Upworthy's cofounder spoke at The Guardian's Changing Media Summit in London. Business Insider/Lara O'Reilly Upworthy's cofounder Peter Koechley has an apology to make.

Speaking at The Guardian's Changing Media Summit in London on Thursday, Koechley apologized for what made the three-year-old site one of the fastest growing of all time: its bombastic, sensationalized, clickbait headlines such as "This Amazing Kid Just Died, What He Left Behind Was Wondtacular" and "His First 4 Sentences Are Interesting. The 5th Blew My Mind. And Made Me A Little Sick."

Those types of headlines were punished by a change in Facebook's algorithm last year, which sought to clean up the social-media site's News Feed to surface more "high quality" stories, resulting in huge drops of traffic for Upworthy and similar sites.

Koechley said: "We sort of unleashed a monster. Sorry for that. Sorry we kind of broke the internet last year. I'm excited going forward to say goodbye to clickbait."

Using a native advertising model, Upworthy has grown revenue to more than $10 million, and now that the company has shifted from a fast-growing startup to a "vibrant business," Koechley said, the site's content is pivoting.

He said Upworthy's mission had always been to create and (mostly) curate "empathetic" content, the type of articles that make people feel some sort of emotion like surprise or disgust, or at least amusement.

Upworthy still wants to do that, but the focus of its empathetic mission will be on bigger, more noble, societal, political issues. Those can come from its internal content team, other publishers on the web, nonprofits, and even brands through native advertising (though Upworthy apparently "says no really often" to corporations that do not have genuine good intentions.)

Koechley said he wanted Upworthy to "build empathy at a truly massive scale, get millions, tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of people to understand and care about people they have never seen or will never meet.

"We will do it by sharing powerful stories that put you in someone else's shoes to help you see the world in other people's eyes."

An example of this new approach that Koechley shared was a video from The Alzheimer's Association, showing what it is like to suffer from the disease. Upworthy posted the video on its site under the headline "I Was Totally Lost For 70 Seconds. And Then: 'Holy Sh*t.'" The video seems to be a Google year in review film, but there is a twist:

Koechley said with the editorial change, Upworthy also began looking at different ways to measure the success of its content.

"We do track things based on emotion, sometimes just to see how a depressing story does in comparison to a thought-provoking or inspiring one," he said. "We found the same things that other media owners find when they look it. Active emotions get people reading forward. It doesn't always have to be happy — anger, shock, and outrage does as well as happiness and inspiration. It's the confused, depressed, and deflated that tends to perform worse."

Upworthy's mission to improve readers' empathy with other people around the world is an admirable one, but for a startup known for clickbait, it does risk appearing a little po-faced and could even turn readers off.

When asked whether readers might just become numb to all the well-intentioned, empathetic content Upworthy plans to produce, Koechley responded: "Like everyone in the industry you need to constantly be feeling like you're new and fresh, bringing people into stories for different reasons and making it worth their while. We optimize for the feeling that you leave people with. If you bring people into a story and really make it worth their while and leave them in a good place, they have an impulse to come back."