It is so over for kitten videos – Buzzfeed goes for long form essays
I must admit that not being obsessed with kittens or aliens means that I don’t spend as great deal of time on killer viral site Buzzfeed. But I do know people who spend as much time on there as they used to on Facebook.
I do find it heartening though that the site has just employed the former editor in chief of Spin to pioneer a section of long-form journalism on the site.
How on earth they expect to make any money from serious essays – and the ones they have run so far including a profile of Mitt Romney’s father are serious stuff completely at odds with the catchy songs about pizza and Obama crying videos that is the site’s bread and butter – remains to be seen.
How they present the essays too will be interesting. The essays so far like – Can you Die From A Nightmare? are just scroll down affairs that probably work much better on tablets than they do on the web. Maybe we will see some HTML5 type magic like Pitchfork – which incidentally freezes my PC each time visit it.
So what do you think? Will 2013 be the year in which the web loses its obsession with videos and images and goes crazy for words? Mmmm.
