Yes, it's jarring to see the juxtaposition between the the first (Dialect Map) and second (Boston Marathon bombings) pieces of content. But it should also be remembered that articles about the Boston Marathon bombings could be found anywhere from a variety of sources, while the Dialect Map tool was exclusive to the New York Times.
I think that goes a long way to explain why, in the context of solely the NYT, the Dialect Map was more popular. But let's not take that to mean that, overall, people were more interested in the Dialect Map than the bombings. They weren't.... they just got their information about the bombings somewhere besides the NYT.
I think that's missing the point, you kinda cherry-picked one piece to compare to (albeit the next-most-popular one). As the article mentions, only four of the top ten were breaking news stories. And yeah those are the least interesting because that is the most basic and straightforward function of a news organization and, as you noted, rather interchangeable with competitors' offerings. And I don't think the article was attempting to say that "people were more interested in the Dialect Map than the bombings."
But, the point is, when stacked up against the rest of the Times' original/exclusive/investigative pieces - their differentiating content - an interactive "app" was more popular than traditional journalistic prose (even from noted celebrities!), and that they demonstrably missed opportunities by not creating more apps.
As an aside, I agree with corresation's point that the "only 11 days" argument is weak, in fact it probably got a massive viral boost by coming during the holidays. Anecdotally I was with my family when we all did the quiz and talked about it.
> They weren't.... they just got their information about the bombings somewhere besides the NYT
Probably "other sources in addition to NYT", but yes.
Not just that, but the Boston Marathon bombings were an ongoing story - the NYT had a number of different stories that related to it.
NYT is actually not a great place to go for truly breaking news like that - except for pre-planned NYT-exclusive releases, they're almost never the first to post a story. On the other hand, they usually have more in-depth research, better analysis, and (most importantly) better fact-checking than other news sources; this is clearly a direct tradeoff.
I'm actually surprised that the Boston bombings was so high on the list. If anything, I think that speaks to the trustworthiness of the NYT as a news source, even in the online era.
Also, by its very nature, the dialect map feature appealed to people all over the US. It will have received a lot of clicks from people who would otherwise never have visited the NYT. Doesn't prove much.
In a world where the attention span of adults and teenagers is trending towards zero and where sites like http://viralnova.com and http://upworthy.com do so well, links that go viral have to do more than educate the reader - they have to briefly 'elevate' the sharer in their loosely defined peer group with a momentary ego boost.
Reminds me of something that a legendary e-commerce marketer did once (before FB probably banned the practice). He played to ego - the most important player of all:
* Setup a Facebook app for fans of a certain college team (I believe it was the Cornhuskers)
* The Facebook app challenged the user with various and obscure trivia about the college team
* If you scored well enough, you were "rewarded" with a chance to share your score with your FB buddies and a "no-strings-attached" Netflix trial subscription
I went through “How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk” when it came out, but I probably wouldn't have taken the time if it had been with a less credible site, like BuzzFeed. So maybe their success with this owes a lot to their other journalism.
Great point -- in fact, I actually recall seeing a similar visualization on a different site a couple weeks before the NYTs one came out. It was interesting, but I dismissed it as less scientific because it wasn't on a credible domain. No doubt, part of the success of this visualization was that it was tied to the NYT.
The content-light format of "22 X that Y"[1][2][3], pioneered by Cracked and perfected by BuzzFeed, is infecting other sites, including once-reputable ones like Forbes[4], and indeed getting tons of eyeballs. I'm somewhat afraid next year's top article won't be much more than funny pictures off Google with witty captions.
I can't confirm Cracked as the pioneers of the listicle, but ca. 2007 Digg was the altar[1] of listicles and Cracked was the leading source for most of them.
[1] This has been beaten to death already, but the top subreddits definitely have a 2007-2009 Digg vibe.
While Cracked are disciples of the church of lists, I wouldn't attribute the unfortunate trend to them: it has been a checkout line magazine mainstay for many, many years.
"10 Food Ingredients That Will Tighten Your Tummy!"
"6 Sex Tricks That Will Drive Him Wild!"
"9 Common Household Items That Will Kill You!"
I blame Digg v1.0 (now taken over by Reddit) for it becoming a common tactic online -- As the Digg front page was taken over by lists, that accessible format allowing for easy upvotes, it encouraged an invirtuous cycle of other sites desperately adopting it as traffic started becoming much more clustured, and "winner takes all" became more important. Sites had less success existing in their niche given that even their normal readers were spending most of their time with the herd, so if you can't beat them, make a list about how to join them.
This makes sense because this 'story' was completely egocentric. When people shared it, they did with the implication that devoting your time to this story can tell you something about yourself.
People are most interested in themselves.
P.S. -- I think the quiz was very well done. I grew up near Miami and the three cities it guessed were suburbs of Miami.
As an occasional (and increasingly frequent) long-form journalist, I'm not the least bit concerned here. Do we really expect that the most popular journalism in the 21st century will follow a function derived from an outdated form?
The 'Regional Dialect Map' was a piece of interactive software. It was interesting. It was engaging. It was sharable. It provided entertainment and, I'd argue, legitimate utility to people who took the two to three minutes to fill it out. It wasn't Pulitzer material, sure, but it was a far cry from one of those "One Weird Trick to Lose Bellyfat" spamvertorials.
Traditional journalism has a place in the modern world, but its form is going to evolve over time, and we shouldn't bemoan the inevitability. Everything is not turning into a "Which Star Wars Character Are You?" poll. Everything is not becoming a 132-character sound bite. Some things will. Maybe even most things. And other, newer things will come along. Many of those things will be useful, though they'll take forms that freak us out at first. That the NYT's most popular piece of content was something untraditional is not necessarily cause for alarm. If anything, this piece will be remembered, five to ten years from now, as the primitive ancestor of the much cooler and more engaging things that descended from it.
I think that, for certain topics, these sorts of visualizations could be the future of journalism. It allows one to take a complex subject, and illustrate a portion of it much more lucidly than is possible in text.
That said, it also really interesting to note that the data for the "How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk" actually came from a Harvard study. The actual "journalism" was really an exercise in UI for the NYT.
I'm in the process of putting together a social experiment that draws some similar conclusions to what people have addressed here. The idea is to create 365 link bait titles and then back fill them with content and publish one article per day for one year. My hypothesis is that you could effectively create a publishing company without great content, very well engineered titles, and social media for the marketing. If anyone is interested in helping, feel free to get in contact! I've already built some guidelines and have a list of titles ready to go.
And it probably pales in popularity compared to "Which Star Wars Character Are You". It is surely eclipsed by "What is your Elf Name?"
What is the take away from this? What is the amazing discovery? What is the reveal?
Some content is more accessible and shareable than others, often in a negative correlation with value. In this case it's a linguistics/idioms test where you can prove that you, indeed, live where you live.
It's also strange how much noise is being made about it doing it in "11 days!". Most content on news sites have an extremely steep popularity drop off, and it isn't really the norm that people go back to revisit the news from two weeks ago: A week after the fact, you aren't reading the original story about the Boston Bomber, but instead are reading the newest one (of the 10,000+ that the NY Times published on the topic). There is nothing in that particular observation.
A good example of this is how image-based submissions began dominating reddit - especially after imgur - because, more than anything else, they can be consumed in a second and voted on.
In my opinion, this development definitely did not change reddit for the better.
It's not that bad, because there are still subreddits with strict rules and mods enforcing them. Compare /r/gaming to /r/games for example. And then there's /r/AskHistorians of course, which is the standard by which all other subreddits are judged.
EDIT: Having said that, I agree that the phenomenon you describe is very real.
Interesting observation that is so obvious as to be easily overlooked. It would be interesting if upvotes and downvotes were normalized somehow such as by filetype or by subreddit activity so that non-image content has the same relative popularity as image content.
A large percent of consumers won't pursue anything that doesn't make a good first impression and images convey a first impression faster than any other type of content.
Though not all images an be "consumed in a second," all will convey a first impression rapidly.
So images dominate not only because of fast consumption, but because they "sell" their first impression more quickly and completely than any other kind of content.
I am a data scientist and right now I am working on exactly this problem: automatically identifying good content; in my case among piles of user generated content. The question is how do you define that? It's not what most people like (or at least say they like), it's not what most people share or reply to.
• Highlighting (usually, a great headline/share title);
• The audience;
• Content form;
• The KPI. Conversions or comments? Visits or shares? Etc.
• The content itself;
• Incentivizing distribution.
If you say that good content is "not what most people share or reply to" then what KPI (Key performance indicator) are you measuring by?
For example, with a good influencer strategy, shares can be more important than outright clicks/visits, because getting your work to spread results in more clicks/visits down the line.
Most people do not vote - a front page link on HN or Reddit will see 10 - 100x more impressions than votes (my own experience has been 100x+ on the low side). The more complex the material, and the slower it is to parse, the response rate drops dramatically further still because it will likely either be backed out of (ain't got time for that), or more likely when the user is done with it they have lost all context. Those magical tabs you find sitting in the background hours later.
So you're left with the highest response rate being towards short, sweet material that ideally panders to a bias, allowing the user to shortcut even more. This is true even on HN where trends come and go, people trying to evangelize some bias based on nothing more than a title or a skim summary.
All of this doesn't even count astroturfing and sock puppets - the lowest common denominator ascension of content already makes enough noise.
I think that goes a long way to explain why, in the context of solely the NYT, the Dialect Map was more popular. But let's not take that to mean that, overall, people were more interested in the Dialect Map than the bombings. They weren't.... they just got their information about the bombings somewhere besides the NYT.