The Spectacular Rise and Crash of Upworthy

“Here, approximately, is how Upworthy became one of the biggest sites on the internet back in 2012 and 2013: It came up with a way to package preexisting YouTube videos in a way that made them appealing to people who wanted to project certain political and social values to their Facebook friends. This makes sense! Putting a compelling headline and a hard-sell introduction on a video that might have otherwise gotten lost is just good aggregation—the content is free, the payoff is big, and the politics are coherent. What made Upworthy especially explosive was that it was repackaging not just to appeal to people but to a mostly invisible quirk of its distributor—what is sometimes referred to as Facebook’s ‘long click’ metric. Upworthy headlines compelled people to click; long YouTube videos embedded on their site compelled people to stay; Facebook received three very strong signals—clicking, sharing, and time spent—that Upworthy’s content was vigorously engaged with, and treated it as such.”

—John Herrman

Why You Should Love—and Hate—Upworthy

“Here’s why you should love Upworthy: it harnesses the latest wisdom about Internet sharing to bring staggering amounts of attention to important issues.

“Or here’s why you should hate Upworthy: it is craven, formulaic, and sickly-sweet, despoiling the innermost secrets of the Web and human nature and getting rich.

—Katy Waldman

Even Upworthy’s CMS Is Edgy

“Curators load potential headlines and thumbnail images into a testing system, which shows each option to a small sample of the site’s visitors, tracking their actions—did they click it, did they share it? The system used to return detailed numerical feedback on each option, but it was decided that hard numbers over-influenced the curators; now it tags options with things like ‘bestish’ and ‘very likely worse.’”

Watching Team Upworthy Work Is Enough to Make You a Cynic. Or Lose Your Cynicism. Or Both. Or Neither

When Less Content Means More Traffic

“One reason Upworthy limits the content it unleashes is that they’re [sic] focused on traffic from Facebook, and Facebook limits the amount of content a publisher can profitably post. Outlets on Facebook get punished if they’re posting too much content to the site. So a Facebook-focused publisher like Upworthy has far sharper diminishing marginal returns than a traditional publisher who’s extremely interested in, say, repeat viewers of their homepage. (This is one way in which Facebook’s (evolving) rules might effect how outlets publish in the future.)”

—Ezra

Upworthy’s 11 Rules for Success

Eli Pariser:

1. Don’t write about politics.

2. Find story ideas on social media feeds, not other websites.

3. Focus on Facebook, not Twitter.

4. Write 25 headlines for every article.

5. It’s ok to trick someone into reading an article if you know they’ll love the content.

6. Use A/B testing and analytics to juice content.

7. Think about advertising differently.

8. Don’t worry about keeping readers on your site.

9. Being first doesn’t matter.

10. Mobile is important, but it isn’t everything.

11. Only write something 1 million people would be happy to learn about.

The Quick and Easy Way Upworthy A/B Tests Headlines

Growth Hackers:

All that’s necessary is Facebook, Bitly, and the clock.

Here’s how they do it:

First, they pick two promising headlines for the same content and create a bitly url for each—one with url?r=A and one with B. Next, they find two cities with similar demographics and populations amongst their Facebook fans and share one bitly with each city. They set a timer and wait for the clicks to roll in. When the time is up, they add a “+” to the end of the bitly and compare stats.

The title with the most clicks is the winner.

Adam Mordecai, over to you. Is this true?

Upworthy Explains Its Secret Viral Sauce

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of Upworthy. If you care about making your content go viral, then study these slides from the site's editorial director and chief curator:

Everything You Know About Web Publishing Is Wrong

Conventional Wisdom	Upworthy
Focus on current events	Timeliness doesn’t matter
Publish hundreds of posts per week	Publish 60 posts per week
Original content is best	No original content
Videos should be short	Video length doesn’t matter
Wear your partisanship on your sleeve	Use nonpartisan headlines
Comments build a community	No comments
Pitch big-name reporters	Pitch social media celebrities

Sources:

1. The Brilliant, Unusual Way Media Startup Upworthy Grew to 10.4 Million Monthly Readers in Its First Year, Business Insider

2. Why Upworthy’s Signature Headlines Are Only Half the Story, Fast Company

3. What Tools Does Upworthy Employ to Test Its Headlines?, Quora

4. Upworthy Says We’ve Been Doing Viral All Wrong: Serious Stuff Is More Shareable Than LOL Cats, PandoDaily

As You Title-Test, Don’t Forget to Picture-Test

Upworthy Goes Viral by Optimizing Optimism

How a Viral Headline Raised $300,000 for Cancer Research

Doctors gave Zach Sobiech bad news just after his 17th birthday: bone cancer would take his life within one year. Undaunted, the teenager recorded a song about struggling with the sickness.

The website, Soul Pancake, picked up the video and featured Sobiech in an online documentary, “My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech.” The biopic appeared on the websites of Fox News and People, and soon garnered tens of thousands of views.

Then the editors at Upworthy saw the spot. After testing 79 options, they repackaged it under the headline, “This Kid Just Died. What He Left Behind Is Wondtacular.”

The results were remarkable:

• The video was viewed almost 12 million times
• Sobiech’s song, “Clouds,” skyrocketed to the top listing in iTunes
• Upworthy raised more than $300,000 for cancer research

Upworthy co-founder Peter Koechley frames the story this way: “Had [we] not optimized that headline, that post would have gotten maybe 1 million views—not 15 million.”

Upworthy Goes Viral by Optimizing Optimism

Related: How a Viral Headline Spurred a Police Investigation

Upworthy’s Top Curator Publishes at Most One Post a Day

If you’re focused on churning out content (as is the preference of my friend, Sean Hackbarth) rather than perfecting a single post or two, then Upworthy’s model suggests you’re doing the whole publishing thing wrong:

“The conventional wisdom is that viral pay dirt requires volume. Whether the content is being created or repurposed, sites such as BuzzFeed and Gawker produce dozens of posts a day. Upworthy staffers, by contrast, are told to find the most compelling content available, then spend most of their time thinking about how to present it. ‘Our curator who gets the most traffic barely publishes six things a week,’ [Upworthy co-founder Peter] Koechley says.”

Upworthy’s Greatest Hits

Thanks to Hamish McKenzie for the first and second columns.

How Hard Is It to Make Something Go Truly Viral?

Take it from Upworthy’s top curator, Adam Mordecai: "Rarely, if ever, does content truly go viral ... I think 0.5% of everything we do goes beyond one million views."

Addendum (12/31/2013): Put another way (again from Mordecai): "Anyone who says they can make anything go viral is probably a snake oil salesman or really naive. Most of our stuff fails."

Addendum (1/8/2014): One more Mordecai slide:

On Hating Buzzworthy

An ongoing list of envy masquerading as principle vis-a-vis two of today’s most important websites

1. “Upworthy—even smarmier than BuzzFeed.” —Nick Denton, Gawker

2. “Sites like Upworthy cater to the basest and most recklessly childish of human instincts.” —Jack Flanagan, Daily Beast

3. “The hammer of [Upworthy’s] unrelenting moralism starts to feel not so much as if it is breaking barriers as it is cracking your skull.” —Hamish McKenzie, PandoDaily

4. “Upworthy is the worst site on the Internet. Their mission statement is smug, backpatting, faux-activist horseshit. Their headlines are the purest, crack-cocaine of clickbait. And when you do click, the content they’ve dredged up from YouTube never, ever pays off.” —Bob Powers, HappyPlace

5. “Whatever the intentions of the Upworthy and BuzzFeed creators, the consequences for real, honest and complex ideas, causes and people are the same: they get ignored or drowned out in a sea of bullshit.” —Ryan Holiday, Betabeat

6. “There’s something about the Upworthy headline idiom ... saccharine to the point of grossness.” —Lexi Nisita, Refinery29

7. “The traffic-getting half of BuzzFeed.com ... is manipulative and gross.” —Choire Sicha, The Awl

8. Viral stories and photos produced by publishers like BuzzFeed and Upworthy are “junk-food stories with LOLcat art.” —Anonymous insider

9. “For the most part, Upworthy makes itself appear like it is targeting people who are either downright ignorant or in need of a lot of emotional masturbation.” —Ryan Phung

10. “Perhaps the most cynical place on the web.” —Nick Kolakowski, Slashdot

11. “Pioneered by BuzzFeed, and possibly perfected by Upworthy, clickbait is a modern-day media scourge, as unbecoming as it is irresistible.” —Brian Morrissey, Digiday

How a Viral Headline Spurred a Police Investigation

Read Quote of Adam Mordecai's answer to Viral Videos: What advice does Upworthy have for making viral videos? on Quora

How Upworthy Really Makes Things Go Viral

It’s not the headline. It’s the content:

Upworthy posts don’t go viral because people click—Upworthy posts go viral because people share. “Clickbait”—overselling content with outrageous headlines in order to get people onto a website—is a totally viable (if totally annoying) way to get a bunch of initial views. But it doesn’t create viral content. By far the most important factor in getting people to share a post is the actual quality of the content.

In other words, a good headline can open the door, but only good content will entice people to walk through it.

Your Gut Is Gullible

Last year, a senior member of Obama’s campaign email team dropped this bombshell: despite the team’s expertise, no member could reliably predict which message would generate the most money. “We basically found our guts were worthless,” he admitted.

Earlier this year, Adam Mordecai, Upworthy’s editor at large, divulged the same deficiency. “I’m our highest performing curator,” he wrote. “I get 20-30% of our traffic every month. And every time I predict something will go viral, or headline X will win, I’m usually horribly wrong, usually about 97% of the time.”

The lesson: test, test, and test some more.

Addendum (12/23/2013): Or, to put it another way: “Unless you harness the magical powers of a unicorn horn, you will never know how to make all your stuff go totally viral.”

Upworthy Explains Its Success

“At best, things online are usually either awesome or meaningful, but everything on Upworthy.com has a little of both. Sensational and substantial. Entertaining and enlightening. Shocking and significant.”

About Us

Upworthy’s Secret to Making Serious, Seemingly Unsexy Subjects Go Viral

Updated (12/9/2013)

In July, David Carr profiled the first 100 days of a website called Upworthy:

“Upworthy, a news aggregation site that began publishing on March 26, is serious news built for a spreadable age, with super clicky headlines and a visually oriented user interface. Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, and Peter Koechley, a former managing editor of the Onion who also worked at MoveOn, noticed that much of the media that gets shared online is built on cute animals and dumb humans that are good for a laugh, but not much else ...

“By putting tasty headlines on nutritious subjects—chocolate sauce on brussels sprouts, as it were—Upworthy can make the sharing impulse work on topics beyond LOLCats and fashion disasters.

Then, a few days ago, the Times followed-up with another mash note:

“There is conventional wisdom about what kind of material will go viral on the Internet: celebrity slide shows, lists like 10 tips for losing belly fat, and quirky kitten antics.

“Then there is the path of Upworthy.com, whose goal is to make more serious content as fun to share as a “video of some idiot surfing off his roof.” Surfing idiots are tough to beat, of course, but Upworthy has shown that by selecting emotional material and then promoting it with catchy, pretested headlines, it can fulfill its mission: to direct Internet audiences to what it deems socially worthwhile subjects.

“Already the site has drawn millions of people to share videos about sober topics like income inequality and human trafficking. A video featuring Patrick Stewart discussing domestic violence was uploaded more than six million times after it was posted in May.

Fact: Upworthy Produces None of Its Own Content

NYT:

Instead, it employs roughly 20 “curators” who find obscure video and graphics (but not text) in topic areas—like sexuality, civil rights or economics—that they feel are meaningful, but being passed over. The site repackages the freely available content with snappy headlines and content teases. The owners acknowledge that “meaningful” is subjective, and their tilt is progressive. Still, curators are given few boundaries, and are told that if they find something that moves them to laugh or cry or get angry, it will probably move others.