Millenials don't seem to care about homepages
We've been talking a lot about our goals recently: getting 1 million monthly visitors by the end of this year (short term) and becoming the site/app people open when they want to be informed what's important right now (long term).
We reconsidered these goals after thinking about how content and its consumption is becoming more and more distributed across social networks, aggregators, and apps.
Some people even predict the death of the homepage and the end of apps and say that we should rather think in systems and be where the consumers already are. This is the reason why everyone is so much into bots and messaging interfaces right now (also see conversational commerce). It's super difficult to become a new destination people move to because you need to change their habits, which is always pretty tough to accomplish. So why not use current habits to your advantage?
This is why we tweaked our goals:
We want to help people stay informed about what's happening right now in the most convenient way that adapts to their news consumption. [phrasing is WIP]
We want to achieve this by:
- being everywhere they already are, not measuring our success by homepage visits but rather measure our reach on distributed platforms (see BuzzFeed data post)
- optimizing content for each platform (e.g. our Twitter experiments)
- building integrations that easily fit into their current habits (e.g. WhatsApp bots, Chrome Extensions..)
I'd love to hear your feedback!
-Jan
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