2016 Will Be the Year of Reading, Not Mindless Clicking

This year, rather than writing our own predictions, we decided to have Motherboard interview each other.

I have a terrible confession to make: I barely read anything in 2015 that wasn't related to work. I have to read a lot every day as part of my job, but rarely did I take the time last year to read a novel in bed, finish an article in a magazine simply because I thought it looked interesting, or finish that story friends on social media told me is a "must read."

Most of the time, I click on a story, scan it quickly, then open another tab, which is how most people consume media these days. I don't like that. I don't like the kind of reader this short attention span makes me, and I don't like the kind of stories it incentivizes publications to write.

I was surprised and encouraged to find out that Adrianne Jeffries, Motherboard's managing editor, thinks that this will start to change in 2016. Jeffries knows a lot about the current media landscape. She admitted to me, distressed, that she can barely think of anything else these days. So I decided to turn Jeffries's misery into our collective wisdom by getting her predictions for how our media consumption habits will change this year.

Emanuel Maiberg: You told me before that you think that 2016 will be the year that media companies will stop chasing the 100 million visitor site dream. Explain the logic behind that dream and why you think it's one that media companies will let go this year?

Adrianne Jeffries: I'm not sure if it comes from unsavvy media companies or unsavvy advertisers or a terrible feedback cycle between both, but the main strategy for making money in online publishing is to maximize the size of the audience, BuzzFeed-style, and the number to aim for is 100 million. It's a nice number. I don't know if 2016 will be the year media companies stop chasing this number, but i think it will be the year that the weaknesses of this strategy start to show themselves and companies will start catching on.

You just can't serve 100 million people without making compromises on quality—what you cover and how much resources to devote to any one thing. You also end up with so much crap in that 100 million—bots; drive-by readers who couldn't remember the name of your site 20 minutes later; readers that your advertisers don't care about for whatever reason, such as readers in poor countries.

Right now all websites are melting together in pursuit of the same 100 million little-bit-of-everything audience. Every site from the Daily Dot to the Washington Post publishes lowest common denominator stories and cute videos and headlines from every site are starting to sound the same. I think some publishers will realize that it makes more sense for them to cultivate a smaller, more dedicated audience.

Emanuel: I think you see that with the eSports audience for example.

Adrianne: Oh really, what do you mean?

Emanuel: It's a smaller, but very dedicated audience, and you can market to it like a laser. If you advertise on an eSports site, and you try to sell readers premium headphones and mice marketed to gamers, you'll get some traction.

Adrianne: Exactly, but i don't think you have to do it by topic area necessarily. Take The Awl for example. Not really a subject-driven website, it's more like an audience-driven website where the audience is a certain type of person and the creators of the site are that same type of person, and they just all feel at home on The Awl. If you think about it in terms of metrics, it would be a shift from looking at raw pageviews and unique users, to looking at time on site and homepage traffic.

You can have a 100 million unique visitors a month, but your average time on site is 4 seconds and homepage traffic is non-existent. How much are those readers worth, especially when you can turn on a Facebook or Taboola ad and reach any target number as long as you're willing to pay?

Emanuel: Right, but it seems like that's the bulk of internet traffic? People who click something shared on Facebook, give a page half a scroll, and bounce. That's the internet, and how does that change as long as most traffic comes from Facebook?

Adrianne: That is definitely a good point, and I think some traffic will always be that, but right now publishers are optimizing for that world, and I think some of them will stop and start optimizing for the audience of 1000 loyalists over 100 million absent-minded clickers. The current race to the bottom is not sustainable.

Emanuel: I want to talk to you about this thing called virtual reality. Have you heard about it?

Adrianne: I believe virtual reality is absolutely the future and am currently seeking a way to invest all of my savings into an index fund.

Emanuel: loool.

Adrianne: idk i have had some cool virtual reality experiences.

Emanuel: But for serious. Both New York Times and Buzzfeed did virtual reality stuff in 2015, and 2016 is when all the virtual reality devices are coming out.

Adrianne: IDK what Buzzfeed did but I thought the NYT kinda half nailed it and half boned it. Sending out the cardboard holder was smart. Picking a super downer topic was not smart, and having subtitles was not smart.

Emanuel: Do you want to take in stories that way, more than you want to read them or watch video etc?

Adrianne: I'd be super curious to hear how many people actually tried it and whether it reached any of the Times's older, less techie audience. I imagine that there must be a story and director combination that would be told really well in that format. But like my media diet now, I want to consume 75 percent in the easiest, lightest lift way, which is skimming/reading, and then I will mete out the rest of my time to formats that take more time, such as podcasts and video and documentaries. I think virtual reality will be in the very last spot.

I also like virtual reality in museum exhibits. I've run across it a few times, and it's nice as just a jolt of visceral experience. If you're in the mood to go walking through some art and have it influence your emotions. I don't think the market will really bear a consumer virtual reality headset yet though, not in 2016.

Emanuel: I forgot to ask you regarding the 100 million site thing: The Dress is like the perfect 100 million story, right?

Adrianne: Yeah it is.

Emanuel: I'm wondering if that story is going have a lasting effect?

Adrianne: You mean where publishers are trying to do more stories like that?

Emanuel: Yeah, like, is it too big of a goldmine to not have a people dedicated to finding the next The Dress.

Adrianne: I think publishers took some lessons from The Dress, like trying to find things that will divide an audience in half. The machine of BuzzFeed is built to discover and package stories like The Dress to maximize traffic, and publishers have been imitating BuzzFeed for years. It's funny because the original Tumblr post is gone. Looking at this again is depressing me.

BuzzFeed wrote so many follow up stories about The Dress. I mean everyone did. I'll be curious to see if we get more megastories as BuzzFeed's platform continues to grow in size and influence. I think the 100 million strategy works for Buzzfeed. What bums me out is seeing everyone try that same strategy. We need more smaller, high quality things, and publishers need to be willing to stop growing at some point, and their business sides need to be good enough to sell that smaller audience to advertisers.