The Daily Beast: How To Be Successful

During NYC’s Social Media Week, we had the opportunity to sit in on “Launching a media brand from scratch: A short history of The Daily Beast”, a panel in which The Daily Beast discussed how the relatively new site was able to rise to prominence in several months.

The general consensus was that their success resulted from the prolific propagation of their content. While it’s easy to spam the world to let them know what you’re writing about, it’s more efficient to engage other blogs and publications on a personal level. The idea is that tailoring which articles to share with specific blogs allows for a better dialogue. This makes sense, as PSFK and others have pointed out before. It’s an inversion of the traditional PR model—it’s about building individual relationships rather than spamming.

Yet, sharing content alone isn’t the only reason there are flurries of comments on The Daily Beast. Their content, as moderator Faris Yakob from McCann noted, could be “all the news that’s fit to debate.” In that sense, their bi-partisan coverage of the news fosters multiple perspectives, and this naturally invites users to comment, debate, and opine.

The argument goes that if The Daily Beast only catered to either conservatives or liberals, there wouldn’t be discussions, but agreements, which bring an end to conversations. The combination of images, headlines, and high/low-brow content feeds the debate circles. More than just aggregation, they are curators of what’s important at the moment through their Cheat Sheet. Readers can participate by voting the news up or down in addition to commenting.

The design of the site also allows for a hierarchy of digestible news. Readers can quickly access almost a dozen stories before the fold. These include a mix of aggregated content along with original pieces, top stories on the Cheat Sheet, and video posts. Without having to leave the front page, the multiple entry points encourage readers to choose their content and determine their level of engagement.

It may be the difference between old web portals and our current online media—the move from broadcasting to provoking heated discussions.