Read this or be left out

Heard of ‘FOMO’, or the fear of missing out? The social anxiety disorder, magnified in today’s hyperconnected world, is what makes us reach for our phones a hundred times every day. It’s also why F5 wears out on keyboards, what makes us tweet with one eye on the TV and the other on the iPad, and what headline writers across the world use to manipulate us into clicking on links on the social web. That’s because in the age of this, the newest of new media, the headline decides everything.

Everything pretty much refers to the fight for the most valuable virtual real estate out there—your friends, links, circles across social media platforms. Think a world of writing where if a story is merely read it is useless, and probably as good as not written. It has to be read and shared. Only then is the cycle of consumption in the age of social news complete.

Almost everybody, Indian or otherwise, who creates content on the web, wants it to go viral. The appetite is such that social news website Upworthy’s presentation titled ‘How to Make That One Thing Go Viral’ has nearly 500,000 views on Slideshare. But nobody has perfected shareworthiness like eight-year-old New York-based social news and entertainment website BuzzFeed. Starting out as an initiative to test, track, and create viral content on the web, the little-known site went on to break the news that, in the U.S. elections, ex-presidential candidate John McCain was endorsing challenger Mitt Romney. ‘This Little Kid Dancing Like A Maniac Is All Of Us’, ‘If All Of Your Ex-Boyfriends Were Cats, These Are The Cats They Would Be’, ‘14 Sexy Stock Photos Of Men Eating Doughnuts’, and many such gonzo stories later, it seems BuzzFeed’s recipe for success is to combine targeted advertising with seemingly unrelated stories—understanding who its readers are and what they want. It has taught marketers to write BuzzFeed-like stories, which promote their brands without in-your-face advertising messages. And the ads often appear on Facebook or Twitter with the shared stories. (It’s just coincidence that BuzzFeed’s acronym ‘BF’ is Facebook’s ‘FB’ in reverse.) BuzzFeed content is constantly shared on many social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and currently it’s No. 3 with regard to how many people share stories published on a social news platform.

Media everywhere is changing the way they look at the web because of BuzzFeed’s success. New business models are being created on the basis of shareable content. And India, by virtue of the sheer weight of its population and the growth that lies ahead, is in the spotlight of this sharing-based universe. India now has the third-largest Internet population, which, according to Cisco, is expected to be more than 526 million by 2018.

WHAT WORKED FOR BUZZFEED in the U.S. might work with a certain kind of globally attuned audience in India, but for these sites to become genuinely popular, they need to appeal to Indian sensibilities. That is where Pune-based StoryPick and Delhi-based ScoopWhoop can teach them a thing or two.

ScoopWhoop’s co-founder, 26-year-old Sattvik Mishra, says the company owes its name to the Indianness of following one word with a similar sounding and mostly nonsensical word (think roti-shoti, paani-vaani). The seven-member team, working out of south Delhi, puts out six to seven stories a day. Some of them are original (suggested and written by staff) and many curated (published after trawling the web for shareworthy content). Mishra wants ScoopWhoop to be “an ‘easy to the consumer’ content company that will keep the social age in mind”. At the moment, it is funded by Sidharth Rao, CEO and co-founder of online advertising agency venture WebChutney. The two founders—Mishra and Rishi Pratim Mukherjee—were, in fact, working in WebChutney and launched ScoopWhoop in their spare time, and Rao offered to fund it.

Another, StoryPick, which boasts of 5.6 million unique visitors as of May, is run by Sangeeta Sarma and Tonmoy Goswami, who were frustrated with their IT jobs and wanted to do something on their own. After a few misadventures (a marketplace for talent and a conversation platform, both of which didn’t take off), they launched StoryPick but didn’t put their names or contact details on the site. This, Goswami says, was done because they wanted to see if their friends would share the content—a validation for their new venture. Their friends shared and the venture continues to be bootstrapped. But there have been many “inbound enquiries” from VC players and media conglomerates.

Both ScoopWhoop and StoryPick are ripe acquisition targets for big media companies fishing for a larger share of the Internet audience. Earlier this year, overtures from the Times Group, one of India’s largest media houses, were rebuffed by ScoopWhoop. A senior exec with the Times Group said the primary reason why big media companies are circling over these firms is because the urban youngster is a notoriously difficult animal for age-old newspapers like The Times of India or the Hindustan Times to address. Many in the demographic don’t read newspapers, and instead consume content online. Many of them are massive influencers of popular culture, and sharing to their immediate circle is the Internet’s equivalent of flexing muscles. Social news sites are extremely popular in that age group and rather than looking to create such content in-house, he contends, it is easier to acquire these websites.

BuzzFeed too, armed with $46.3 million (Rs 278.2 crore) in funding (with another $200 million expected) and $120 million in revenue this year, is open to acquisition, according to Scott Lamb, vice president, international, BuzzFeed, even though that is something they haven’t considered in the past. The popularity of ScoopWhoop and StoryPick on social feeds here has been “good market research” for BuzzFeed, which launched its India offshoot in Mumbai last month. “Our traffic from India is already sizeable, given we have so little India-specific content. But that should change now,” says Lamb.

WHILE MOST OF WHAT is written about shareworthy content concentrates on BuzzFeed’s brand of ‘fun’ stories, serious journalism ventures too are taking on the challenge of populating social feeds. They have to. The impact of BuzzFeed is best summed up by a recent story in The Guardian that quoted Howard Stringer, Sony’s ex-chief and an independent director on the board of the BBC. Looking at the performance of the BBC’s digital assets, Stringer suggested that the venerable institution should pick up lessons from BuzzFeed to drive a digital presence that is “punching well below its weight”. He added that BBC’s web presence lacked “character and personality” compared with younger rivals such as Vice Media and BuzzFeed. Stringer, as The Guardian reports, “criticised BBC’s web presence as having the neutral tone of a news bulletin compared with the vibrant presence of its social media rivals”. Remember, BBC is 92 years old.

Many of those working in the media may find that line of questioning distasteful. But why can’t serious content be designed for a social audience? That is what Quartz, the two-year-old U.S.-based business news website, is trying to create. It promises big—calling itself a “digitally native news outlet” which, like Wired in the 1990s and The Economist in the 1840s, embodies the era in which it was born.

Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief and president, Quartz, says it is trying to show how “high-quality journalism can exist on the Internet”. “All our content is designed to be read on the mobile and tablets, and we populate them with charts. It is very hard to take content and retrofit it to social,” he adds. Note: Making content social essentially is a game of detail, which involves ticking boxes like design, clean layouts, single-click sharing, uniform-size stories, non-intrusive advertising, and importantly, an arresting headline.

Quartz launched in India in June through a content partnership with Mumbai-based news website Scroll.in, which has similar moorings, but focusses more on politics and culture. It was started by media entrepreneur Samir Patil, who says that it caters to the demand for high-quality content from India, which isn’t being provided by Indian publications online so far. “Internet content in India has been a race to the bottom,” says Patil. Quartz’s arrangement is that the editorial inputs for the India site will come from the local team, with the U.S. team looking at monetising the content through custom and native advertising.

SO, WHAT IS NATIVE ADVERTISING (and its variants) that everyone is betting on? For starters, it is not something that has been that well defined, and many in the industry admit that it is work in progress. According to eMarketer, a market research company, the perceptions about what constitutes native advertising are as varied as the ads themselves and the places where they appear. There’s still disagreement over basic terminology such as ‘native advertising’, ‘sponsored content’, and ‘branded content’. Some make distinctions among those terms, while others use them interchangeably.

As long as the colour of money remains the same, no matter how native advertising is defined, there will be people betting on it. Take the case of a story on ScoopWhoop—‘29 Problems People Who Wear Glasses Face’—that is sponsored by contact lens maker Bausch & Lomb. For most, that is right up the native advertising alley—a story that is fun to read, targets a segment, and conveys the message in a rather subtle manner.

ScoopWhoop’s Mishra is happy that most of the native paid content created thus far has been a result of inbound queries—brands coming to them looking for ideas to work together, rather than them going out and actively marketing. They have also worked with Pepsi, Airtel, and Budweiser. He explains that the interest is generated mostly because the marketing teams in these firms themselves see shared content from ScoopWhoop and the likes on their Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, and are often curious enough to reach out to them for discussions.

But that kind of awareness is not yet high enough for a site like Quartz to open a business office in India. Its launch here was on the back of a deal with GE as their founding partner (with 50% ad inventory across custom and native advertising) and was negotiated and signed in the U.S. Quartz publisher Jay Lauf feels that Indian marketers still need time to accept the idea of native advertising. “Right now, we are talking only to multinationals,” he says.

BuzzFeed too is toeing a similar line. “Our initial interest in India is purely editorial and we are keeping in mind the vast potential in future than big numbers in the present. We are familiar with the work of educating advertisers. In most countries we launch, we have to establish ourselves as a new advertising platform,” says Lamb.

That awareness may not be too far away though. An eMarketer report titled Native Advertising: Difficult to Define, but Definitely Growing, says, “the perceived effectiveness is fuelling marketer investment in native advertising”. Quoting an estimate from media experts BIA/Kelsey, the report says, “the native ad spending on social media alone would grow from $3.1 billion this year to $5 billion in 2017”. As a percentage of total social ad spending, it projected native to rise from 38.8% in 2014 to 42.4% in 2017. India’s digital advertising is at a mere $500 million, with native currently a sliver. If all goes to plan, the revolution will be digitised.