

Inside the Buzz-Fueled Media Startups Battling for Your Attention - dnetesn
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/new-media-2/

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jgalt212
Has anyone studied if HuffPo, Buzzfeed, and Business Insider have bot rates
dramatically higher than old media news websites (e.g. NY Times, WSJ, etc).

It seems to me these content optimized websites serve mostly to attract bots.
My feeling is that you cannot optimize content to any great extent. Because,
if you could, the movie and TV studios would have done this long ago, and
you'd never see flops or shows cancelled very early in their first season.

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Tossrock
It should be obvious that technological change allows content optimization in
a way that was never possible in old media. With a group of different
headlines, you can apply A/B testing / multi-armed bandit in real time, and
watch the results. With a TV show, you had to make the show first, and then
you saw the results from Nielsen after it had already aired. The web allows
analytical depth on content that was never possible with newspaper / TV /
movies, and the proof is in the pudding - Buzzfeed's rapidly growing revenues,
the proliferation of content optimized viral sites, etc.

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jgalt212
Yes, it definitely seems like it would be easier responsive to consumer tastes
and preferences in the online world. That being said, you're still trying to
model human behavior which as I indicated earlier I believe is largely
unmodelable (sp).

Of course, any fool can A/B test to show that readers prefer interesting
articles over boring ones. That being said, it's very hard to ex ante produce
interesting content. Or even enough content such that a high enough per cent
is interesting to the consumer.

For example, how many articles have we seen on people leaving crazy good/bad
tips and the server taking a phone pic of such tip as evidence. I think I read
the first few, but they still seem to come out every single day. Are people
still clicking on them? HuffPo says they are. Why else would they keep running
them? However, I really think those sort of stale genres are now only being
clicked on by bots.

