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With a team of founders that includes Huffington Post co-founder and former Chairman Kenneth Lerer, and former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, the NowThis News social app is keenly attuned to a target audience “of primarily millennials,” says Ed O’Keefe, editor-in-chief. “That basically means that the people we are reaching on our mobile applications and through our social networks 1) go to at least 25 to 30 different sources of information every day, and 2) their bullshit detector is so incredibly high that if you do anything inauthentic, if you rely on the standard traditional format of presentation that you see in a lot of other places, you’re dead.”
On a fluid scrolling interface that is somehow incredibly simple to use without feeling dumbed down, NowThis presents its content in short bursts of video across the usual categories of entertainment, politics, entertainment, world, science and technology and food. In its quest to battle inauthenticity, its news anchors dress casually and deliver the day’s pressing stories in a tone O’Keefe describes as “genuine, irreverent without being glib, straightforward, occasionally edgy but really just truthful.”
In foregoing a more authoritative favored by many news outlets, NowThis acknowledges that, for mobile users, “Google is at your fingertips,” says O’Keefe. “We shouldn’t pretend that we are the only source in the world and that you’re going to learn everything that you possibly can learn – it’s not possible. But, you want to know that if you come to NowThis News through the app or the mobile site, or anywhere that you encounter it, you’re going to find out what the biggest, most important, most sociably sharable stories of the day are in the news, and you’re going to get a perspective that breaks that story down into the simplest component in an understandable, relatable and sharable way.”
That “sharable” term is crucial to the success of NowThis News and very likely any news-oriented media company looking to succeed in the age of mobile. “We are not in the least concerned about the total aggregate views as we are how many people are actually sharing our content,” says O’Keefe. “We want to understand not just that a large number of people watched it [but] what about the piece made it a shareable piece of news. What we’ve learned, and we are still learning, is that doing something like the [George] Zimmerman trial in under 128 seconds is much more inherently sharable than just doing a straight read on what happened today in court. Without being insulting to the audience, we’re going to break that case down and we’re going to be exclusive in a promise of how long it’s going to take you to watch it. If you give us 128 seconds, you will be up to date on every major point in the George Zimmerman trial. You can’t necessarily say that [when] you turn on cable or turn on a network show or even go to a certain website.”
Sharability extends into the company’s monetization efforts as well. One of NowThis News’ founding principles was the elimination of a pre-roll ad leading into the selected story. “If you’re going to put up a 15- or 30-second ad, particularly before a 30- or 45-second piece, in most cases it’s never going to work,” says O’Keefe. “You have to respect the user.”
NowThis is currently experimenting with sponsored content from brands that features “storytelling in the advertising that is as compelling as the content it’s adjacent to,” says O’Keefe. “If you do it well, it’s amazing to see how voluntary sharing is. It’s not forced, it’s not bought, it’s not unnatural and if you have a social app experience that has that great, compelling strong content that differentiates itself in telling stories, it’s not like any other news source.”
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