Big Data and Digital Media: Q&A With Mic Co-Founder Chris Altchek
As the Co-Founder and CEO of Mic, Chris Altchek has leveraged new means of content creation to develop a digital media company dedicated to providing high-quality news coverage to young people.
We connected with Altchek at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival to get his take on how technological advances and big data capabilities will transform the ways we produce and consume content.
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How does the power of storytelling manifest in your work?
Chris Altchek: I’m the CEO of Mic, a news site. Storytelling is what we do. We take important information and turn it into stories that people want to talk about and share and hopefully affect the way they think about the world.
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How has the strategic role of marketing changed in your world, and where do you see it going by 2024?
Chris Altchek: One of the big trends is people have more choices than ever in terms of what content they consume and how they consume it.
Whether it’s people not watching TV commercials anymore or ignoring banner ads, you’re finding user behavior move more towards very selective consumption of content that they want to consume on demand, all the time.
What that means for marketers in a big way is they need to be creating ads or content that people actually want to consume. It’s as simple as that. Especially with people 18‑24, that demographic is incredibly good at ignoring ads they want to ignore.
Over the next 10 years you’re going to see — wild prediction — but you’ll see people really focused on other storytelling in marketing and more valuable content in the stories they’re telling.
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What metrics do you look at to judge the success of content, and how do you see that changing in the next 10 years?
Chris Altchek: We looked at a bunch of different metrics, everything from still page views to shares to minutes on page to number of comments and discussions on Facebook and Twitter. We aggregate all those into metrics that we care about.
One of the amazing pieces about what’s happening is we’re getting more and more data every day on what and how our users are consuming our content.
It’s only going to get richer and we’re only going to get a more holistic view of what’s actually happening with our consumer content. That will actually be a big piece of innovation in the next three or four years.
Chris Altchek joined Ted Bailey, Jim Bankoff, Isaac Lee, and Vivian Schiller at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival for a session titled “News at the Speed of Data.” Watch the complete panel below:
If you liked this post, you might like Journalism In The Digital Age: Q&A With Kevin Delaney or 10 Influencers On The Future Of Content Marketing.
Interview has been edited for clarity.
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
