One afternoon in June, Emerson Spartz, an Internet-media entrepreneur in Chicago, left his office and walked several blocks to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where he was scheduled to speak at an event called the Millennial Impact Conference. He and other participants had been asked to discuss ways that young people using technology can “build movements to create change.” This is not Spartz’s specialty. “I basically have only one speech,” he told me. “It’s about how to make things go viral. I have personal preferences about how I would want those principles to be applied, but in practice they can be used for pretty much anything.”
Spartz is twenty-seven and has been successfully launching Web sites for more than half his life. In Chicago’s small startup subculture, he is an envied figure. On his way to the conference, he ran into Jimmy Odom, a thirty-three-year-old businessman with dreadlocks. Odom described Spartz to me as “inspiring” and “legitimately awesome.”
“Why won’t you accept my friend request?” Odom asked him.
Spartz grinned apologetically and said, “Facebook puts a cap on how many friends you can have”—five thousand—“and I’m at the limit.”
In 1999, when Spartz was twelve, he built MuggleNet, which became the most popular Harry Potter fan site in the world. He appeared on CNN and Fox News, and J. K. Rowling invited him to her estate in Scotland. He eventually lost interest in Rowling—although he bought “The Casual Vacancy,” her recent novel for adults, he said he hadn’t yet read it—but he remained fixated on commanding young people’s attention online. “As I became less motivated by my passion for the books, I got obsessed with the entrepreneurial side of it, the game of maximizing patterns and seeing how big my reach could get,” he said.
Web development is a low-overhead enterprise, especially when you live with your parents. MuggleNet made hundreds of thousands of dollars through advertising, and Spartz funnelled his earnings into a new company: Spartz, Inc. His first employee was his younger brother Dylan, who designed the site; during college, at Notre Dame, Emerson started working with Gaby Montero, then his girlfriend and now his wife. After graduation, they started building rudimentary Web sites, sometimes as many as one a month: GivesMeHope (“ ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’—the twenty-first-century, Twitter-style version”); Memestache (“All the Funny Memes”); OMG Facts (“The World’s #1 Fact Source”). Many of the sites fizzled out; others gained a following. When Internet culture developed a fascination with “fails”—news bloopers, errant autocorrects—Spartz created a site where users could post funny mistakes from Facebook (Unfriendable), a site featuring gaffes from television (As Failed On TV), and one about garbled text messages (SmartphOWNED). When the data indicated that optimism was attracting more visitors than Schadenfreude, Spartz let his “fail” sites languish and focussed on promoting GivesMeHope, a repository for anonymous, uplifting anecdotes.
Last year, Spartz, Inc., raised eight million dollars in venture-capital funding and made several million more in advertising revenue. As new-media companies like BuzzFeed and Upworthy become established brands, Spartz hopes to disrupt the disrupters. He employs three dozen people full time, in addition to several freelancers. The company operates thirty sites, which have no unifying aesthetic. Their home pages, which can be chaotic and full of old links, don’t always feature a Spartz logo; traffic is generated almost entirely through Facebook, so brand recognition is relatively unimportant. Most of the company’s innovations concern not the content itself but how it is promoted and packaged: placing unusually large share buttons at the top and the bottom of posts; experimenting with which headlines and photographs would be more seductive; devising strategies for making posts show up prominently in Facebook’s news feed. “I keep hearing people around town talking about this young man as a Steve Jobs kind of guy,” Gary Holdren, one of Spartz’s chief investors, told me. “I think his stuff is indicative of where digital media is headed.”
At the museum, Spartz waited backstage while Jake Brewer—a manager at Change.org, a platform for petitions—delivered a speech about online organizing. Brewer, who is thirty-four, warned that online activists needed to be more strategic. “The Internet has created a huge megaphone,” he said. “That’s great, but it often creates so much noise that the people on the receiving end can’t hear anything.”
Spartz took the stage, wearing a cordless microphone. People who achieve success at an early age often retain a childlike aspect into adulthood, and Spartz has the saucer eyes and cuspidated chin of a cartoon fawn. His hair style (a tidy mop top) and clothing preferences (heathered T-shirt, dark jeans, black sneakers) have not changed much since his tween years. A screen in front of a velvet curtain displayed, in jaunty type, “Hi! I’m Emerson Spartz. I want to change the world.”
When he was growing up, Spartz said, his parents made him read “four short biographies of successful people every single day. Imagine for a second what happens to your brain when you’re twelve and this is how you’re spending your time.” He used his hands to pantomime his mind being blown. “I realized that influence was inextricably linked to impact—the more influence you had, the more impact you could create. . . . The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest that we could get to having a human superpower.”
He offered practical tips: “Facebook should be eighty per cent of your effort, if you’re focussed on social media”; “Try to change every comma to a period”; “Use lists whenever possible. Lists just hijack the brain’s neural circuitry.” Behind me, two women in their fifties took notes on legal pads. In summary, Spartz said, “The more awesome you are, the more emotion you create, the more viral it is.” One of the women whispered, “Really impressive.”
Spartz left the stage and walked to his office, a mile away, without stopping to see the Isa Genzken retrospective upstairs. “People have hoity-toity reasons for preferring one kind of entertainment to another,” he said later. “To me, it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at cat photos that inspire you or so-called ‘high art’ that inspires you.”
I had met Spartz a few weeks earlier, at a dinner during a tech-industry conference in Manhattan. When I asked him what he did for a living, he replied, “I’m passionate about virality.” I must have looked confused, because he said, “Let me bring that down from the thirty-thousand-foot level.” The appetizer course had not yet arrived. He checked the time on his cell phone and cleared his throat. “Every day, when I was a kid, my parents made me read four short biographies of very successful people,” he began.
On this occasion, I was the only person listening to his speech, but he spoke in a distant and deliberate tone, using studied pauses and facial expressions, as if I were a video camera’s lens. When he got to the part about virality being a superpower—“I realized that if you could make ideas go viral, you could tip elections, start movements, revolutionize industries”—I asked whether that was really true.
“Can you rephrase your question in a more concrete way?” he said.
I mentioned “Kony 2012,” a thirty-minute film about the Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony. It has been viewed on YouTube more than a hundred million times, but it did not achieve its ultimate goal: Kony remains at large, as does his militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army.
“To be honest, I didn’t follow too closely after the whole thing died down,” Spartz said. “Even though I’m one of the most avid readers I know, I don’t usually read straight news. It’s conveyed in a very boring way, and you tend to see the same patterns repeated again and again.”
He went on, “If I were running a more hard-news-oriented media company and I wanted to inform people about Uganda, first, I would look it up and find out exactly what’s going on there. Then I would find a few really poignant images or story lines, ones that create a lot of resonant emotion, and I would make those into a short video—under three minutes—with clear, simple words and statistics. Short, declarative sentences. And at the end I’d give people something they can do, something to feel hopeful about.”
Spartz left before dessert, which he called “a low return on investment, calorically.” On his way out, he sent me an e-mail as an aide-mémoire. The subject line read, “Hi. Stay in touch!” and the entire text of the e-mail was “Viral guy.”
The offices of Spartz, Inc., are in a loft space with polished-cement floors, bright-red walls, a hammock, and an aquarium full of sea monkeys. Games are everywhere—Xbox, Blokus, Ping-Pong—but I never saw anyone playing them. Spartz and his staffers sit in one room, at undivided workstations. On a wooden support beam near his desk, Spartz has tacked up images of some of his idols: Jobs, Branson, Bezos. The office layout is ostensibly non-hierarchical, but the workstation next to Spartz belongs to Matt Thacker, the chief financial officer, who has an M.B.A. and describes himself as the company’s oldest employee “by a hundred years.” He is thirty-six. A few seats away sits Gaby Spartz, the company’s vice-president of content. (Dylan Spartz recently left the company to join a startup in Los Angeles.) Other workstations are for data scientists, Web developers, and five “associate editors,” who write the material on Spartz’s sites.
Employees communicate with one another through instant messages. They almost never talk out loud, and there are no office phones. When something must be discussed face-to-face, staffers arrange to meet in one of several conference rooms ringing the central space. These are named for regions of Westeros, the fictional territory depicted in “Game of Thrones.” Because the decision to continue a conversation off-line is made online, a visitor will occasionally notice several people standing up in unison, unplugging their laptops, and carrying them silently toward King’s Landing or Casterly Rock.
On the day I arrived, the company was in the process of reconceiving its flagship site. In the morning, it was named Brainwreck.com (“The #2 Most Addicting Site”); by the afternoon, it had been re-branded as Dose.com (“Your Daily Dose of Amazing”). The new design, Spartz explained, had a more “premium” feel, with cleaner lines and more muted colors. If the name Brainwreck invoked self-destructiveness, Dose was ambiguous—suggesting either a dose of Vicodin or a dose of vitamins—and this allowed for more tonal flexibility. Few people would take seriously a site called Brainwreck Politics or Brainwreck Travel, but Dose could in theory expand in almost any direction.
For now, Dose is a simple photo- and video-aggregation site. Around the office, posts on Dose are called “lists,” and one hears comments like “The list about albino animals is crushing it right now.” The posts are collections of images arranged to tell a story (“This Dad Decided to Embarrass His Son in the Most Elaborate Way Possible. LOL”), make an argument (“Bacon-Wrapped Onion Rings Are Perfect for Appetizers, Burgers, and Life”), or offer variations on a theme (“The 21 Most Unusual Horses That Make Even Unicorns Seem Basic”). A bored teen-ager absent-mindedly clicking links will eventually end up on a site like Dose. Spartz’s goal is to make the site so “sticky”—attention-grabbing and easy to navigate—that the teen-ager will stay for a while. Money is generated through ads—sometimes there are as many as ten on a page—and Spartz hopes to develop traffic-boosting software that he can sell to publishers and advertisers.
Most of Spartz’s old sites are still online, but, because their content is user generated, they run largely on autopilot. The company now devotes much of its attention to promoting Dose, which in November received thirty-three million page views. (In aggregate, Spartz says, the company’s sites attract sixty million page views a month.) When I was at the office, Spartz’s engineers were also building two smartphone apps: Blanks, a mobile version of the party game Cards Against Humanity; and Twirl, a gay version of the dating app Tinder. Spartz thinks that pathbreaking ideas are overvalued. “If you want to build a successful virus, you can start by trying to engineer the DNA from scratch—or, much more efficient, you take a virus that you already know is potent, mutate it a tiny bit, and expose it to a new cluster of people.” Brainwreck’s early posts “leaned more toward originality,” Spartz said—they featured novel combinations of images, with text that reflected at least a few minutes of online research—but with Dose “we’ve stopped doing that as much because more original lists take more time to put together, and we’ve found that people are no more likely to click on them.”
Whenever I glanced at Spartz’s screen, he was almost always studying one of several data-analytics programs, which break down his sites’ traffic into dozens of metrics. He commissions even more detailed reports from his data scientists, in an effort to predict visitors’ clicking habits at a pixel-by-pixel level of specificity. “Analytics is so baked into everything we do that I can’t even imagine having a separate discussion about it,” he said. Spartz is unusually candid about how dependent he is on social media. “Our volume of traffic right now is possible only because Facebook has been very generous about linking to our content,” he said. “I’m aware that they might not be so generous forever.”
Much of the company’s success online can be attributed to a proprietary algorithm that it has developed for “headline testing”—a practice that has become standard in the virality industry. When a Dose post is created, it initially appears under as many as two dozen different headlines, distributed at random. Whereas one person’s Facebook news feed shows a link to “You Won’t Believe What This Guy Did with an Abandoned Factory,” another person, two feet away, might see “At First It Looks Like an Old Empty Factory. But Go Inside and . . . WHOA.” Spartz’s algorithm measures which headline is attracting clicks most quickly, and after a few hours, when a statistically significant threshold is reached, the “winning” headline automatically supplants all others. “I’m really, really good at writing headlines,” he told me. “But any human’s intuition can only be so good. If you can build a machine that can solve the problem better than you can, then you really understand the problem.”
At the bottom of a Dose post, there is usually a small “hat tip” (abbreviated as “H/T”). Many people don’t notice this citation, if they even reach the bottom of the post. On Dose’s first day of existence, its most successful list was called “23 Photos of People from All Over the World Next to How Much Food They Eat Per Day.” It was a clever illustration of global diversity and inequity: an American truck driver holding a tray of cheeseburgers and Starbucks Frappuccinos; a Maasai woman posing with eight hundred calories’ worth of milk and porridge. Beneath the final photograph, a line of tiny gray text read “H/T Elite Daily.” It linked to a post that Elite Daily, a Web site based in New York, had published a month earlier (“See the Incredible Differences in the Daily Food Intake of People Around the World”). That post, in turn, had linked to UrbanTimes (“80 People, 30 Countries and How Much They Eat on a Daily Basis”), which had credited Amusing Planet (“What People Eat Around the World”), which had cited a 2010 radio interview with Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, the writer and the photographer behind the project.
The Dose post, which received more Facebook shares than its precursors, briefly mentioned D’Aluisio and Menzel (though D’Aluisio’s name was misspelled). But their book, “What I Eat,” went unmentioned, and they certainly did not share in the advertising revenue. “This took us four years and almost a million dollars, all self-funded,” Menzel told me. “We are trying to make that money back by selling the book and licensing the images. But these viral sites—the gee-whiz types that are just trying to attract eyeballs—they don’t pay for licensing. They just grab stuff and hope they don’t get caught. I don’t want to make a comparison to Ebola, but I do think it’s no accident that they use the metaphor of a virus.”
Around 4 P.M., Matt Thacker, the C.F.O., clapped me on the back and said, “Exciting day, huh?” I scanned the room of impassive faces. “It’s our biggest traffic day ever!” Thacker said. He told me that the food list had received two hundred thousand page views. By instant message, employees exchanged jubilant GIFs and emojis.
An announcement was made over office chat, and soon everyone went to the kitchen and stood in a circle. From a refrigerator, which was permanently stocked with hummus and Muscle Milk, came bottles of André sparkling wine. Spartz delivered a toast. “We spend a lot of time doing a lot of back-end things, a lot of tweaking,” he said. “This is one of those days when we get to celebrate—a new name, a relatively new site, and the biggest day Spartz has had in its history. To Dose!” He played a gong sound on his iPhone. People giggled, then disbanded. I turned to the man next to me, a programmer in a Cubs hat, and asked about the sound. Was it an inside joke? He laughed nervously and retreated to his desk. Later, over the phone, he explained that ringing a digital gong at meetings had become “an office meme.”
When Emerson Spartz was a child in La Porte, Indiana, he had the highest batting average on his Little League team. “I quickly started seeing patterns,” he told me. His coach instructed only the fastest players to steal bases. Spartz was not fast, but he noticed that the catchers were unpracticed at throwing to second base, allowing runners to advance. “I started stealing pretty much every time,” he said. “It worked extremely well, but that wasn’t what the coach cared about, apparently.” To punish Spartz for disobedience, the coach batted him eighth. “I gave him a statistical explanation of why it made no sense to put your best hitter at the bottom of the order,” Spartz said. “You can imagine how that went over.”
At school, he was a precocious student who chafed at classroom structure. A few weeks into seventh grade, he asked his parents if he could be homeschooled. His mother, Maggi, was the breadwinner, working at a local philanthropic foundation. His father, Tom, became Emerson’s teacher.
One Sunday, I drove Emerson and Gaby from Chicago to La Porte, where his parents still live. We headed east on Interstate 90 for just over an hour, passed a few cornfields, and pulled into a driveway. Maggi and Tom were waiting in the front yard with Emerson’s youngest brother, Drew, who is sixteen. Tom Spartz speaks in passionate bursts that sound like unrelated fortune-cookie aphorisms spliced together. He said, of his role in Emerson’s intellectual growth, “I don’t care what expectations you have, all of the great—we’ll call them ‘developers’—were just continually shaking with energy. You want to keep ’em moving, keep ’em loose, keep ’em testing. I saw this stuff coming long ago. When you see the momentum, you’ll be laughing at how obvious it all was.” Tom calls himself “a part-time inventor and business developer,” though none of his inventions have become solvent companies. In the non-digital world, it is harder to convert industriousness into income.
A few days after Emerson dropped out of school, Dylan joined him. Tom showed me the den, which he had used as the boys’ classroom, with desks, whiteboards, and inspirational posters. (“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.”) Drew attended a public high school—“He’s more of a rule follower,” Tom said—and the den was now just a den. On a weight-lifting bench, Tom had arranged a two-foot stack of the “short biographies of successful people” that I had heard about from Emerson. They turned out to be extremely short: a single-sided page each, photocopied from a newspaper called Investor’s Business Daily. Each distilled a life of accomplishment into a moral. (Karl Malone: “Practice makes perfect.” Mel Blanc: “Never give up.”) Tom shuffled through the pile and picked out a page about the novelist Pearl S. Buck. “It shows that she was away from her normal world, and all of a sudden she’s writing about the East,” he said. “It’s like, Wow, can you imagine?”
I asked Tom if he had encouraged the boys to read Buck’s novels. He shook his head. “You lay out a hook, but you don’t put it in the fish’s mouth,” he said. Apart from the biographies and enough algebra to satisfy state requirements, the Spartz pedagogy was flexible and self-directed. The boys listened to motivational audiobooks by Tony Robbins and watched documentaries by Ken Burns. They learned arithmetic in part through “Kroger math”—on trips to the supermarket, Emerson and Dylan kept a tally of prices while Tom added items to the cart.
In 1999, Emerson discovered Homestead, one of the first free applications that allowed users to design Web pages without learning how to code. He built a site called Xtreme Golf—“ ‘Xtreme’ with an ‘X,’ which I thought was incredibly cool”—and then www.the-best-harrypotter-links.homestead.com, which evolved into MuggleNet. When he reached the limit of what he could do with Homestead, he began to learn HTML. Web production became his main school project and his job.
At the same time, Gaby Montero was building Web sites dedicated to the subculture of kawaii, the Japanese word for cute. She grew up in Quito, Ecuador, and studied at an international school; now twenty-seven, she is petite and pale, and it is easy to imagine her as an indoor kid. “My parents wanted me to hang out with more people after school,” she said. “I would just be on the computer with my Internet friends.”
Gaby and Emerson met during their first year at Notre Dame, where they were both business majors. They knew more about Web development than most of their professors did, and they kept coming up with ideas for viral sites. Soon after graduation, in 2009, they married, moved into an apartment in South Bend, and built GivesMeHope, which quickly became profitable.
During lunch with the family, I asked Tom when he realized that Gaby would be able to match Emerson intellectually. “She can’t,” he said. “That’s one of those things—when you’re a thoroughbred and your goal is to get further and further and you don’t even look back, it’s over.” Emerson is a quick thinker with impressive recall, as is Gaby; I never saw him introduce a concept that she didn’t immediately grasp. I thought that Tom might be joking, but nobody laughed and Gaby did not visibly react. (“I wasn’t surprised to hear him say that,” she told me later. “Before we met, Emerson was a pretty serious guy—staying inside all day, sucking up information.” Because she is the “more chatty, more sociable” of the two, she said, people sometimes think of her as being less book-smart.)
On the drive back to Chicago, Emerson discussed artificial intelligence. “We’ll soon get to a point where A.I. fully surpasses us,” he said. “When you think about what asymptotic growth looks like, there’s no way humans are going to be able to keep up.” I interrupted him to ask whether we should stay on the highway or merge into the exit lane. He hesitated briefly.
“We could just Google it,” Gaby said from the back seat.
“No, Gaby, I know exactly where we are,” he said. He told me not to turn.
A Katy Perry song was playing on the radio. “Art is that which science has not yet explained,” he said. “Imagine that the vocals are mediocre in an otherwise amazing song. What if you could have forty people record different vocals, and then test it by asking thousands of people, ‘Which one is best?’ To me, that’s a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio.”
Several times, I asked Spartz if I could talk to his content producers. He discouraged me, first subtly and then explicitly. “They don’t have as much personal discretion as you might think,” he said. “What we do is pretty algorithmic.”
Spartz calls himself an aggregator, but he is more like a day trader, investing in pieces of content that seem poised to go viral. He and his engineers have developed algorithms that scan the Internet for memes with momentum. The content team then acts as arbitrageurs, cosmetically altering the source material and reposting it under what they hope will be a catchier headline. A meme’s success on Imgur, Topsy, or “certain niche subreddits” might indicate a potential viral hit. He added, “The sources and the rules sound simple, but it takes a lot of experimentation to make it actually useful. It’s a lot of indicators weighed against each other, and they’re always changing.” If an image is popular on Reddit but relatively stagnant on Pinterest, for example, Spartz’s algorithm might pass it up in favor of something more likely to appeal to Dose’s audience.
Eventually, Spartz gave me permission to talk to Chelsea DeBaise, one of the content producers. DeBaise, who is twenty-two, wore a crew-neck T-shirt and a baseball cap advertising a brand of vodka. She had posted several lists that morning. (Recent headlines included “33 Photos of People Taken Seconds Before They Die. #10 Is from My Nightmares” and “No Matter How Much You Stare, You Won’t Be Able to Guess What These Photos Really Are Of.”) She had just graduated from Syracuse University, where she majored in writing and contributed to the Daily Orange. Her best story, she said, was a feature about local poverty, for which she spent several days talking to homeless people. “Stories like that—heavily reported, with one-on-one interviews—there is a lot of value in that,” she said. “But then you have to think about impact. A Dose story I did in an hour would shatter that one, in terms of reach.”
After college, DeBaise applied mostly to tech startups. “I was willing to sort of put my journalism practice on the back burner,” she said. “But since I’ve come here I’ve found that a lot of those skills—attention to detail, an affinity for research—have come into play. I was surprised, in a pleasant way.” When she writes Dose headlines, she said, “there is a part of Syracuse University Chelsea that’s, like, ‘I don’t know if this is the way I should write it.’ ” The headlines that “win,” according to Spartz’s testing algorithm, are usually hyperbolic, and many of them begin with dangling participles or end with prepositions. “But then another part of me is, like, ‘Actually, there’s pretty definitive evidence that this version will get a better response.’ So is the goal for people to look at it and be, like, ‘Wow, that girl wrote a really articulate headline’? At some point, you have to check your ego.”
When we spoke, DeBaise was reading “In Persuasion Nation,” a book of dystopian short stories by George Saunders, in which the oppressive force is not a totalitarian government but the all-seeing eye of targeted advertising. One story, “My Flamboyant Grandson,” takes place in midtown Manhattan, in the not so distant future. As the narrator and his grandson walk the streets, devices implanted in the sidewalk mine digital information from strips in their shoes. Eye-level screens then show them “images reflective of the Personal Preferences we’d stated,” imploring them, for example, to visit a nearby Burger King.
DeBaise said, “You know the quote from ‘Spider-Man’—‘With great power comes great responsibility’? Well, a tremendous amount of media attention means a lot of power. We’re lucky that Emerson is inherently a good person, because if you had someone that smart who wasn’t? Lord knows what would happen.”
In March, a working group at the Times presented an internal report to the paper’s top editors. A few weeks later, the report was leaked, and BuzzFeed published it. The first sentence was “The New York Times is winning at journalism.” However, it warned, “we are falling behind in a second critical area: the art and science of getting our journalism to readers.” Virality, in other words. The report’s authors argued that sharing and promotion should not be seen as a “chore”; on the contrary, “watching a year-old story go viral on social” could be “truly exciting.”
Old-media loyalists were troubled by some of the report’s recommendations. The metaphorical “wall” separating editorial staff and business staff, long considered an axiom of journalistic ethics, was cautiously called into question. Yet traditionalists might not have recognized how good they had it. The report repeatedly distinguished the Times’ core mission—“winning at journalism”—from more easily quantifiable goals, such as winning at page views. In our data-obsessed moment, it is subversive to assert that the value of a product is not reducible to its salability.
When I e-mailed Spartz to ask about the report, he said that he hadn’t heard of it. After skimming it, he wrote that it seemed like too little too late: “Nothing struck me as being particularly eye-opening, just confirmed my suspicions about how far they are behind the . . . Times. (Sorry.)”
The report acknowledged a “tension between quality control and expanded digital capabilities.” Spartz experiences no such tension, because he does not distinguish between quality and virality. He uses “effective,” “successful,” and “good” interchangeably. At one point, he told me, “The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that’s fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”
Spartz does not call what he makes journalism, even if he employs a few journalists, and he does not erect barriers between his product and his means of promoting it. Asked to name the most beautiful prose he had read, he said, “A beautiful book? I don’t even know what that means. Impactful, sure.”
Neetzan Zimmerman, formerly the chief aggregator of viral content at Gawker, is the editor of a secret-sharing app called Whisper. He told me that Spartz’s approach seemed most indebted to Upworthy, which became famous for tantalizing viewers with headlines containing such phrases as “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” “If you consider Upworthy to be the starting point for a genre of site that trades in the curiosity gap, then I think Dose and sites like it are the logical conclusion of that trend,” Zimmerman said. “Upworthy at least goes through the process of finding the content themselves. On Dose, you see entire lists that are ripped wholesale from other Web sites and passed off as their work. I think there is a cynicism to that.” He added, “But that’s an abstract conversation—it doesn’t make what they’re doing any less effective as a business.”
Kathleen Sweeney, who teaches courses about viral media at the New School, told me, “There’s a difference between ‘I want to change the world’ and ‘I want to change the world, and along the way I want to make millions of dollars.’ You can start off with one mission, but then you start to notice, We get way more traffic when we put up cat videos, and your mission shifts.”
Spartz never had to shift in the first place. “We considered making Dose more mission-driven,” he said. “Then I thought, rather than facing that dilemma every day—what’s going to get views versus what’s going to create positive social impact?—it would be simpler to just focus on traffic.” He sometimes phrases this sentiment in the snappy style of Dose headlines: “You can have whatever personal values you want, but businesses that don’t provide what the customers want don’t remain businesses. Literally, never.”
Earlier, in Casterly Rock, Spartz and I had spoken about targeted advertising. “The future of media is an ever-increasing degree of personalization,” he said. “My CNN won’t look like your CNN. So we want Dose, eventually, to be tailored to each user. You shouldn’t have to choose what you want, because we will be able to get enough data to know what you want better than you do.”
On a whiteboard behind him were the phrases “old media,” “Tribune,” and “$100 M.” “The lines between advertising and content are blurring,” he said. “Right now, if you go to any Web site, it will know where you live, your shopping history, and it will use that to give you the best ad. I can’t wait to start doing that with content. It could take a few months, a few years—but I am motivated to get started on it right now, because I know I’ll kill it.” ♦
