Chris Kolmar (left) and Nick Johnson
Four years ago, Chris Kolmar and Nick Johnson were working in the Bay Area for Movoto, an online real estate brokerage that matches buyers with agents. Kolmar, a twenty-nine-year-old computer geek with a brain for algorithms, was Movoto's director of marketing. Johnson, thirty-nine, an affable former sports reporter, handled media outreach. Their directive was to drive traffic to the Movoto website so that people could connect with agents, buy houses, and score Movoto finder's fees.
Search-engine optimization was key. Movoto needed to appear prominently when people searched for "realtor Detroit" or "houses for sale Tucson."
But the web was also in the midst of a sea change. Facebook had become the Internet's home page. Sites like BuzzFeed were breaking traffic recordsand raking in truckloads of cashby specializing in the kind of viral ephemera that Facebook users share widely.
What if, Kolmar wondered, Movoto applied BuzzFeed's strategy to Movoto? Businesses creating original content as a way of marketing themselves wasn't a new concept, of course. But the Facebook paradigm held vast potential. A post could reach millions in a single day.
If Kolmar could produce content and get it to go viral, that would translate into big traffic for Movoto's siteand, in theory, big bucks for Movoto.
"The challenge was how to make real estate interesting," Kolmar says. "And we didn't have a team of journalists who could compete with the big media outlets on real estate news. So we started writing these blog posts about things that we knew there was an audience for: what the fictional value of Batman's house might be, or how much Harry Potter's castle would cost."
It soon occurred to Kolmar that posts about neighborhoods, cities, and states were a natural fit. So Movoto started cranking out titles like "These Are The 10 Best Places To Live In Alabama." The methodologytossing census information, crime rates, tax rates, weather conditions, and a few other factors into an algorithm and writing up whatever it spit outwouldn't pass muster at a research lab, but that wasn't the point.
"We figured out pretty quickly that if you tell the people in a city that their city is a top-ten best place to live for something, they'll click on you," Kolmar said. "And often, if you send that link to a media outlet in that city, they'll do a story on it."
Kolmar and Johnson had stumbled upon a dark truth about media in the Internet age: Establishment news outletsTV stations, radio stations, even newspaperswere as desperate for traffic as Movoto was. In this beleaguered media environment, a half-baked Movoto "study" often rose to the level of news. If something smelled vaguely viral, journalists would happily gobble it up. Few editors or reporters seemed to care about the methodology behind Movoto's findings, or even that Movoto was a for-profit enterprise.
Traffic to the Movoto blog skyrocketed, from two thousand visitors per month in 2011 to eighteen million in 2014. But there was a problem.
"The traffic was all crap," Kolmar said. "The people weren't buying houses."
Kolmar and Johnson had become wizards at getting eyeballs, but their audience was mostly clickbait rubberneckers. And though creating all that content was cheap, it wasn't free. Movoto wasn't seeing a substantial re- turn on its investment.
In October 2014, Movoto was purchased by a large Japanese corporation and soon cut the cord on Kolmar and Johnson's viral-content strategy.
Kolmar relocated to Durham, where his wife is a pediatrics resident at Duke Hospital. Johnson and his fiancée later followed them to the Triangle. They wanted to continue working together, building on the knowledge of regional virality they'd acquired at Movoto but in an environment free of the burden of having to sell something.
In other words, a clickbait site.
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On a Thursday morning in January, I drove to the Chapel Hill home of Johnson and his fiancée, Kim. Located in a woody subdivision, their place doubles as the de facto base of operations for Kolmar and Johnson's new venture.
Kolmar typically works from his home in Durham (he has a new baby) or Bull City Coworking, but he'd stopped by, in Duke cap and hoodie, to give me an overview of the operation. Kim, who helps out part-time, was in the living room, half watching TV, half working on her laptop. Johnson, a UNC cap on his head, was in a Post-it-filled zone off to the side of the living room, behind a messy desk with a couple of large monitors on it. A Pandora station was churning out earthy jams: Rusted Root, Dave Matthews, an interminably long Counting Crows song. Their new company, founded last May, is called Chasing Chains, LLCa frisbee golf reference.
"Regional infotainment" is the phrase Kolmar and Johnson use to describe Chasing Chains' two sites, HomeSnacks and RoadSnacks. Though that phrase may be unfamiliar, the content it refers to is likely queued up on your Facebook feed at this very moment. Maybe a friend from college just shared a post about the "50 Best College Towns To Live In Forever" that featured your alma mater. Or a restaurant where your cousin works was named one of the "20 Best Restaurants in Charleston Right Now."
If you click on these links, they sometimes lead you to well-established websites, either old school (Travel & Leisure) or new (Thrillist, Huffington Post). Like Kolmar and Johnson, these outlets have discovered that innate hometown pride can be soaked up and wrung out as advertising dollars.
Just as often, though, the "10 Reasons North Carolina Is The BEST State" post leads you to some site you've never heard of before. Somelike WalletHub, NerdWallet, and SmartAsset (why are the two words always smashed into each other?)are personal finance websites that publish clicky, regional "studies" to boost their exposure and collect consumer data. Others, like HomeSnacks and RoadSnacks, are pure page-view plays, dependent entirely on ad revenue.
Only In Your Stateprobably Kolmar and Johnson's closest competitorfalls into the latter category. It has huge reach: more than five million fans across its state-themed Facebook pages. Brian Warner, who owns and runs the site, told me he started Only In Your State because he wanted to highlight cool places and interesting small businesses.
"I just think it's awesome when we hear from businesses that tell us their sales exploded after we called them the best donut shop in their state," Warner says.
But how does Warner, who lives in Los Angeles, have any idea what the best donut shop in Georgia is? He says he has a team in place that manages content for individual states. But he's unwilling to divulge how many employees he has or how they're paid.
Kolmar and Johnson are more open about their business. At Johnson's house, I asked them to take me through the life of one of their posts. They chose "These Are The 10 Most Boring Cities in South Carolina."
Kolmar takes pride in the fact that their findings are not plucked from thin air but rather are the result of a pseudoscientific data mine. To determine the boringness of cities in a given state, Kolmar created an algorithm that examined the percentage of the population over thirty-five years old, married population, population with kids, and population over sixty-five. The higher these numbers were, the more boring the place was.
Johnson purchased three Facebook ads targeting users who live in the cities that made the list, as well as users who "like" South Carolina on Facebook. Each ad used a different picture. After a few hours of the "suggested post" being delivered to Facebook feeds, Johnson checked to see which ad was attracting the most clicks and shares. He then shut off the others and increased the ad buy on that post. In the other room, Kim was blasting South Carolina media with pitches, drawing from an organically assembled spreadsheet containing more than two thousand media contacts across the country.
Johnson checked Chartbeat to see how many users were currently looking at the post: twenty-six.
"Twenty-six at noon is pretty good," Johnson told me. "If it continues at this pace, by three p.m. there could be about fifty on it, and by the time people get home from work, maybe a hundred. And if you get hot with sharing after work, you could have as many as six hundred on it by midnight, and if you can get to there, you're pretty much guaranteed one hundred and fifty thousand views"Kolmar and Johnson's general benchmark for a viral post.
A few days earlier, while browsing the HomeSnacks site, I noticed that the thumbnail for a post called "If You're From North Carolina, This Will Be The Most Jaw-Dropping Thing You See Today. Guaranteed" had a computer-drawn marker circling some indiscriminate object on a beach, with an arrow pointed at it. But when I clicked, it was just a four-minute video with aerial shots of picturesque North Carolina scenery. There was no payoff for the beach mystery. Despite this, it had attracted over seven hundred thousand page views.
The videos they were publishing the morning I visited also had arrows and circles, occasionally a "Wow!" written somewhere on top of the photo. What was with the drawings?
"It's so spammy, and I hate it," Johnson says. "But if I ran those videos without the arrows or the 'LOL,' probably about half as many people would engage with it. We could say, 'This is a great video, it'll break your heart, it's beautiful,' and with no arrow maybe five percent click. People don't care. But if you're like, 'This will blow you away,' and you circle something or throw an arrow on it, they come to it."
Does HomeSnacks see diminishing returns on its traffic after people realize they've been misled?
"That's a concern, for sure," Johnson says. "I think about that. But the thing is, right now we're so new that we don't really have a brand. We're just another site you see on Facebook that you click and then read real quick."
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"They're the biggest sharers on the Internet," Kolmar says. "Generally speaking, if they don't care about it, we don't write about it."
"But it's surprising what they seem to care about," Johnson chimes in. "I live with a woman over the age of thirty-five"his fiancée, Kim"and I'm always trying to quiz her on ideas I have. I haven't been able to figure out a pattern."
From the living room, Kim shrugs. "Every day is an interesting anthropological experiment," she says.
"Like, you'd think a 'best places to raise a kid' post would do well to women over thirty-five," Johnson says. "But that's not been our experience."
In fact, they found that Facebook users were starting to grow tired of hearing about top places to live.
So they launched a new site, RoadSnacks, to explore the darker side of "regional infotainment"hence the "boring" and "dumbest" posts. They've done a series of negative concepts for each state: drunkest cities, most stoned cities, douchebag cities, ghetto cities.
An early HomeSnacks post about the best cities in Florida netted only twenty thousand unique page views. "But then we flipped it on the RoadSnacks site and did the worst cities in Florida, and that got three hundred thousand views in a week," Johnson says. "Right now, nine times out of ten, the traffic is better for the negative stuff than the happy or exciting stuff."
This approach is a double-edged sword, however. Earlier this year, RoadSnacks ran a post called "These Are The 10 Worst Chicago Suburbs." Kolmar's algorithm determined that the number-one spot belonged to a village called Harwood Heights. The post caught fire on Facebook and was picked up by the Fox and ABC affiliates in Chicago. The residents of Harwood Heights took it personallyso personally that the
Chicago Tribune did a story about the response, which included criticism from the school superintendent and the mayor.
"My thing is, I don't think the mayor of Harwood Heights should give a shit that RoadSnacks did a post about Harwood Heights," Johnson says.
Each post, Kolmar points out, has a note up top stating that it is "opinion based on facts" that is "meant for infotainment." In other words, it shouldn't be taken seriously.
"We clearly say we're not an authority," Kolmar says.
Still, this episode hits on an interesting point about the relationship between the traditional news media and clickbait sites.
A quick scan of my INDY email account shows that WalletHub has sent me forty-two pitches since the beginning of this year. Possible story ideas include a study about 2016's best cities in which to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and one about 2016's best cities for an active lifestyle. It's tempting. For an overworked reporter trying to hit a story quota, an "A study has found" post is like being handed an umbrella in a rainstorm. Clickbait studies are even more appealing because they're tailor-made to garner clicks.
So click-hungry news operations take the bait. The Triangle Business Journal, a generally reputable publication, aggregates WalletHub and the like on a near-daily basis. The TBJ may be the worst local offender, but we're all guilty. Virtually every local media outlet, including the INDY, has at some point indulged these lists.
The problem is, these are not legitimate news stories. They're cynical traffic grabsand cash grabs, too. The purely capitalistic dynamics here are plain to see.
Even Warner, the founder of Only In Your State, flat-out told me that his goal was to get to a point where his site could strike deals with entertainment destinations in which they paid him to be included on his site's lists.
Johnson says he is regularly surprised by the degree to which HomeSnacks and RoadSnacks posts are covered credulously by the media.
"The only authority we have is the authority [news outlets] give us," he says. "Why is the Chicago Tribune doing a story about our post? I mean, it's RoadSnacks-dot-net. We're not even a dot-com."
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Despite being a relatively tiny businessjust Kolmar, Johnson, Kim, and some freelance writersChasing Chains nevertheless attracted seven million unique visitors to its sites last month. By comparison, The News & Observer's marketing literature indicates it draws 2.2 million per month.
They're not buying Rolexes yet, though. Kolmar showed me Chasing Chains' income statement for May 2015 through December 2015its first eight months in business. The biggest expenses were buying Facebook ads and paying writers (they pay based on the post's performance). All told, revenuesall from web ads, mostly Google Adsense and Taboolawere $163,000. Their net income was $55,000.
"But with six or seven million people a month coming to our site, we should be making more money than we are," Johnson says.
To further complicate things, their current business model will likely soon be outdated.
"Our current strategy works right now, but it's not going to last," Kolmar says. "The ad spends are getting more competitive. And Facebook could change its algorithm at any point, which would alter our traffic structure. So we have to diversify how we make money. It's just a question of what direction to take."
Consulting is one possibility. "We're very good at getting a lot of people in one region to see the same thing in one day," Johnson says. "Which is a good skill to have, and I think there are companies that would pay us for that insight."
In the meantime, HomeSnacks and RoadSnacks are beginning to bump up against the limits of regional infotainment.
"We've kinda run through a lot of the good topics alreadyfattest, laziest, hardest-working, boring, redneck, whatever," Johnson says. "You know, can you tell people, 'These are the most redneck cities in North Carolina,' and then the next year say, 'These are the most redneck cities for 2017'? I think we're still trying to test the limits of what people are willing to read."
Kolmar told me that what he'd really love to do is turn the sites into more journalistic enterprisessomething closer in spirit to Atlantic Cities.
"I think Nick and I, we think of ourselves as good humans, we want to balance our karma out," Kolmar says. "And we really do have a passion for local news. I wish we had the money to do more original reporting and original videos, on-the-ground stuff about Durham restaurants and things like that. Unfortunately, that's not what the Internet wants."
This article appeared in print with the headline "One Trick for Building a Clickbait Empire."
