What Kind of Content Is King?
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Content. Connection. Engagement. Authenticity. Mobile. Facebook.
These were the words I heard most during the first day of Internet Week New York 2012. They were uttered during panels and presentations, and in conversations near the Brightbox stations where you could charge your phone for free in a glowing box that locked and unlocked with the swipe of your credit card. There was actually a point in the day when I’d heard these words so often that they started to lose their meaning. So I mumbled them to myself in the back row of panels in the hopes that doing so would anchor the words to their definitions. At one point I looked up the definition of content on my laptop. The first definition was adjective; in a state of peaceful happiness.
Everyone is finally in agreement that content is king. But what kind of content is king? During the Webby session with Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti and Jon Steinberg, Steinberg claimed that if The New York Times wants to be a real publisher, the newspaper needs to have an animals section because if the Internet has proven anything, it’s that people like consuming content that has to do with animals.
The audience reaction to this intentionally provocative statement was split. Half of the people in the room looked around and nodded eagerly as if to say, Yes, there really aren’t enough cat videos on the Internet! The other half rolled their eyes, or started pecking at their iPhones, which seems to be the Internet Week audience equivalent of rolling one’s eyes.
A more interesting and honest observation came from his colleague Jonah Peretti, who pointed out that “Twitter is for your head; Facebook is for your heart.” Unlike Steinberg’s statement, his showed an awareness that there’s a time and place for each piece of content out into the web. Peretti said his experiences with Twitter often taught him things and opened him to experiences he wouldn’t have had on his own. On the other hand, the things he encountered Facebook gave him a charge that was more emotional. When examined in this light, it’s easy to see why these two sites are wildly popular.
During a panel called The Newstand 2.0 (which was covered in full by my colleague Cory Bortnicker), I found myself drawn to the parts of the conversation that were about exactly how people consume content. Panel leader Daniel Blackman, who serves as the Chief Digital Officer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, stated that he’s found digital to clearly drive subscriptions, proving that if you give people well-curated, meaningful content, they’ll pay for more.
Panelist Melissa Lafsky, also of Newsweek, shot down an audience member’s notion that people’s attention spans are too short for long-form, solid journalism, and are better suited to … well, cat videos. She claimed thatNewsweek has found people are staying on the site for surprisingly long periods of time, something that other panelists noted as well. Jesse Angelo of the Daily Beast stated that the interactivity and intimacy of devices such as the iPad have the potential to boost editorial appeal.
Mobile devices made up the backbone of a talk by Brett Martin, the CEO ofSonar, a location-based app that helps you find people in your area with whom you share interests, or even friends. He reminded the audience that our cell phones are basically little tracking devices that have the potential to speak volumes about our lives, and how this functionality can be used to make our lives better. He said that Sonar’s number Number One goal is to make people have better real-life interactions. I must admit, it was hard not to get excited at the idea of being introduced to a stranger who works one floor up and went to the same 30 concerts I went to last year. Maybe he could tell me about new music over lunch in the Hearst cafeteria, or at least buy my extra Odd Future ticket at the last minute.
It’s clear that everyone at Internet Week wants to be part of the next big thing. But what they all know is that it’s not quite yet time for the next big thing. Facebook, the current and impressively stock-still big thing, is about to go public, and this fact seemed to tingle in the air. When a woman stopped to show meAereo, a service that allows you to stream network television on your mobile device, I could tell from the look in her eyes that she believed it would change everything. And honestly, for a few moments, I did, too.
— Nick Burd, senior writer, iCrossing Live Media Studio