide is originality. Although: I enjoyed reading Matt’s story and regret clicking the other links. They’re original linkbait at best, which is what BuzzFeed editors want.
BuzzFeed offers a fascinating look into how its content is shared rather than searched. Writing for GigaOM, Matthew Ingram gives the CliffNotes version so you don’t have to pour over reams of data and graphics. Simply stated:
One of the core principles behind BuzzFeed is that social sharing is more important than search, so it’s no surprise that the main driver of traffic (which is estimated to be about 150 million unique visitors per month) is social—in fact, the company says that its social traffic is five times larger than its search traffic.
Over at Digiday, Lucia Moses explains: “For BuzzFeed, Google isn’t a focus. It has engineered itself almost entirely for social sharing”. Newest tactic: “The social publisher has discovered that writing original, made-for-sharing URLs can act like a rocket booster for a post”.
Sweet Freedom
That’s how you escape the Google economy, baby, and search as means to an end—meaning ad revue for Big G and the end for you the content producer. No one can long sustain livelihood by giving away content for free that costs money to produce. Search is a necessary utility that too often is a necessary evil for content creators.
BuzzFeed’s social escape tunnel opens about 3 meters outside the Google free economy’s prison gates. More content creators need to go there. TechCrunch has long tradition of producing original content from original reporting. BuzzFeed is my no means in the same news gathering class, but nevertheless demonstrates how red (social) is the new black (search).
Why look for stuff you want to read or watch, when it comes to you? Now, that’s magic behind BuzzFeed’s formula.
Photo Credit: RE-CUT