How To Create The Fastest Growing Media Company In The World

On March 26, 2012, a new media startup called Upworthy launched.

Upworthy is a 14-person site that tries to make meaningful information and pictures go viral.

Today, it is the fastest growing media company in the world. Upworthy finished October with 8.7 million monthly uniques, up from 6 million the month prior. In August, it hit four million uniques, up from 2.5 million in July. Its fast growth was rewarded with $4 million from investors.

There are lots of media companies out there, but none have grown that quickly.

Are Upworthy's growth and business model sustainable? We're not sure, but either way the stats are impressive. We asked CEO and co-founder Eli Pariser what Upworthy has been doing to smash traffic records every month.

Here's what he had to say.

Don't write about politics.

Before he started Upworthy, Pariser worked for a digital, political publication, MoveOn. He and his co-founder, The Onion's former Managing Editor, Peter Koechley, thought the upcoming election would drive traffic to Upworthy.

But people weren't sharing much of Upworthy's political content, so the pair ditched that angle and broadened the site's coverage.

"We thought, 'Ok, it's an election year, people are going to be really interested in politics and the campaign, and we'll get a leg up that way,'" Pariser says. "The election was our whole argument for starting Upworthy this year. But it turned out to be a total non-driver of growth. Of all our top pieces, only a couple deal with politics or the election."

It can be tough for startups to let go of initial ideas and pivot to what's working. But as soon as Pariser let go of the politics angle, traffic soared.

Find story ideas on social media feeds, not other websites.

Upworthy's curators don't start their days surfing other websites for news. They surf social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook instead.

Sometimes it's easier to highlight a conversation than to start a new one.

"We have our team of curators spending all their time looking on the Internet for stuff," says Pariser. "We go for visible, sharable stories and really stay away from doing more typical, text-driven articles and blogging. We lean into images and videos."

Focus on Facebook, not Twitter

Upworthy has found that Twitter is small traffic potatoes compared to Facebook. At the end of the day, Facebook is where the most people spend the vast majority of their time online.

"Facebook is a huge piece of the puzzle for us," says Pariser. "Our Facebook community has grown from zero in March to over 600,000 likes."

Pariser says Upworthy hasn't done anything particularly brilliant to juice Facebook for traffic. It just spent a lot of time and energy cracking the social network.

"Honestly, I think part of [our success with it] is we take Facebook much more seriously than many of the other social networks," he says. "I love Twitter, and Twitter is a fun place to hang out with smart people, but it's a small fraction of our traffic compared to Facebook. The time and attention most sites spend on [perfecting] their homepages is probably what we spend on Facebook. If you look at our homepage, it's pretty mediocre."

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