First Round Review and the vindication of long-form content
- Summary:
- I get irritated when people dismiss long form content. I found some new proof points via Chris Fralic of First Round, the company behind the long-form goodness of First Round Review.
I’m calling BS. I believe in immersive content, and I’ve got counter-intuitive stats to force the issue. Granted, short-form video can put virtual butts in seats. And some viral absurdities make me question my reasons for sticking around. So you can imagine my contrarian delight when I stumble upon fresh proof points. I recently did just that at Advocamp, Influitive’s annual customer advocate event.
This debate fodder comes courtesy Chris Fralic, Managing Partner at First Round Capital. First Round's long form content site, First Round Review, has been very successful. And they did it by ignoring the bromide that people have become distracted Facebook junkies who need their content in tiny bites.
Before I get to First Round, there IS some merit to the video and mobile arguments. But mobile’s impact on content has to do with user experience, NOT content length. As I wrote about in Why UX has fundamentally changed content’s winners and losers, smarties like Dave Pell of NextDraft thrive on short mobile content. But mobile content is about the form factor. Peeps scroll and swipe to consume content. If you keep their attention and make it easy to peruse, they'll keep scrolling.
Buzzfeed is synonymous with cheesy videos. But did you know that Buzzfeed will also be credited for cementing the "art of the long form scroll?" In 2014, Buzzfeed wised up to this trend with pieces like "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500." This 6,000 word piece got more than 1,000 page views, with 47 percent of them from mobile devices. Tablet readers spend 12 minutes on the story, but mobile readers averaged a whopping 25 minutes.
The elegance of the mobile scroll
That's the elegance of the scroll in action. As Megan Garber of The Atlantic put it:
There's something intuitive about the scroll as an interface. Individual pages—the stuff of books and magazines and newspapers, the stuff that had been transferred, skeuomorphically, to the web—offer reading experiences that are relatively contrived. One of Buzzfeed's most significant contributions to The Way We Web Now will likely prove to be the selection of a scroll framework over a paginated one. "I actually think that long, immersive scroll is a kind of lovely way to read a piece," [Buzzfeed Editor in Chief Ben] Smith says.
Buzzfeed's infamous listicles are also implicated. It's not common to see a "five things" or a "ten things" list. "27 things" or "39 things" is more common. Buzzfeed's time on page average in 2014 was more than five minutes; the time spent on a long form story is double that.
Video has similar surprises. We've all seen travelers perfectly happy to watch full-length movies on their phones; perhaps the "Netflixation" of the phone has something to do with the stats for longer videos. Another 2014 study found that 31 percent of long-form video viewing on mobile is content in the 60+ minute range.
First Round Review - winning with long-form
When it comes to capturing attention, user experience counts. For businesses in search of a content edge, quality usually trumps quantity. That's what First Round learned when they started publishing blogs in 2013. In the summer of 2013, Editor Camille Ricketts came on board. First Round Review began publishing twice-weekly long-form pieces, focusing on actionable advice.
During his Advocamp presentation, Fralic shared their approach:
It's long-form detailed content that is actionable and tactical that you can take home and put to work when you read the article. We've now built it up to 400,000 thousand readers a month. It's being shared like crazy (50,000 + total shares this year).
First Round is a ten year old company which focuses on helping startups with the first "seed" round. They've helped over 350 companies that have gone on to raise more than $15 billion in capital. Yet Fralic said, "First Round Review has become the thing we're more known for."
First Round Review's success has fueled First Round's investment in their platform. Fralic:
We put together a platform team that's twice as big as the investment team... If you think of what used to happen maybe once a year at a CEO summit, we're now bringing it online and connecting all the companies together all the time. Now, we're also trying to extend that out into companies that aren't part of First Round yet. For example, Slack told us a very detailed story of how they got to their first million users. I know, to this day, on social media, when people ask the CMO of Slack, "How did you grow?" He'll point them to this First Round Review article that we did.
After his talk, I asked Fralic if they had tied the traffic directly back to new client acquisition (not an easy thing to do statistically). He said they hadn't spent much time on those kinds of metrics yet; their goal is to reach a wide audience with actionable content. But we do know this type of content does impact trust and decision making (see my recent story on Blackbaud's decision to choose Influitive, partially based on outstanding (free) how-to content.
In a recent interview, Ricketts echoed this point:
If they see that excellent content is coming out of First Round and that we’re knowledgeable about certain things and we have a lot of connections, they’re much more likely to work with us, frankly.
Ricketts doubled down on mobile UX in a 2015 redesign, organizing First Round Review's content into nine digital magazines. The magazines have the same simplicity of layout that makes First Round Review a mobile winner.
My take
I frequently share First Round Review content in my enterprise newsfeed, so I'm not surprised by their success. With original content like Thoughts on Gender and Radical Candor, they get traction (1,200 shares for that piece alone).
But it's not the share volume that matters most - it's knowing their content is focused on their demographic, and always has how-to tips to apply the narrative.
During my chat with Fralic, he admitted that he wasn't sure the long-form approach would work. I can understand the hesitation - even diginomica's longest articles are much shorter than a typical First Round Review piece. But Fralic is won over. He consistently hears from readers who tell him about articles that were essential to their professional growth.
There's no one right way to do content. Blogger Josh Bernoff's Without Bullshit blog has built a big readership with a rigid commitment to short form prose (in fact, short form is a fundamental law of Bernoff's advice on no-BS communication). But Bernoff is publishing a book, so even this short form evangelist sees a time and place for the long-form.
It's good to see examples like First Round Review that subvert lazy rules about how content should be. There is ample confirmation of the dominance of mobile in their design. They get bonus points for (apparently) dropping the brutal Bounce Exchange exit popups they were using for a while. Though now I wish I hadn't belly-ached to Fralic about it, as they seem to have abandoned that sign-up method. If so, that's good news - they don't need the hard sell sign up to win readers. That much they've proven.