Jonah Peretti este co-fondatorul lui Huffington Post și fondatorul lui BuzzFeed, deci ar trebui să știe câte ceva despre media, digital media sau social media. Bloggerul Felix Salmon a stat cu el de vorbă timp de șase ore și a publicat interviul integral pe medium.com.

În peste 20.000 de cuvinte, Peretti ține o lecție despre digital media, despre viitorul conținutului pe internet, despre cum creezi conținut viral, dar și despre viață. Este un interviu pe care orice pasionat de social media sau web ar trebui să-l citească.

Foarte interesantă este și prezentarea de pe Medium, interviul fiind grupat în opt părți, și, în ciuda lungimii sale, nu este deloc greu de citit.

Iată câteva citate care mi-au atras atenția:

Despre media

Then the other thing was this bedrock assumption that The New York Times’s content is just the best content. I think that they do a lot of tremendous journalism. They have a lot of great stuff. It’s just sometimes, the stories are boring, or, by certain metrics of excellence, they’re not excellent content.

I feel like what you see in the industry now is people jumping around and trying to find the God metric for content. It’s all about shares or it’s all about time spent or it’s all about pages or it’s all about uniques. The problem is you can only optimize one thing and you have to pick, otherwise all you’re doing is making a bunch of compromises if you try to optimize for multiple things.

Despre succes

One theory about early successes is that they often are fairly random. So there’s lots of smart people, there’s lots of pretty talented people and then, in some cases, they end up being a talented computer science grad at Stanford. Some of them go on to be professors and teach or work at good startups—and then Larry and Sergey are running this giant empire. Part of that is chance, or luck, or happenstance, the initial project being right for the moment and taking off and getting attention and it snowballs from there.

Despre… viral

We were thinking in terms of an actual epidemiological definition of viral, with a certain threshold of contagion that results in it growing through time. Instead of exponential decay, you get exponential growth. That is what viral is.

Despre inovație

The thing is, if you care about having an impact on the world, the too-early mode is the highest leverage point because you can have an idea, build a mock or a prototype of it, and then have those ideas find themselves in products that other people build that then scale up to massive.

What I learned first at HuffPost is that if you do something and make a splash and build something interesting, then people will give you money to do more stuff. They come to you and say, “Why don’t you take this to the next level? Let us invest.” And then you generate revenue, and that allows you to explore more ideas.

Despre Huffington Post

What he [Ken Lerer] said to me was, “I know business, you know the Internet, let’s build something together. Let’s start something.” There wasn’t an idea of what it was going to be, defined. It was just like, we’ve worked together on these things that have been successful. We bring in different pieces to it. It’s very complementary.

A great way to learn about the Internet is to build one of the biggest sites on the Internet. It’s hard to remember how much we’ve all changed, because we’ve changed so much.

Despre SEO

At its worst, SEO is someone finding an inferior article instead of a superior article because the site does a better job of writing for Google, but a worse job for writing for humans. I think that’s when, in my view, you’re over-optimizing.

There is some conflict between Google saying, “Well we want to serve the consumer,” and sending people to the article that the consumer likes the best. Or is Google supposed to send people to the article that costs the most to produce and supports the industry the most?

Despre BuzzFeed

That was the beginning. It was just all these simple little “one sentence plus three sentences” […] That was the original BuzzFeed. We did five things a day. It was just these five things.

For me, mentally, as Twitter is to Facebook, in terms of size and importance, so is news to the rest of BuzzFeed, the core viral stuff. It’s important, and it’s the kind of stuff which media people tend to notice. But in terms of attention or page views or whatever metric you want to use, it’s still always going to be the tail, not the dog.

When we have something that’s a hit, usually our response is not, “Let’s do more of those.” Our response is, “Let’s figure why this is a hit and make variations of this.”

In general, we tend to avoid a post that is designed to make the author feel smart and superior and the reader to vicariously feel smart and superior because a Hollywood film is mediocre or because something in culture is mediocre.

Part of the idea of BuzzFeed from the beginning was can we get to the point where the platform is more valuable than the expertise? If you actually have an idea or an insight into how things are shared or why they’re shared or what works, can you build that into either the technology platform or the data science or the culture of a team of people?

What do people add to a story when they share it? In some cases it’s better than the headline that our team wrote and in some cases shows why content matters to them. Because you say, “I’m sharing this” and explain why you’re sharing it.

Despre viață

life is tricky because it happens once and there’s no opportunity for A/B testing. It could be that you are living your best possible life and that if you re-play Felix Salmon’s life hundreds of other times, that this life you’re living is the best or among the top 5 percent of lives that you would have lived, and in lots of other ones you’d end up in an alley or in an unhappy relationship or with a job where you’re not intellectually fulfilled, and that you have found this amazing path.

Cam ceea ce fac eu acum

Say The New Yorker writes a really long 12,000 word piece on Scientology. That takes lots of reporting and lots of investment. That’s important work that our
industry should embrace and should find ways of supporting economically.

The average person who hears about that story doesn’t want to read the whole story. They’re at work, most likely. They do a Google search because they’ve heard about this Scientology scoop or long form piece. Their first result is the HuffPost link, not a New Yorker link. They look at it. It summarizes what the article is about. It says, “Here’s what was in it, here’s what was notable about it.” Has a few tweets from people. This is how people are reacting to it, and if you want to read it, here’s a link and you can go read the article.