Upworthy is rolling back its clickbait headlines and ramping up its story creation in a shakeup that will pit it against viral media storytellers, such as BuzzFeed and Vice.



The move marks a significant departure from the company’s editorial strategy over its first three years, which entailed a team of curators scouring the web for content with a social purpose.

Upworthy’s editorial director, Amy O’Leary, has been working on a new content strategy since joining the site in February, shortly after she was poached from the New York Times by co-founders Peter Koechley and Eli Pariser.



The company has been experimenting with its own content for the past few months and has published 22 Upworthy originals to its YouTube channel.

The key to the success of quality content is the marriage of deep data to empathetic storytelling, according to O’Leary, who writes in a report, out today: “We believe that buried inside the relationship there is the power to change the world. And that’s what we’re up to.”

Upworthy’s early growth led it to be named the fastest-growing media company of all time, clocking 8.7m unique monthly visitors in its first six months. The site now hits 20m unique visitors a month, according to the report, and the team will be hoping the new content strategy will fuel further growth.

Koechley hinted at the possibility of more story creation in an interview in February when he said the site was coming up to the limits of curation.

He told the Guardian that story creation had been part of the long-term plan, since day one: “We’ve always modelled ourselves on Netflix and we’re following the Netflix strategy here by spending a good amount of time developing a great user experience and a huge wealth of data and insights into what people pay attention to and care about.

“And then once you have enough data insight you can start experimenting with original storytelling yourself.”

At the Changing Media Summit in March, Koechley apologised for releasing a “monster” onto the internet and said: “I’m excited going forward to say goodbye to clickbait.”

O’Leary said, however, that the site will not be moving back to normal newspaper headlines: “I think that, as someone with a newspaper background, traditional headlines are broken.” She added that Upworthy’s style of headlines worked well before it was adopted by copycat websites and the style flooded the internet.

The 30-strong editorial team, which includes five new writers after six were laid off earlier in the year, will tackle issues such as climate change, justice and diversity and produce sponsored content.

O’Leary said Upworthy can retain its integrity with readers while also producing sponsored content by preventing conflicts of interest: “There are a lot of ways to do that. One thing I’m really proud of is that we’re really careful about who we work with. We’re only choosing to partner with organisations where there is already a natural alignment.”

Asked who Upworthy considers to be its primary competition, O’Leary said: “I think if you’re competing to get people’s attention on the internet, you are competing with the internet.”

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