Drew Curtis Quotes

We believe that the best Web content optimization strategy is something as old as journalism itself: the shocking truth and the authentic opinion.

One of the things that is counterintuitive about BuzzFeed is that there's not a natural corollary to what we're doing because it isn't possible to distribute content through word-of-mouth in print.

Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.

The first thing you learn when you're blogging is that people are one click away from leaving you. So you've got to get to the point, you can't waste people's time, you've got to give them some value for their limited attention span.

For blogs today, it's really about content creation and partnering with a brand. You can get the news in so many forms and so many places. A tweet now is enough to tell you about a story. People don't have to click to go to your site.

When you think of Yahoo, they had a shot to be what Vox is doing, in terms of taking content and distribution, and really focusing on news, sports, finance - the things that uniquely Yahoo was really terrific at - and really build that whole flywheel.

As much as I love scores of wonderful sites across the web, most of them are driven by the daily grind of the display/pageview hamster wheel. They create 20, 30, 40 'content snacks' a day, and I miss far more than I consume.

OK, I have to admit that I go on TheSuperficial.com. That guy is so funny, he's just so funny... you know, I'm a news junkie, so I regularly flip between HuffingtonPost.com, CNN.com, and a site that's called MyWay.com, which shows me six different news feeds. And I go on DrudgeReport.com about once a day.

It's a good time to be in the content business though, the branded content business.

Ben Smith's quick-hit campaign 'scoops' are about as viral as cat videos. That fits with Buzzfeed.

If you're creating an entertainment site, you want the content to be the star.

I think international is a place that, actually, The Huffington Post and AOL have started to make moves in.

What I worry about the most is the competition for young eyeballs. We have so many other competing forms of media. I don't take any audience members for granted.

When I was at AOL, I was always on the web media side while much of the company was focused on the ISP business. We focused on big categories like celebrities and sports, and we created brands around that category like AOL Celebrities, AOL Movies and Fanhouse.

Advertisers don't want to put their ads next to the investigative story; it's extremely difficult to do that. And very few people today actually read those serious news stories on the Web now.

I don't think that Yahoo or any other Internet company should try to become a television network. We will be nowhere if we have to create our own content.

OKCupid's model is almost entirely based on advertising, which is the way most online media is monetized these days, whether it's the news or whether it's sports, and we think online dating is going to evolve in the exact same way.

If you look at the heritage of the best advertising, you can make stuff that is great for both readers and advertisers. I don't think Don Draper would have loved banner ads.

These days, headlines are trying to get you to click.

As more ad spending shifts online, the ability to have expertise and to innovate quickly will become critical.

Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.

Many of us get our news from social networks, blogs, and daily aggregators.

Just like the VCR opened the film and TV industries to unimaginable new revenue streams, search, RSS and the Internet will do the same for marketers and media companies.

Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don't think it should ever go, where it's trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize.

I just get my news from the Internet.