People in the media industry are buzzing about entrepreneur Jonah Peretti, and it's not just his latest venture, BuzzFeed, that has them talking. The Huffington Post co-founder has made a name for himself exploring the ways information spreads online, turning an academic interest into a highly lucrative series of businesses that are prompting people in the media industry to rethink the way they distribute content—especially online.

    The inspiration for this conversation came from an interview of Peretti that I conducted at this year's American Magazine Media Conference in New York. Here are the highlights.

    Serwer: By now, everybody knows what BuzzFeed is, or at least has been to the website. What exactly, to your mind, is BuzzFeed?

    Peretti: I think I maybe see BuzzFeed differently than a lot of our readers see it. I think a lot about how ideas spread, how information spreads, why is it that something you're really proud of and you spend a lot of time creating sometimes doesn't go anywhere, and something that you kind of do on the side, on a lark, ends up getting shared and passed around and having this big impact. And so I think of BuzzFeed as this platform that enables us to understand how people are sharing and distributing things like entertainment content, journalism, branded content, all these various types of content that we distribute on this platform that we built.

    When we started, we really were a laboratory trying to understand how this stuff works. Now, we're a team of really dedicated editors and reporters and people creating entertainment to distribute across the web on our site.

    Where do you want to take BuzzFeed? You don't characterize it as a journalistic enterprise per se. What is it most analogous to in the traditional media world?

    I think that there are certain companies that, on the web, you can compare to a traditional entity. So you can look at eBay and say there were auctions in the real world, and now there are auctions online. Or you can look at Amazon and you can say there were stores that people go to, and now there are online stores. In fact, at The Huffington Post, we talked about the "Internet newspaper." It was kind of comparing the site to a [printed] newspaper.

    眼下，传媒圈正在热议企业家乔纳•佩雷蒂，人们聊的不仅仅是他最新创立的网站BuzzFeed。这位《赫芬顿邮报》( The Huffington Post )联合创始人因探索信息的在线传播方式而声名鹊起。他把一种学术兴趣转化为一系列盈利前景可观的企业，进而促使业内人士反思分销内容，尤其是在线分销内容的方式。

    这段对话的灵感源自今年我在纽约举行的美国杂志媒体大会(American Magazine Media Conference)上对佩雷蒂的采访。下面是这次对话的精华部分。

    苏安迪：到现在为止，大家都知道BuzzFeed是一家怎样的网站，或者至少访问过这家网站。那么，在你的心目中，BuzzFeed究竟是什么？

    佩雷蒂：我想我浏览BuzzFeed的角度或许跟许多读者不大一样。我主要思考的是，思想如何传播，信息如何传播，为什么有时候你真正引以为傲、费心费力创造的东西却无人关注，倒是一些你抱着“玩票”心态，顺手做的东西却无心插柳柳成荫，获得共享，四处传播，还产生了巨大的影响。所以，我把BuzzFeed看成这样一个平台，它能够让我们理解人们如何分享、扩散娱乐内容、新闻和品牌内容，也就是我们在我们创建的这个平台上扩散的所有这些不同类型的内容。

    创建伊始，我们真的就是一家实验室，尝试着了解这样做是否行得通。现在，我们是一支具有奉献精神的团队，我们的编辑、记者和用户正在这个网站上创造供整个互联网分享的娱乐内容。

    你打算引领BuzzFeed走向何方？你并没有把这家网站本身定性为一家新闻企业。它最类似于传统媒体世界的哪一家媒体？

    我认为，某些互联网公司确实可以跟某家传统实体进行比较。比方说，现实世界有各种拍卖活动，现在eBay把拍卖活动转移到了网上。再比如，人们经常去传统的商场购物，亚马逊(Amazon)就是一家在线商场。实际上，我们经常说《赫芬顿邮报》就是一家“互联网报纸”。这家网站与纸质版报纸具有一定的可比性。

    One of the things that is counterintuitive about BuzzFeed is that there's not a natural corollary to what we're doing because it isn't possible to distribute content through word-of-mouth in print. People rip out magazine or newspaper articles and mail them, and there's some small amount of distribution, but we're reaching 85 million unique visitors without owning a printing press or a broadcast pipe or anything. And every day we have to make content that people think is worth sharing, and we don't reach any audience at all unless we make content that people think is so good that they're willing to pass it on and share it with all their friends. That model doesn't have an offline version of it.

    That does make it more confusing. It's easier to understand a business when you say, "Oh, it used to be done, you know, this way, and now it's done more efficiently using the Internet or using technology." What we're doing you couldn't have done without the Internet.

    BuzzFeed is a commercial enterprise, a business. You are interested in making money, ultimately, and in growing it. Right?

    Yeah. We became profitable this year and we've been growing our team. We want to build a sustainable company. We like to think, what would a media company be if you created one from scratch today? What would a media company be for the era of social and mobile? [What would it be like] to build that company? Generating revenue is an important part of building a company. So is having great investigative journalism. So is having really entertaining content. We have a pretty broad purview—a pretty broad range of things we do.

    You're really all about leveraging the viral aspect of the Internet. That's what you started out with at MIT, with that Nike iD thing where you were denied a request to put "sweatshop" on your shoes and the story went viral. And your friend said you couldn't replicate that. That was your "Aha!" moment. So social platforms are, in a way, your lifeblood. Tell me about the landscape of social media, which social platforms are the most important to you, and which ones are you most sanguine about.

    What we've found is that content spreads on different networks for different reasons. There are underlying human dynamics for social content. There are reasons why people share. But certain platforms are better for certain types of sharing. Twitter is very fast. Partly because of the architecture of Twitter, things flow so quickly and disappear so quickly that you need to post things that are of the moment. And so that's why Twitter is great for things like live television, breaking news, and real-time events. Twitter is also much better for interest-based content. So people on Twitter can follow tech if they're interested in tech, or business if they're interested in business, or they can follow celebrities that they're fans of.

    On Facebook, because people use it as their actual network of people that they're friends with in their real life—you have friends from college, you have friends from high school, you have friends from work, you have a diverse range of people that you're connected to—you don't really want to share things that only a very small subset of people would be interested in. So if you're tweeting about running, you can write about running and people who are interested in running can follow you. But if you start posting on Facebook constantly about running, and most of your friends don't care about running and actually kind of hate you because you're a runner, or at least it makes them feel bad about them not being a runner or whatever, you know, it doesn't really work that well. So Facebook is much more tied to broad human emotion and things that everyone can relate to, and things that connect people with the people in their lives. It's not so much about the information in the content; it's about how that content allows you to connect with other people in your life.

    但是，就BuzzFeed而言，一件违反直觉的事情是，我们正在做的事情并不是一个自然推论出的结果。因为印刷版内容不可能通过口口相传来传播。人们撕下杂志或报纸文章，把它邮递出去，这样做可以产生少量的散播效应。但在没有印刷机或广播管道的情况下，我们正在抵达8,500万独立访客。我们每天都需要制作一些人们认为值得分享的内容。如果我们制作不出人们认为非常优质，以至于他们愿意传递、并跟所有朋友分享的内容，我们就根本无法吸引到受众。实体世界并不存在这样一种模式。

    这种模式确实让这家网站更加令人迷惑。如果你说：“哦，过去曾经采用过这种方式，但现在利用互联网或技术来做更有效率。”人们就更容易理解一家企业。如果没有互联网，我们正在做的事情就不可能发生。

    BuzzFeed是一家商业企业，一门生意。你最终还是想通过它的发展壮大来赚钱，是这样吧？

    是啊。我们今年已经开始盈利，我们一直在扩充团队。我们试图打造一家可持续发展的公司。我们总是思考，如果今天从零开始，创建一家媒体公司，它将是什么样子？一家面向社交和移动时代的媒体公司会是什么模样？创建这样一家公司将是怎样一番景象？创造收入是构建一家公司的重要组成部分，创作优质的调查性报道和真正有意思的内容亦是如此。我们的视角非常广阔，我们要做非常广泛的事情。

    你的确非常善于利用互联网的病毒式传播效应。最初是你在麻省理工学院(MIT)读书的时候，你要求耐克公司(Nike)在你订购的运动鞋上标注“血汗工厂”字样，但遭到了拒绝。这个故事迅速在网上传播开来。你的朋友说你不可能复制这样的传播效应。那是你的“茅塞顿开时刻！”所以，在某种程度上，社交平台就是你的命根子。给我讲讲你怎么社会化媒体的格局，对你来说，哪些社交平台是最重要的？你最看好哪些平台？

    我们发现，内容因为不同原因在不同网络传播。究其根本，社会化内容需要人来传播。人们愿意分享是有原因的。但对于某些内容而言，一些平台的分享效果更好。Twitter的传播速度非常迅速，海量讯息来也匆匆，去也匆匆，以至于人们必须发布与当下密切相关的内容，这跟Twitter的架构有一定关系。这也是为什么电视直播、突发新闻和实时事件等内容更适合在Twitter上传播。此外，对于依托于兴趣的内容，Twitter的传播效果也要比其他社交网络好得多。所以，如果你对技术或商业感兴趣，你可以在Twitter上关注技术或商业资讯。如果你是一个追星族，你可以在Twitter上关注明星动向。

    在Facebook上，因为人们把它当作一个真实的人际网络，用它来联络在现实生活中结交的朋友——比如你在大学、高中或工作中相识的朋友，以及与你存在各种联系的其他人——你真的不想分享一些只有极少数人感兴趣的东西。所以，如果你打算在Twitter上发布关于跑步的帖子，你可以写一些关于跑步的东西，对跑步感兴趣的人或许就会关注你。但如果你开始在Facebook持续发布跑步讯息，而你的大多数朋友都对跑步没兴趣，甚至憎恶你有这样一个爱好，或者至少这些讯息使得他们为自己不常跑步而感到惭愧，那么它就不会产生很好的联络效果。所以说，与Facebook相关联的是宽泛的人类情感，以及每个人都深有体会，能够把生活中的朋友连接在一起的事物。它的真谛并不是蕴含于内容的信息，而是这些内容如何把你跟日常生活中的其他人连接在一起。

    And then something like Pinterest is much slower. People are actually bookmarking things in Pinterest—making boards of DIY projects they want to do later. Things spread at a slower rate, but there's a lot deeper engagement where you're actually cooking a recipe or you're building a dresser or you're doing something that you have to wait for the weekend to have enough time to do.

    And the list goes on. How do you tailor your business or your content to each one of these social platforms?

    Well, part of it is the type of content. We think about that on a human level—we're not like, "Look at Pinterest. Let's make the perfect Pinterest. Let's game Pinterest's algorithm." It's more, "Let's make something that people are proud to share. Let's make something that people see and say, 'This is going to be more fun with someone else.' " So things like humor, things like cute animals, things like breaking news, things where when you engage with the content, you immediately want to share it and bring other people into the conversation.

    On one hand, you are incredibly data-driven. But you also rely on your gut, right? How do you balance those two things? How much is gut-driven and how much is data-driven?

    People often say, "I go with my gut," and they forget that their gut is informed by huge amounts of data and past experience. It's like if you've launched five magazines that have failed, and then someone wants to launch a similar one, a sixth one. You're like, "I'm going to go with my gut. This isn't a good idea." That doesn't mean that you have some deep insight. You actually have these five very strong, painful data points that have informed your gut. That's why when you look at someone senior in any company, almost always their gut is to do the thing that they had success previously in their career doing. They want to do that thing again and again.

    It's good to not always trust your gut, to have some skepticism about it, and to constantly have new data coming in and constantly question what you actually know. A lot of what we do at BuzzFeed is give dashboards to every person who works at BuzzFeed where they're seeing how people are engaging with the content they're producing: Is it going up? Is it going down? They can test hypotheses and theories and say, "All right, this worked in the past. Can I make it work again? Can I do something similar? Can I take one part of it and make that work?" And you start to learn through having a healthy skepticism and lots of access to new data.

    You always hear people who say, "Well, we can't be a slave to the numbers on the web because if we only follow the numbers, it will lead us down some path." You don't have that problem at all, do you? Don't you only follow the numbers?

    No. It's dangerous to only follow the numbers. I think there's a lot of over-optimization on the web. You see this sort of "side boob" trap or something, where you put some picture of a celebrity whose dress lets you see the side of her boob on the front of your website, and you say, "Wow! That gets a really high click-through rate." If you were a slave to the numbers, you'd start putting more stuff like that and more stuff like that and more stuff like that. And pretty soon you would have a site full of trashy, salacious garbage, and you would say, "Oh, I'm just looking at the numbers," but you would be hitting a local maximum, where lots of people would never want to read your site just because 10 percent of your readers are horny guys who can't resist clicking, or women who can't resist gawking at celebrities.

    图片分享网站Pinterest要慢得多。人们其实是利用Pinterest给某些东西设定电子书签——为他们打算以后从事的DIY项目制作布告板。讯息的传播速度较慢，但如果你正在制作一个烹饪配方，一个梳妆台，或者你打算做一件必须等到周末、有足够时间来做的事情，那么你就会更加深入地接触这家社交网络。

    这样的例子不胜枚举。你如何调整BuzzFeed的业务或内容，以适应每家社交平台的需要？

    怎么说呢，措施之一是内容的类型。我们是从人的层面来思考这个问题的——我们不会说，“瞧瞧人家Pinterest，让我们打造一个更完美的Pinterest，让我们模仿Pinterest的算法。”我们的反应是，“让我们创作人们非常乐意分享的内容。让我们创作人们一看到就说，‘跟人分享会更有乐趣’的内容。”所以，我们主要创作幽默、可爱的动物、突发新闻，以及那些你一看到内容马上就想跟人分享，从而把其他人带进谈话的东西。

    一方面，你是一位数据驱动型企业家，但你同时也依赖直觉，对吗？你如何平衡这两件事情？直觉驱动与数据驱动各占多大比重？

    人们常常说，“跟着感觉走，”但他们忘了，所谓直觉建立在大量的数据和过去的经验之上。比方说，如果你创办过5本最终失败的杂志，而有人打算推出相似的第6本杂志，你会说，“直觉告诉我，这不是一个好主意。”这并不意味着你具备某种深刻的洞察力。你其实拥有5个已经渗入你的直觉，非常强有力且痛苦的数据点。这就是为什么当你观察任何一位公司的资深人士时，他们的直觉几乎总是做他们已经获得成功的事情。他们想一遍又一遍地做这件事。

    不要总是相信自己的直觉，最好保持一定的质疑，不断吸收新数据，不断质疑自己已有的知识。在BuzzFeed，我们经常给每位员工发送各种仪表板，让他们观察人们对他们创造的内容作何反应：共享次数是在上升，还是在下降？他们可以测试假说和理论，说：“好吧，这样做过去很奏效。我可以让它再次产生影响吗？我还能做出类似的内容吗？我能不能从中抽取一部分，让它传播开来？”通过这种有益的质疑，同时获取大量新数据，人就会开始学习新知。

    你总是听到人们说：“是的，我们不能成为网络数字的奴隶，因为如果我们只是关注这些数字，它就会带领我们走进死胡同。”你完全不存在这个问题，对不对？难道你不是只关注数字吗？

    没错。只关注数字是非常危险的。我认为，网络上存在许多过度优化的问题。你经常看到这种“乳沟”陷阱，你在网站首页发布某个名人的照片，她的裙子可以让人们看到她的乳沟，你说，“哇！这张照片的点击率可真高啊。”如果你是数字的奴隶，你就会开始持续不断地发布类似这样的东西。于是，你的网站很快就会充满色情垃圾。你会说：“我只是始终在关注数字而已。”但你正在突破一个局部最大值，很多人再也不想浏览你的网站。因为仅仅只有10%的读者看见图片就点个不停的色情狂或者喜欢窥视名人隐私的女性。

    If you made something that was compelling and touched people in a deeper way, you might actually… there might be a mountain that you could climb, but if you're just following numbers, you think you're at the top of the mountain because every direction you go looks like it's downward to a lower click-through rate. But there's actually something there that's much bigger. Optimization can lead to finding local maximums, but those local maximums often aren't where you actually want to be. That's why exploring lots of different kinds of content, and thinking about things on a human level and saying, "Is this actually good content, or are people just clicking this because they can't resist clicking it because it's a guilty pleasure?" is important. You need to have creative, experimental people trying lots of different things. And then the data becomes meaningful.

    My college-age daughter loves BuzzFeed. What is your audience? What do you want your audience to be?

    We didn't really start with a demographic in mind. We just were focused on making content for the social web, with sharing being our distribution. Mobile and social really converged. So, it used to be that mobile was the thing that would stop things from spreading. I used to hate mobile. You'd get the email on your BlackBerry and say, "I'll look at this when I get back to the office." Now the most popular apps on mobile devices are social apps. When we see traffic from Facebook or Twitter, it's disproportionately mobile.

    So we were focused on making media for the way people consume media today, for mobile, for social. And then we kind of were looking at our contour numbers, and we were like, "Oh, wow! We have this super-young demographic. Why do we have this super-young demographic?" The reason was that we were making media for the way people were consuming content today, and young people are the earliest adopters of using smartphones to consume media, and of using the social web as their main source of content. So we kind of accidentally ended up with this demographic of readers in their twenties and thirties who are very active on social media, who are very educated, who have high incomes relative to the peers their same age, but not relative to their parents, and who share content at a really high rate and engage with content in a very voracious way.

    Do you want to get older? Do you want to get broader? Is it something that you seek to do?

    I think we will. I mean, it's hard to predict the future. My guess is that a lot of the media consumption behaviors of young people will start to spread to a broader audience. I actually don't think we're demographically defined. It's more a way of consuming content media, and I think there are older people who do consume media that way, and they'll probably increase. That will be a growth area for us, just the same way that older people were a growth area for Facebook.

    How many people go through the front door of BuzzFeed.com? Does that speak to the tension between search and social?

    We have millions of people go to our front page and tens of millions of people go to our "B" pages and articles. Social has really become the starting point—the Facebook newsfeed, the Twitter stream—where most people are finding their news and information now. It's become something that has become more and more prevalent, particularly for young people. And we are in those streams at a really high rate. We're one of the most popular sites on Facebook and Twitter and other social sites.

    People go to the front page of BuzzFeed partly because they've seen a bunch of things in their stream, and they're like, "Oh, I like this site. Why don't I go to the source?" I think that happens. But also people are going to look for something to share. So people come to the front page of BuzzFeed saying, "Oh, that article sucks. This one's not for me. This isn't my cup of tea. But this one is perfect, and I'm going to share it with all of my friends." So the eclecticness of our home page almost is a benefit because it lets people pass over things that isn't the right content for them, find the one that is, and put that into their stream and get the sharing going on the social web.

    如果以更深入的方式创作出引人注目、打动人心的内容，其实有希望爬上一座大山。但如果只关注数据，你可能会认为自己已经爬到了山顶，因为接下来无论往哪个方向走都会导致点击率下降。但那里其实蕴含着远大得多的前景。优化可以引领你发现局部最大值，但这些局部最大值往往不是你真正想要的东西。这就是我们为什么探索不同类型的内容，从人的层面上思考问题。“这真的是优质内容吗？人们点击它是否仅仅因为他们无法抗拒，还是仅仅因为它能够带来一种混杂着负罪心里的快感？”提出这类的问题非常重要。你需要让人们创造性地试验许多不同的事情。然后，数据会变得有意义。

    我女儿正是上大学的年龄，非常喜欢BuzzFeed。你的受众是哪些人？你希望你的受众是哪些人？

    创办这家网站时，我们真的没有考虑过目标受众群体。我们只是集中精力为社交网络创作内容，共享是我们散播内容的方式。移动和社交真正融合在一起。这么说来，过去阻止内容传播的正是手机。我以前很讨厌手机。你的黑莓手机(BlackBerry )收到一封电邮时，你说，“回到办公室以后，我再查阅。”现在，移动设备上最流行的应用程序是社交应用。Facebook、Twitter的相当大一部分流量都来自移动终端。

    因此，我们专心致志地面向人们今天消费媒体的方式——面向移动，面向社交——来打造媒体。随后，当我们看到我们的等高线数字时，我们不由得惊呼：“哇！我们拥有一个超级年轻的受众群体。我们的受众群体为什么这么年轻呢？”原因在于，我们根据人们目前消费内容的方式来打造媒体，而年轻人恰好是最早使用智能手机消费媒体、同时把社交网络作为主要内容源的群体。所以，我们碰巧与这样一个读者群相遇。这些二三十岁的年轻人接受过良好的教育，拥有比同龄人更高的收入（虽然还比不上他们的父母）。他们在社交媒体上非常活跃，以非常快的速度共享内容，以一种非常贪婪的方式消费内容。

    你是否打算向年龄更大的读者拓展？你是否想拓宽读者群？这是不是你寻求做的事情？

    我想我们会的。我的意思是，未来很难预测。我猜想，年轻人的许多媒体消费行为会蔓延到更广泛的受众。我其实并不认为，我们的受众局限于某个具有人口统计学意义的群体。我们更多的是面向一种消费内容媒体的方式，我想一些老年人也在采用这种方式消费媒体。未来，他们的数量或许会增加。这对于我们来说将是一个增长点，就如同老年人是Facebook的增长点一样。

    现在有多少人登陆BuzzFeed.com的首页？它是否揭示了搜索和社交的紧张关系？

    几百万人登录我们的首页，几千万人阅读“B版”页面和文章。社交网络现在已经真正成为大多数人寻找新闻和信息的起点，比如Facebook的新闻源和Twitter的数据流。社交网络已经变得无所不在，对于年轻人尤为如此。我们正处在这些高速的信息流之中。在Facebook、Twitter和其他社交网络，我们都是最受欢迎的网站之一。

    一些人访问BuzzFeed首页在某种程度上是因为他们在自己的信息流中发现了一堆好内容，随后肯定在想：“噢，我喜欢这个网站。我为什么不直接去内容源看看呢？”我认为是这样一种情况。但也有一些人打算寻找某个可以分享的内容。所以，当人们登陆BuzzFeed首页时，他们说：“那篇文章很烂。这篇不适合我。这篇也不对我的胃口。但这篇很好啊，我要分享给我所有的朋友。”因此，兼收并蓄的BuzzFeed主页是一个福利，因为它让人们忽略那些不适合他们的内容，找到合适的内容，放进自己的信息流，让它们融入社交网络的共享洪流之中。

    Do you care about search at all anymore?

    We don't spend that much time thinking about search.

    Isn't that amazing, that SEO is not an important part of what you do?

    It's a tricky thing. I mean, I think that search will at some point have to catch up to social, you know, to understanding how to index and present content that is getting shared at a high rate. I think there's a problem now where Google doesn't have a lot of that social data. The aggregators win on search where people cram in key words and do SEO and rewrite stories. But on social, you want to share the authoritative story—the Ben Smith scoop is going to get re-tweeted a bunch of times, not the rewrite of the Ben Smith scoop. But the rewrite is going to be what ends up getting a lot of the traffic in Google. That's the thing that Google is going to have to figure out how to fix over the next years.

    Interestingly, it's not like Google's suffering right now particularly. At one point, I thought that search was going to kill search. Can both pies grow?

    Yeah. It's always hard to predict. BlackBerry had record profits right before it all started to fall apart. Google could have another ten years of rapid growth and success and drive us around in cars and tell us what to think and look at with glasses, or they could have real problems. It will be interesting to see.

    What percentage of BuzzFeed content originates from BuzzFeed?

    We have four types of content. We have news content created by our team of journalists and reporters. They really are not focused on aggregation; they are calling people, working sources, doing original stuff. We have entertainment, often characterized by our lists. And those lists are all original creations, although they often use material from, you know, AP and Reuters and Getty and image libraries and other sources. Then we have branded content, which is how we make our living, where our revenue comes from. Fifty of the top 100 brands used BuzzFeed's platform to launch branded content. And we also have community content, which is where you can go to BuzzFeed, go to the community section and create your own content and launch it. Four different types of content, all on top of the same technology platform that we developed.

    Let's talk about that branded, sponsored content. You treat that the same way you treat editorial in terms of optimizing the social component, right?

    Yeah. A few years ago, our traffic was starting to grow, and we had a board meeting, and my board asked me whether we had any revenue. And I said no.

    你已经不再关心搜索了，是吗？

    我们没有花那么多时间去考虑搜索。

    搜索引擎优化(SEO)不是你的重要工作之一，这是不是太不可思议了？

    这是一件难以捉摸的事情。我的意思是，我认为在将来某个时点，搜索必须要追赶上社交网络，以了解如何索引和呈现正在高速共享的内容。我觉得，谷歌公司(Google)现在面临的一个问题是，它并没有大量的社交数据。人们输入关键词，做搜索引擎优化，改写故事时，聚合器可充分发挥搜索功能。但在社交网络上，人们想分享权威性故事——经常在Twitter上被转发多次的是BuzzFeed主编本•史密斯的独家新闻，而不是这些新闻的改写版本。但改写版本会在谷歌上获得很多流量。这是谷歌在未来几年必须设法解决的问题。

    有意思的是，谷歌现在的日子似乎并不是特别难熬。我一度以为，社交网络将扼杀搜索平台。这两块馅饼能够同时成长吗？

    是啊。这种事情是很难预测的。就在黑莓手机即将开始土崩瓦解之前，它还获得了创纪录的利润呢。凭借无人驾驶轿车，左右我们的思维模式，以及谷歌眼镜，谷歌或许还能够经历另一个10年的迅速发展和成功，也可能他们会碰上真正的麻烦。就让我们拭目以待吧。

    在BuzzFeed上，你们自身的原创内容占多大比重？

    我们有4种类型的内容。BuzzFeed有我们的记者团队创作的新闻内容。这个团队的工作重心真的不是聚合新闻；他们给人们打电话，联系消息源，做原创的东西。我们也做娱乐内容，经常发布一些很有特色的榜单。尽管它们经常使用美联社(AP)、路透社(Reuters)、盖蒂照片社(Getty )、图像库和其他来源的材料，但这些榜单都是原创作品。此外，我们还制作品牌内容，这是我们维持生计的方式，我们的收入源泉。在100个顶级品牌中，有50个使用BuzzFeed的平台发布品牌内容。最后，我们也有社区内容。大家可以去BuzzFeed的社区转转，创作自己的内容，发布出来。这4种不同类型的内容，都是在我们开发的技术平台上发布的。

    请谈一谈接受品牌赞助的内容。就优化社会化内容构成这个意义而言，对于这些品牌内容和社论，你是一视同仁的，对吗？

    是的。几年前，我们的流量已开始增长。董事们在董事会上询问我们有没有收益。我说没有。

    So I started thinking about how to generate revenue. The idea of putting banners on the site never appealed to me, in part because we were investing in this platform for distributing content on the social web. Our team was using it to make fun, entertaining stuff at that time—we didn't have any reporters at that point—and we were looking at how to really detect whether we were connecting with an audience, and whether people wanted to share this content, and how to give people content that they were excited about to share.

    So banners didn't make much sense to me. It made much more sense to build a version that uses the same platform for branded content and advertising. And so we told brands, "You have to tell a story." This is actually something the magazine industry has been great at over decades—making advertising that actually adds to the product. It's something that websites have completely failed to do, and largely it's the fault of trying to cram things into little banner ads. If you take a high-end magazine and rip all the ads out, it's often a worse product. If you take all of the ads out of a fashion magazine, you lose half the photography, you know? So we really took the approach of, "Well, why can't the web be like that? Why can't we make great branded content, advertising, that has its own page that people want to click on and engage in and share and interact with?"

    We created our own form of advertising that was totally proprietary. It was a real hard slog trying to sell it. People were like, "Well, look, it's not IAB standard, and it's not the way the industry works. And we don't really like these banners, but it's just sort of the way it works." But we had a few people, including Beth Comstock, the CMO of General Electric, come to us and say, "Well, we want to innovate. We want to experiment." General Electric is a giant company. At the time, we were very small. And we've been working with them ever since.

    A bunch of other brands saw some of the early success we had and said, "Oh, look, if it works for GE and they're getting 10X the click-through rate of banners and they're getting sharing and they're telling a compelling story, then we'll try it out, too." Once people try it, they renew and renew and renew.

    What is BuzzFeed's relationship with magazines?

    We're partners with some magazine websites. We have something called a partner network that lets other publishers use some of our technology to detect when something is taking off. So if you work at The New Yorker, for example—we are a partner with them—you can get an alert that shows that one of the stories on their website is starting to take off. They can have a dashboard that shows some of how their content is spreading.

    If you look at the right-hand rail on the front page of BuzzFeed, you'll see the publishers in our network, their most-shared stories trigger and show up on the site. So that's one way we work with magazines.

    Will you establish more partnerships like that?

    Yeah. There are over 400 million unique visitors in the network now, and all of them are getting some of the benefit of our data science and our technology.

    When you see magazines' websites, what do you think is right, what do you think is wrong, what do you think they could do better?

    The main way that I see magazine websites is someone who has tweeted a story or put a story into my Facebook newsfeed. The biggest challenge I see is that some magazines have a very bad mobile experience. You'll click to see a story, and then there will be some kind of desktop-looking pop-up ad or overlay ad with one of those little x's, and you're trying to read the story, and it's hard on a mobile device to find out where the little x is to get rid of the ad and see the story. At the bottom of the article, it will be paginated, and it'll be like nine pages or something. So you have to find the little number 2 to click that. And when you click that, it will pop another one of those ads up. It has to be a really good article for you to go through that kind of [experience].

    So, test all your stuff on mobile devices. Apps are important, and I think apps are part of the pedigree of the magazine industry, which is where subscriptions have been so important over many years, but mobile web is also really important. Because if I have an app for a magazine, and I share something, that's going to Facebook. The person is more likely than not accessing Facebook on a mobile device, and if they can't read the article, then you missed an opportunity to bring in new readers.

    What magazines do you read, what magazines do you enjoy, historically or today?

    I really like reading on the web because you get the best of all different sources. So really, Twitter and Facebook are the main ways that I find stuff. Sometimes e-mail. We have a long-form section on BuzzFeed that has, you know, 12,000- and 6,000-word pieces, and we do a long-form e-mail that links out to the best long-form pieces each week. That is another way I discover a lot of long-form magazine articles—through the long-form editors at BuzzFeed who are reading stuff. We have some original stuff, but usually it's one of ours and three or four from other magazine sources.

    于是，我就开始思考如何产生收入。我从来没想过在网站上发布横幅广告，部分原因在于，我们投资这个平台是为了在社交网络传播内容。我们的团队当时使用它来创作一些有趣好玩的东西。那时还没有记者，我们只是在探索如何发现我们是不是跟某位受众连接在一起？人们是否愿意分享这种内容？如何为人们提供让他们感到兴奋、从而愿意分享的内容？

    所以，对于我来说，发布横幅广告并没有多大意义。更有意义的是，打造一个使用同一平台发布品牌内容和广告的版本。于是，我告诉品牌商，“你们必须讲故事。”这其实是杂志业数十年来非常擅长的事情——创作其实已成为产品组成部分的广告。这是网站完全没有做到的事情，很大程度上就是那些拥挤的小横幅广告惹的祸。如果你拿起一本高端杂志，撕掉所有的广告页面，它的品质往往反而会下降。你知道吗，如果你取出一本时尚杂志的所有广告，你就将失去多达一半的图片。于是，我们就真的采取了这种方式。我们说：“那么，为什么网络不能这么干呢？为什么我们不能制作拥有自己的页面，人们愿意点击、参与、分享并互动的品牌内容和广告呢？”

    我们创建了一种完全专有的广告形式。推销它真是个苦差事。许多人的反应是，“哦，看看吧，这不是美国互动广告局(IAB)标准，业界没这么玩的。我们其实也不喜欢横幅广告，但这种方式很奏效。”然而，有几个人，包括通用电气公司(General Electric)首席营销官贝丝•康斯托克，走到我们面前说：“我们打算创新，想试验一下这种方式。”通用电气是一家享誉世界的巨型公司，而我们当时还是一家非常小的网站。我们从那个时候其一直在跟他们合作。

    目睹了我们早期的成功之后，其他一些品牌纷纷表示：“如果这种广告形式适合通用电气——他们讲述了一个引人入胜的故事，获得了10倍于横幅广告的点击率，而且被不断共享——我们也想试一下。”一旦尝到了甜头，人们就会一而再、再而三地尝试。

    BuzzFeed与杂志是什么样的关系？

    我们与一些杂志网站结成合作伙伴。我们建立了一个合作伙伴网络，让其他出版商用我们的技术来探测哪篇文章正受到追捧。比方说，如果你在我们的合作伙伴之一《纽约客》( The New Yorker)工作，你就可以收到一个提醒信息，由此获知网站的哪篇报道人气正在上升。他们还可以获得一个显示内容传播方式的仪表板。

    如果你观察一下BuzzFeed首页的右侧导轨，你将看到加入这个合作伙伴网络的出版商。点击某个出版商，它共享次数最高的故事就会显示在网站上。这是我们与杂志合作的一种方式。

    你们是否将建立更多类似这样的合作关系？

    没错。网络上现在有超过4亿的独立访客。他们都在获得我们的数据科学和技术带来的某些好处。

    当你看到杂志的网站时，你认为哪些方面是对的，哪些方面是错的？你认为他们在哪些方面还可以做得更好？

    我浏览杂志网站的主要方式是，有人在Twitter上发布了某个故事，或者把某个故事放入我的Facebook新闻源。我认为最大的挑战是，一些杂志的移动阅读体验非常糟糕。用户得点击之后才能读到故事，然后会出现一些类似桌面的弹出式广告或带有小x的重叠式广告。人们费劲力气想看一看这篇故事，但在移动设备上很难发现那个能够消除广告、从而看到故事的小x。文章的底部经常有分页，9页，甚至更多。所以，大家必须要找到、点击小数字2。点击后，阅读界面又会弹出另一个广告。谁有耐心经历这样的阅读体验啊，除非你认为这篇文章足够好。

    因此，一定要在移动设备上测试杂志网站的所有东西。应用程序很重要，我认为应用是杂志业谱系的一部分——尽管这么多年来，订阅一直非常重要，但移动网络真的也很重要。原因是，如果我下载了一个杂志的应用，我往往会分享某篇文章，它就将进入Facebook。人们更有可能通过移动设备登陆Facebook，如果他们读不到这篇文章，你就失去了一个获得新读者的机会。

    你过去或者现在经常读哪些杂志？你喜欢哪些杂志？

    我真的很喜欢在网络上阅读，因为你可以充分利用所有不同的内容源。因此，Twitter和Facebook的确是我寻找好文章的主要途径。还有的时候是通过电子邮件。BuzzFeed有一个深度报道分区，也就是那些12,000字或6,000字的文章。我们定期发送一个深度报道邮件，附有每周最佳深度报道作品的链接。这是我寻找大量长篇杂志文章的另一种方式，也就是借助BuzzFeed深度报道编辑的力量，因为他们每天都在阅读各种文章。我们也有一些原创的东西，但这封电邮通常包含1篇我们自己的深度报道，3篇或4篇来自其他杂志的文章。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒