BuzzFeed: Why publishers should avoid 'siloing' content

"The internet has fundamentally changed," Will Hayward, vice-president for Europe at BuzzFeed, told delegates at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit in London today, and publishers need to be aware what that means not only for their work, but for their readers.

"The first era of the web was all about portals," he said, until an explosion of online content in the early 2000s meant that “the whole web started to crunch around search”.

But while "media has changed... people haven’t really".

Traditionally, news outlets had pigeon-holed audiences by the kind of content they imagined would appeal to them, seeing Economist readers as separate from people who enjoyed lifestyle publications like Grazia, for example.

However, he said, readers' interests are rarely so black and white.

"There has always been this line that we can define our audience depending on what they read and this isn’t true at all," Hayward said.

He likened online publishing to a Paris café, with audiences made up of people from all walks of life, having conversations about many different things.
 
However, people's interests are not mutually exclusive, he said, and people who liked to discuss serious subjects such as politics and philosophy can still appreciate silly humour.
 

We think of social as being our newspaper delivery boy or girlWill Hayward, BuzzFeed

Even if publishers do see their business as "siloed" into only producing stories around one topic area, the reality, said Hayward, is "it doesn't really matter anymore because consumers are finding your content on their social feeds".

"We [BuzzFeed] can be very serious about politics and we can be writing about the riots in Ferguson, and we can be breaking news on that front, we don't have an issue with the fact that people are going to find it immediately above an article from Vice talking about how 'cuddle parties' are not quite what they used to be.

"That's fine, that's how people experience media these days."

Publishers have to be ok with mixing politics and more "lifestyle" content because, even if they don't publish that way online, people consume content that way in their social feeds, now the "primary distribution [platform] for publishers, he said.

“We think of social as being our newspaper delivery boy or girl – it's the way we get our stuff to people and it's the way in which people find things these days, so you need to get good at creating things that people want to share.”

Traffic to BuzzFeed over the last 48 hrs - blue is seed (direct), red is from social #DigiPub pic.twitter.com/Ultf1iLOfN

— Abigail Edge (@abigailedge) October 16, 2014

Speaking about the social platforms best suited to different types of content, Hayward noted that "news does very well on Twitter, for a short period of time" but lifestyle and entertainment content "tends to spread more on Facebook".

Due to the increasing amount of traffic coming from social, he added that homepages were becoming "increasingly irrelevant".

"I know that we're very attached to our homepages, I know that we like them because we can control them, but [they] are what we want people to look at, rather than what people want to look at."

BuzzFeed has been expanding its coverage of political and world news this year, and recently announced plans to experiment in new formats for storytelling.

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