Thanks to all of you, Upworthy has 200 million reasons to celebrate.

We’re all about data-informed storytelling at Upworthy, so it should come as no surprise that we watch our numbers closely. And yesterday we saw a pretty amazing number: We hit 200 million Facebook video views in January (205,516,879, to be exact).

The phrase “hockey stick growth” is overused, but this is one of those rare times where it really fits. Take a look:

With a small but mighty team, we’ve gone from 5 million to 200 million in one year.

The most shocking news: We grew from 100 million to 200 million in just three months.

Last year, we launched our first original series, “Humanity for the Win.” And the first two episodes this year, “Hugs Café” and “Second Chance,” already have millions of views and continue to climb. The next Humanity for the Win video will go live next week, and we’re betting it’ll outpace its predecessors.

We’re confident we’ll see even more growth ahead as we expand our serialized content. In the next few months, expect to see two more new original series from Upworthy:

• “Testimony,” a series based on the personal stories of individuals breaking down barriers,  tackling stereotypes, and confronting life’s ups and downs — all with an interesting twist.
• “Another Person’s Shoes,” a no-holds-barred look at a day in the life — struggles, successes, and all — of unique people of different genders, sexualities, cultures, races, socioeconomic statuses, and more.

And we will continue to pilot new formats, including hosted series and animated vignettes.

It’s great news for us because it means our readers are responding to our big business bet — a bold and decisive shift to video. Because it means we are harnessing the most powerful means available to fulfill our mission: sharing stories that matter. Stories like the pay-it-forward pizza shop in Philadelphia that provides food for the homeless, or the dad who lets his daughter paint his nails. They’re vastly different but highlight aspects of humanity that are worth applauding.

Reaching this milestone has been a tremendous team effort, one of constant love, attention to detail, and minute-to-minute strategy. I am so grateful for the work of Thad, Andy, Madeleine, David, Sarah, and Ian. I am forever amazed by the incredible content that Mary, Jordan, and Sonya discover. And I am endlessly wowed by the hi-fi creative that Jess, Alvin, and BJ bring on a daily basis. Thank you all!

Finally, we’re super thankful that there are 200 million people out there who believe we’re all part of the same story.

— Croi McNamara, Head of Video

NOTICE ANYTHING DIFFERENT?

When you got your daily Upworthy fix this morning, did you notice anything different?

Certainly not the stories and videos — they are as meaningful and delightful as ever.

But you might notice that the Upworthy logo looks different.

We evolved from this:

To this:

Why the change?

We’ve been sharpening our focus at Upworthy lately. You may have read about it. Recruiting amazing people. Moving from curation to original storytelling. Doubling down on video.

Adweek called our video growth “huge.” And POLITICO, “burgeoning.”

As a result, our stories are reaching way more people. Which means lots of fresh eyes. So we decided, after four years of the old logo, that we should have a fresh look to match our fresh focus.

We wanted the Upworthy logo to be more … Upworthy: positive and lively, engaging and innovative, and ever-focused on our bedrock mission of changing what people pay attention to. After looking at lots of different options that were terrific but not quite #Upworthy, we landed here.

You’ll see more photos across all our platforms. Upworthy has always been about visual storytelling, and pictures are an even bigger part of our storytelling with the new logo.

We believe the world works better when people understand each other, see each other, and respect each other. That’s our goal at Upworthy. Because we’re all part of the same story.

I want to thank Michael Bierut and the incredible Pentagram team for their partnership on this project. 

They’re super-talented people who totally get what makes Upworthy special.

I’m thrilled with how this turned out.

I hope you think our new look reflects the Upworthy you’ve come to know and love.
 

-Jenn Lindenauer, VP Marketing

9 out of our top 10 stories on Facebook in 2015 were videos

For most of last year, Upworthy had a four-person video team — piloting original video storytelling to help us achieve our mission of drawing massive amounts of attention to the stories that really matter. In October, we began investing more heavily in video and are absolutely floored to see how much it’s paying off.

Tubular Labs just revealed its list of most-watched Facebook creators of December 2015, and we were psyched to see that Upworthy ranked in the top 20 (#18, to be exact). It’s our first appearance on the list, having just started our shift last year from curation to original storytelling, and from text-and-image stories to videos. But it shows that we’re on to something big here — and we can’t wait to share some of the stuff we’re working on for the year ahead. But first, let’s look back.

Our most successful Facebook content in 2015 isn’t that surprising given the Tubular ranking — video dominated.

And we’re super excited that the same year we launched Upworthy Originals (original videos rather than curated videos), the #2 spot was an original!

One of our runaway successes of 2015 was a comic (the only non-video to make the list) about the realities of parenting that resonated with millions of people across the world.

Without further ado, here are our top Facebook posts of 2015.

A tough day … and the reasons why

**The post below is a message shared with Upworthy employees earlier today. In the spirit of transparency we’re sharing here as well.

Dear Upworthy team,

We’ve just spoken to 14 of your colleagues and given them the wrenching news that we are eliminating their positions today.

These are people who did good work, worked hard and counted on us for a paycheck. They are our colleagues and friends, and they did nothing wrong. Today’s decisions were driven by strategy, and nothing more. But because of the impact on peoples’ lives, this kind of thing is never an easy call.

We’re confident this is the right strategic move for Upworthy, and one that will put us on a much stronger growth path for years to come. But that doesn’t make it any easier for the people affected today.

We’re going to have an all-staff call this afternoon to share some thoughts and answer your questions. We’ll talk then (and I’ll share a bit more below) about what we’re doing – and what we can all do – for the folks who are leaving Upworthy. But before then, we wanted to lay out what’s happening today and what it means for us going forward.

Today is about a big bet on our video future. That’s the core of it: We’re shifting resources to our video program in order to capture the massive growth opportunity in front of us.  Video is now the core growth driver at Upworthy. In fact, every dollar we’re shifting today will go to growing our video business in 2016.

Video is the future of digital advertising – it’s where all of the money is going, and an awful lot of the attention is going. We think there are a few big brands that will own big chunks of that video landscape. But no one owns positive, purposeful storytelling – and that’s where we come in.

This strategy is a continuation of what Upworthy’s been focused on since the beginning. Our video efforts here have been successful because our video team is building on everything we’ve created over the past four years: our hard-won understanding of what works in video, our knowledge of what makes a great story, our data-driven approach to story testing, our clear voice and brand, and our enormous,well-engaged community.

We’re proud of our “small but mighty” video team. But the reality is, if we’re going to truly seize the opportunity, our video business can’t stay small anymore. If we’re serious about video, we have to put serious resources against it. Our ambitions here, and the opportunity before us, are too large for an incremental approach.

This fall, for the first time, we reached more people through video than through our text and pictures storytelling. A few months later, we’re not just reaching more people through video, we’re reaching 10 times more. That’s why we need to act quickly to give video the resources it needs. While these staffing changes are going to cause a decline in traffic to Upworthy.com in the short term, we’ll be reaching significantly more people with our stories every month through our video channels. That helps achieve our mission.

And just to emphasize the scale of the opportunity here: as you know, we started 2015 with 5 million video views. In December, we had 167 million. And in the first seven days of January alone, including a holiday and a weekend, we’ve already driven 65 million views, and counting.

It’s also worth remembering the core strengths of Upworthy that brought us here.

We reach many more people than the great majority of our competitors. And we do that with a far more distinct and compelling voice and brand.

On Upworthy.com, the writing is better – funnier, more incisive and thoughtful, more rich and varied – than it has ever been. And as video drives growth, this will open up more space for our writers to be their creative, hilarious, passionate selves, pioneering new approaches and styles.

Our intel, product, and engineering teams have given us a huge competitive advantage with our predictive testing system, which means that our writers and producers draw more attention and pageviews per person than literally anyone.

We’ve developed deep partnerships with top brands, and thanks to the revenue team’s efforts we have a number of really exciting opportunities teed up for the first half of 2016.

Most importantly – in a landscape full of content generated for no other purpose than to get eyeballs to display ads, we stand out because we stand for something. It remains the case that each and every piece on our site communicates something positive, purposeful, meaningful. That’s extraordinary.

I know that none of that makes today’s changes feel good. The only thing that actually feels good is knowing that we’ll do everything in our power to do right by the people who are leaving.

We’re providing them with severance, health care, and support in their transition. We’ll help them land new gigs, offer enthusiastic references and use our personal networks to connect them with opportunities wherever we can. And we ask each of you to do the same. Any place that hires any of these Upworthians will be lucky to have them.

But today is not an easy day. We’ll miss the people who are leaving, and I’m sure you all will as well.  

One of our board members pointed out that most businesses tend to hedge bets.

Great businesses focus aggressively on what they’re great at, even when it means making hard choices.

That’s what we’re doing here. And it’s why after we work through these changes, we can look forward to great days ahead. We’re onto something special: a unique position to bring hundreds of millions of people to meaningful stories everyday, in the most important media battleground of our time.

Without a doubt, today’s changes are hard. But they set us up for a strong future to come – one that we’re excited to build with all of you.

–Eli and Peter

2015: A New Chapter in the Upworthy Story

Just a year ago, I was beginning to wonder what the future of Upworthy would look like — how we could combine the power of data with the art of storytelling to do something totally new. Now that it’s been nearly 12 months since those first conversations, it’s a good time to take stock of how far we’ve come in 2015, and how much farther we’ll go in 2016.

But let’s start with the basics.

How do you tell a story? A stranger comes to town. A child goes on a journey. The unexpected happens. Heroes are tested. Hearts are changed. Maybe the world is, too.

But great stories never change, and even though these fundamentals are timeless, we believe there’s ample room for empathetic, human-centered storytelling in our modern, rapidly-changing world. And 2015 was the year when Upworthy embraced this challenge completely.

When Amy Pence-Brown woke up one morning in August, she was terrified of what she was about to do. She lived in Boise, Idaho, and knew she was about to take a risk that might be hugely embarrassing. Instead, she was surrounded by love.

                                                       Image courtesy Melanie Folwell Photography.

When a police chief in a small Massachusetts town saw, over and over, the pain of his neighbors’ struggles with addiction, he made a bold move. The chief, Leonard Campanello, made a pledge to stop arresting them and instead opened his department’s doors to help those in need, finding surprising success doing the unexpected.

Sofia Yassini is just 8 years old. Recently, her mother found Sofia in tears; she had been putting all her favorite things in a bag in case the Army came to take her family away. This young American girl was terrified of being kicked out of her own country after Donald Trump called to ban Muslims from entering the United States. But then Kerri Peek, an Army veteran, along with dozens of other current and former members of the armed services, wrote to pledge that they would protect Sofia and families like hers as they had pledged to defend this country and its most sacred values. Writing #IWillProtectYou, these soldiers, sailors, and Marines reflect the best of American values.

                                                         Photo by Melissa Chance Yassini/Facebook.

These are stories of radical empathy. These are the stories we believe in.

At Upworthy, we are in a unique position to advance the art of storytelling by applying sophisticated data analysis to each and every story we publish. That’s how we learn to reach truly massive numbers of people on tough stories — like climate change, social justice, and equality for all.

2015 has been a brand-new chapter in our own story here at Upworthy. It was the year we put all we’ve learned since the company’s founding toward original storytelling. We brought in new voices, we tackled new subjects, and we reached new people — but most of all, we’ve taken everything we’ve learned in the last several years of curating stories to engineer super-shareable stories from scratch.

And it’s working.

But here’s the part that really surprises people:

With a core team of only 20 staff writers, we reach over 25 million unique readers every month. Writers who are used to reaching a few thousand people elsewhere reach millions here. And that’s engineered by design. It’s part of our craft. We build intelligence about how to reach people into every decision, every edit, and every system. And it gets real results. At Upworthy, our stories are shared at a rate of between six and 30 times that of other media companies.

When it comes to sharing, Upworthy punches way above our weight class.

And that’s what we do every day — Upworthy brings massive numbers of people to important but traditionally challenging topics.

               A story illuminating issues around sexual consent? 6.4 million views
               A story combating suicide and depression? 5.7 million views
               A story talking about workers’ wages and rights? 3.2 million views
               A story exploring gun control? 3.1 million views
               A story examining climate change and Syria? 3.0 million views
               A story bringing water pollution to light? 2.2 million views

To look more deeply within the numbers, we are able to see that people are spending more quality time with Upworthy stories than others’.

When we look at “active visits” (that is, the amount of people who spend real, legitimate time with our stories) our percentage of those real, engaged readers is about 30 points better than the industry average. And it’s still going up, bucking industry trendlines. Any experienced editor can tell you this is a real skill, but when combined with our data infrastructure, it becomes a superpower.

This unique storytelling + data approach is working in Upworthy video, too.

With years of experience curating meaningful videos, Upworthy put that expertise into practice in 2015 by growing our own video team, whose efforts have shown staggering growth. Last January, we were seeing 5 million views a month. By November? That viewership skyrocketed to 125 million views a month — with a tiny video team. Upworthy’s audience for video is growing at a faster rate than other media companies, and at a faster rate than Facebook itself.

Upworthy’s team has evolved, too. Our executive team includes seasoned hands from The Guardian, Thomson Reuters, The New York Times, Discovery Communications, The Daily Beast, and Bloomberg. On our editorial team, we retired the title “curator” and have been building a team of writers — who are a mix of traditional journalists and unexpected talents. In addition to journalists from Gannett, Fusion, and The Huffington Post, we also have found that voices can come from unexpected places like Hallmark Cards or even the world of television and improv comedy. But it’s the combination of all these talents, experimenting together, that has built something truly unique at Upworthy in 2015.

We’ve laid an incredible foundation for the work ahead, and 2016 promises to be a year of even bigger and better.

Thanks for reading,

Amy O’Leary

Introducing Zazie Lucke, our new Head of Brand Solutions

I won’t bury the lede: I’m ecstatic to welcome Zazie Lucke to our growing leadership team as our new Head of Brand Solutions. Zazie is one of the best in the business, with experience launching and growing the advertising and partnership arms of numerous notable media properties. Here’s a quick rundown of her impressive resume:

• Zazie began her career in media at The Week as a marketing coordinator before quickly working her way up to lead the publication’s marketing efforts.
• Five years in, she began itching to try something new, so she made the move to Wenner Media, where she oversaw the marketing of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men’s Journal.
• About a year into her Wenner stint, Zazie was recruited to help turn the then-fledgling Atlantic around as an associate publisher of marketing and to put down roots in its newly established office in NYC. Over the next five years, Zazie was instrumental in bringing the Atlantic brand back to profitability and reinvigorating it as a major player in the media space (and I was lucky enough to call her a colleague during that time).
• Her success in that role led to a new (executive) one: overseeing marketing for all Atlantic Media properties while also securing major corporate partnerships. During that time, she was part of the small team that launched Quartz, which received some of the best buzz in the industry.
• Zazie’s next move was a big one: She was recruited to lead global marketing for all Bloomberg Media properties — building the Bloomberg Media brand and its various products within the ad community and devising data-driven client/brand solutions for marketers across video, digital, print, TV, and radio (among other things) through  Bloomberg Denizen, which she was responsible for launching.

Which brings us to today, with Zazie joining Upworthy as our new Head of Brand Solutions. She’ll be responsible for creating innovative, strategic campaign packages for brands, agencies, and nonprofits, while also identifying and developing strategic partnerships. I’ve seen Zazie’s wide-ranging expertise and creativity in action in the past and I’m incredibly excited to welcome her to the Upworthy team. I know she’s the right person to take our brand partnerships to the next level.

I’ll let Zazie weigh in on why she’s equally excited:

Upworthy is a brand I’m incredibly passionate about. The team is building a meteoric media property that leverages smart technology and social media savvy for the greater good. This role is a rare one that both matches my beliefs and has the potential to be an incredibly fulfilling business endeavor. When presented with the opportunity to follow my heart, do something that I can truly dig my hands into, and ultimately have an effect on the business future of a smart, innovative company, there was no way I could pass it up.

Spoken like a true Upworthian. Stay tuned to see what Zazie has in store — I have a feeling it’s going to be phenomenal.

— Ben Zagorski, Chief Revenue Officer

Photo by David Cross

Storytelling + data = More engaged readers

100 days ago, our Editorial Director, Amy O’Leary, laid out her vision for Upworthy: a move from curation to original stories powered by the incredible combination of data science and storytelling arts. And that built on my announcement in March that we’ve moved decisively away from anything resembling clickbait at Upworthy.

What’s happened since? Pretty much exactly what we’d hoped: Upworthy’s traffic has grown, but even more importantly, people are engaging more deeply with more of our stories.

We track this with a metric we call Active Visits — the number of folks who land on the page and read for at least 15 seconds. That may seem like a pretty low bar — just 15 seconds — but the data show that publishers are fooling themselves if they think, “Of course our readers read for more than 15 seconds before leaving.”

At Upworthy, we’ve focused relentlessly on increasing the percentage of visits that are active, and it’s working. That number has gone up consistently.

For the industry as a whole, on the other hand, the Active Visits number has been heading in the wrong direction. According to Chartbeat’s chief data scientist, Josh Schwartz: “Back in 2013, Chartbeat looked at what percentage of visits industry-wide end with less than 15 seconds of engagement and found that it was a full third. Now that number is closer to half.”

That’s a really scary stat for publishers — who presumably want their readers and viewers to actually, y’know, read and view their stories — as well as for advertisers, who are putting dollars on the table in the hopes of people actually seeing their messages.

At Upworthy, our Active Visits percentage is about 30 points better than the industry average. And it’s still going up from there.

What’s our secret? Well, we select, craft, edit, and engineer our stories to optimize for attention — not clicks. We test our stories before we publish them to our full audience, and if people are clicking on a headline but leaving immediately, we won’t publish it until we understand why and fix the problem.

What’s more, we optimize our content to satisfy both the the deep readers and the skimmers. We love it when readers pore over every word we write, but we’re realistic: We know some will and some won’t, and we want the experience to be great both ways.

Here’s Melissa Gilkey, our Head of Editorial Growth, to explain how we do it:

We use structural story elements like images and header text to optimize for “skimmability.” Although it might seem counterintuitive, giving folks the ability to skim more easily actually keeps people on the page longer, since it gives more entry points with which to draw people in. Particularly as more and more of our visitors are on mobile, improving skimmability is key.

We don’t write journalistic articles, we write stories — designed to be engaging, surprising, and captivating, just like a story told around a campfire or at a bar with your friends. We think the traditional “inverted pyramid” structure is simply bad storytelling — the format should be retired for our mobile social era. Making each paragraph less important than the one above it encourages people to leave, not to engage.

At the same time, we strive to reward deeper attention. Even if some folks might skip it, the text below the bolded headers increases our Active Visit rates and shareability even further. For example, with this animal list, we tested a skimmable yet substantial version versus a more traditional “viral site” version with just images. Perhaps surprisingly, the “viral” version did worse — way worse. Adding substance but making sure it was skimmable drove up Active Visits and shareability.

At Upworthy, we’re on a mission to tell stories that bring people together. For that to work, people have to actually read, skim, or watch the whole story. So every time we find a new way to craft stories that increases our Active Visits percentage, that’s a big win for our mission — and a hopeful sign for all of us who believe deeply in the power of stories to make the world better.

– Peter Koechley, Co-founder

There’s a new chief in town

We’re thrilled to announce that Robin Wilson, previously our Vice President of Operations, has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer.

Robin joined Upworthy in 2014 as the VP of Operations. From building and managing the company budget to overseeing every aspect of our onboarding process, no challenge is too big or too small for her to solve.

Robin specializes in the intersection of media and technology. Her acute business sense and keen ability to focus on the heart of the matter are some of the reasons we’re so excited about this promotion. But she is also much more than that:

• She’s as equally adept at driving the big-picture strategy as running point on day-to-day details. She has a rare and borderline magical ability to make impossible things seem possible and quickly understand how the 50,000-foot view will work at sea level.
• She’s incredibly business- and tech-savvy. If you asked her to develop a five-year business plan, write code, or think through our product strategy, she’d hit it out of the park.
• She’s able to get more done in one day than most people get done in a week. She tackles all the daily tasks while simultaneously taking on a ton of one-off projects and putting out fires. Somehow, she also remains a constant source of situationally appropriate GIFs. We’re not sure she actually sleeps.

Prior to joining Upworthy, Robin was Head of Revenue Operations at Vimeo and was an early employee at both Blip Networks (acquired by Maker Studios in 2013) and Associated Content (acquired by Yahoo in 2010). We knew it was a coup when we recruited her in 2014, which is why we want to say it again: We’re super excited for Robin, and we can’t wait to see her kick even more ass as our COO!

— Eli and Peter

The real story behind the discussion to form a union at Upworthy

Ouch! This afternoon’s Gawker post alleging union hypocrisy at Upworthy was tough to read. 

Here’s what’s true and what’s not.

It is true our writers considered unionizing. It is true they so far have not.
But just about everything else in the story is, well, Gawker.

Gawker “alleges” that we recently laid off six people. Actually, it was quite public – you can read our statement in this legit news story — it wasn’t a reduction in force, it was a transition to a different skill set. 

Some of our employees were understandably jarred, and that led to a unionization conversation. No union vote was ever taken.

Peter and I are proud supporters of collective bargaining. And if our employees ever decide to unionize – we will support their decision. With enthusiasm. Because we believe in organized labor, as a right and as a force for good in society.

But the timing of any such effort really matters for the people of Upworthy. There is a reason why unionization efforts are usually undertaken at larger enterprises (such as Gawker). Unionizing right now, at this point in our growth (we’re still investor-funded) would threaten our plan to continue to expand the team (we’re at 80 now and recruiting for more than 10 positions right now). Our business is growing but the majority of our funding still comes from investors, and we will need to execute on big plans to achieve our mission of drawing lots of attention to important social topics. 

Everyone here at Upworthy cares deeply about that mission, and we’re growing again, with a clear, shared set of strategies and objectives. And in the end, our writers decided it wasn’t the right time. 

Peter and I don’t assume that means never, nor do we think it should. In the meantime, we will continue to hold ourselves accountable to our employees, whether they unionize or not. And that is one reason why our folks have unlimited vacation, vacation bonuses, no-deductible health insurance, maternity and paternity leave and an unusually generous stock plan. We took those steps long before the recent union conversations, because it’s the right thing to do. It’s too bad that didn’t make the Gawker story.

-Eli Pariser

The Gates Foundation tackles the toughest problem of all.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is known for tackling the really tough problems — problems like extreme poverty and substandard health care in developing countries. That’s something we really respect. But we’re just as excited that the Gates Foundation is tackling what might be the toughest problem of all: getting people to pay attention to these epic problems.

Because one thing we’ve learned at Upworthy is this: Unless important, serious issues are communicated in a savvy way — employing smart combinations of contemporary data utilization and classic storytelling skill — they just don’t stand a chance versus the cat videos, celebrity gossip, and viral memes that dominate the online media landscape. Like it or not, we are all knee-deep in what our Editorial Director Amy O’Leary calls “a street fight for attention.”

Over the last 18 months, we’ve had the opportunity to take on that street fight with the Gates Foundation, through All 7 Billion, a special Upworthy/Gates Foundation series that aims to bring awareness to global health and poverty issues.

Global health and poverty — not always the easiest topics to talk about!

But since the series began last fall, Upworthy has brought over a billion seconds of attention to the issues of global health and poverty — stories about global hunger, sanitation, infant mortality, reproductive health, refugee care, worker rights, and malaria.

ONE. BILLION. SECONDS. To put that number in perspective, that’s…

• Longer than the entire durations of the Xin and Qin dynasties combined.
• Long enough to watch “Frozen” over 160,000 times.
• 16.7 million minutes — or over 275,000 hours — of continuous, uninterrupted attention.

That’s a lot of attention! But what does it really mean? Are we just capturing people’s attention, or are we really moving hearts and minds on these critically important global issues?

We decided to find out.  

We’ve been surveying a small subset of our users to measure whether all of this attention time has led to real changes in people’s knowledge, awareness, attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. And across dozens of surveys, we’ve found overwhelming evidence that it does.

A sample of our results is shown below. In each of the next four graphs, we compare exposed users, who spent at least 30 seconds paying attention to relevant content, to two control groups. The site-wide control group consists of Upworthy visitors in general, and the pre-content control group includes Upworthy visitors who had similar browsing behavior as the exposed group.

(Fig. 1, Above) After users were exposed to Gates Foundation content, they became significantly more knowledgeable of key facts about tough issues, including childhood marriage. (See footnote for sample sizes and statistics.)

(Fig. 2, Above) Paying attention to important stories that users don’t get elsewhere, like this one about how technological innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa is improving public health, enhances people’s optimism about global health problems.

(Fig. 3, Above) Upworthy’s unique style of storytelling leads users to feel more empathy for people around the world affected by difficult issues, such as the global hunger crisis.

(Fig 4., Above) And viewing Upworthy stories doesn’t just affect people’s hearts and minds — it also motivates behavior, like seeking additional information, sharing stories with friends and family, signing petitions, donating money, and volunteering time.

Exposure to the content is moving hearts and minds, but how much attention time is enough attention time?

Apparently, the more, the better.

(Fig. 5-10, Above) Attention time correlates with just about every meaningful metric we have examined across almost every issue. The more time Upworthy users spend paying attention to our stories on global health and poverty, the more knowledgeable they become, the more they care about important global issues and the people who are affected by them, and the more likely they become to take concrete steps to improve these conditions.

Bringing massive amounts of attention to “stories that matter” isn’t just a tagline at Upworthy. And attention time isn’t just another metric or buzzword. It’s all about using data and drama together to help shift the hearts and minds of millions of people about our world’s most pressing issues and challenges.

-Sean Wojcik, Ph.D., Research Scientist at Upworthy

Footnote: Sample sizes and statistics for figures: Fig. 1: N=1,902, p<.01; Fig. 2: N=461, p<.05; Fig. 3: N=770, p<.01; Fig. 4: N=1,888, p<.001; Fig. 5: N=2,133, p<.01; Fig. 6: N=1,452, p<.001; Fig. 7: N=770, p<.05; Fig. 8: N=1,902, p<.001; Fig. 9: N=460, p<.01; Fig. 10: N=1,051, p<.01.

Our Next Phase

Since I joined Upworthy earlier this year as the company’s new Editorial Director, a lot of people have asked me about our new direction and strategy. Today, for the first time publicly, I’m excited to share some of my plans for Upworthy going forward. Check it out and tweet your thoughts, reactions, ideas and questions to me at @amyoleary.

Storytelling + data is powerful. Especially when paired with these 3 new business leaders.

At the beginning of the year we announced some big news: Amy O’Leary, former deputy editor of the international desk at The New York Times, joined Upworthy as our Editorial Director. Since then, Upworthy has undergone some exciting changes. We’ve proven our native ad model. We’ve said goodbye to clickbait. We’ve begun the transition from curation to original storytelling. We’ve welcomed Rachel Fenn as our VP of Engineering. We’ve redesigned our homepage. And there’s so much more to come.

You’ll hear more about our editorial focus on original content creation in the coming weeks. But storytelling is at the core of our business model, too. Through Upworthy Collaborations we’ve partnered with some of the biggest brands, companies, and nonprofits in the world to tell important stories about things that matter. And we’re doubling down on bringing Upworthy’s signature voice — and our deep knowledge of data — to new brand stories through original video, social media, and more.

Today, we’re really excited to announce that three more senior leaders are joining the Upworthy team. These wildly talented people bring both strong experience and a lot of energy to power Upworthy’s growth, not to mention a deep commitment to our mission of bringing massive amounts of attention to stories that matter. They’ll give us more power to do what we do best, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have them on board.

Without further ado, please join us in welcoming these newest Upworthians:

Nicole Carrico joins as our Head of Content Collaborations, where she’ll work with our editorial, business, and video teams to build cause-based storytelling programs backed by our data and tech expertise. To say that she has serious chops working in cross-platform communications and branded entertainment is an understatement. Nicole joins Upworthy from Discovery Communications, where she built and launched the company’s digital branded entertainment studio. Previously, Nicole built and launched Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s digital video branded entertainment offering, where her team created award-winning programs that allowed the group to deliver the largest revenue media deal in their history. Before that, she served as the sole executive producer of AOL’s full slate of digital tentpoles, the company’s first foray into branded entertainment. Nicole’s philosophy that branded entertainment isn’t cleverly disguised commercials but an opportunity for a publisher to leverage sponsor dollars to bring great content to the screen is what led her to Upworthy. We’re really glad it did.

From Nicole: “One of the reasons I’m so excited about joining Upworthy is that I wholeheartedly believe in the company’s mission. Upworthy started as a platform to distribute stories that matter, and that’s what our audience trusts us to do. And we’re able to amplify those stories at an incredible rate that I haven’t seen elsewhere in the industry. I love that I now have the opportunity to bring brands and companies together with a media partner that shares their values, and the chance to develop true collaborations that will help reach a larger audience with the stories that matter to them — and to us — most. ”

From Jenn: “Upworthy has an amazing story and I’m eager to lead the charge in telling it. I’ve been watching the company for a while and it’s been fascinating to see how it’s grown — it gets more and more interesting by the moment. There’s tremendous opportunity for even more growth, and I’m excited to do my part in helping people better understand Upworthy’s purpose and potential.”

Ben Zagorski is our new Chief Revenue Officer. As CRO, Ben is focused on showcasing how an emphasis on storytelling combined with data-centric digital insights can benefit brand partners. Ben’s a true pioneer of digital ad sales, getting his start at Citysearch during the early stages of the growth in local search marketing. From there, he rose through the ranks of the advertising units at the New York Times, Salon, and Atlantic Media Strategies. In those positions, he had a front-row view of the transition from display to content marketing revenue models at some of the world’s premier publishers. Most recently, Ben was at the Daily Beast as it joined with Newsweek and evolved into an all-digital publication. Oh, and fun fact: Before devoting himself to publishing, Ben did a stint as a player for NFL Europe’s Barcelona Dragons. We feel pretty fortunate that his passion for publishing won out over football in the long run.

From Ben: “As brands and organizations rapidly shift to great storytelling highlighting their core values, Upworthy holds a particular advantage in creating credible emotional connections with purpose-driven Millennials. Add to that our deep data insights and social influence, and we have a value proposition to create lasting impact for a partner’s brand-building goals. I’m incredibly happy to be here and to work alongside everyone as we make Upworthy Collaborations an even more powerful tool for marketers.”

We’re really thrilled that folks of this caliber are bringing their talents to Upworthy. Together, we’re going to continue to do amazing things.

— Eli and Peter

Why we hired a woman to lead our engineering team

Because after an exhaustive search, Rachel Fenn emerged as clearly the most qualified and talented candidate — a wicked smart, deeply experienced, sincerely passionate, and endlessly driven leader who inspires her teams to do the best work of their lives. And we like hiring the best person for the job.

Rachel’s an engineer, a product-development consultant, and a 13-year veteran of the intersection of media and technology. She cut her teeth in the embedded systems world at Rovi, made the leap to consumer web with SideReel, and most recently leveled-up her game-development skills by consulting at Zynga and coding a first-person-shooter in her spare time (which she’ll be releasing shortly on Steam).

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome her to Team Upworthy.

– Sincerely,

Peter and Eli, Upworthy co-founders

P.S. Of course, beyond all of Rachel’s amazing qualities, we think the start-up world needs more women in it — and we wanted to put our money where our mouth is on that front. We have only one female engineer out of nine, and that’s not OK by us. We’re looking forward to working with Rachel on increasing Upworthy’s engineering diversity — and, of course, to seeing her kick ass and lead the team to build some truly great things here.

Why This Amazing Woman Is Joining Upworthy As Our Editorial Director

Dear Upworthians,

Some big news today: Amy O'Leary, formerly of the New York Times and This American Life, is joining us on February 9th as our new Editorial Director. It’s our top editorial position.

We’ll let Amy speak for herself about why she’s joining. But since she’s a humble person, here’s a bit about why we’re excited about her.

Amy is an amazing multimedia storyteller, learning the trade as a producer for This American Life, creating wonderful stories for RadioLab, and joining the New York Times as a multimedia editor who can think as fluently in text and audio as she can in data and mockups and wireframes. At the Times, she proved herself a visionary digital strategist, co-authoring last year's Innovation Report; a talented reporter, covering sexism in the video game industry a year before #gamergate; and a clever adopter of technology, once even live-tweeting one of her own keynote addresses. Plus, it’s incredibly rare to find someone who gets as excited about analytics, or about how to keep a viewer’s attention in the seventeenth minute of an interactive video about how financial firms make money off of driving companies into bankruptcy, as Amy does.

Most important, Amy’s really built her career around the same mission as Upworthy’s: To make important stuff compelling and engaging to millions upon millions of people. 

What does this mean for you? Ultimately, when Upworthy’s been successful, it’s because the stories, videos, and graphics we share strike a deep chord. Amy’s going to lead the charge in making that chord even more resonant, and help us move from a few powerful chords to a full song.

We have a lot more to announce in the coming months — 2015 is going to be a big year for Upworthy. But for now, please welcome Amy O’Leary.

–Eli and Peter

Hi everyone! I’m so honored and excited to be joining this community.

Here’s the simple reason why I decided to leave my amazing job at The New York Times to come here: The world needs as much attention as possible on the stories that matter most. Whether that’s climate change, income inequality, health or immigration, I’ve always found the greatest challenge in journalism has been figuring out how to make those kinds of stories, which some people might glaze over, as compelling as when the next Beyonce album drops.

Today, I don’t think even the most talented journalist can be content to say that important stories are just ones people should read or view. Today we have to go farther. We have to be willing to get out there, into the street fight for human attention that is the Internet, and be willing to deploy our strengths as storytellers to make sure the most impactful ideas reach real people, where they’re at.

How to do that? The best way I know how to is to merge narrative skills with deep analytics to craft impactful stories that massive numbers of people want to read and view and share. And Upworthy has been the absolute leader in cracking that code.

I got into journalism because I believe that stories are the lens through which we understand our world, and start to make it a better place. My most formative early job in journalism was as a producer with Ira Glass on This American Life, a program that knows how to keep people listening to stories on everything from complex economics to basic human rights, which was always my favorite kind of work there.

In the same vein, The Times is an impressive and formidable journalistic institution; its coverage often produces huge and important change — probably more than any other news organization in the world. For me, at Upworthy, there’s an opportunity here to take the cutting edge of storytelling even farther — to take centuries-old wisdom about how to capture attention, how to surprise, delight, and satisfy an audience, then share those ideas in a way that makes them stick. And for the first time, be able to experiment and test and see what really works for society-sized groups of people. Doing all that in the service of the mission at Upworthy is an absolute dream job for me.

As a community, you’ve helped demonstrate that there are tens of millions of people out there who are actually interested in what really matters. That’s amazing. My goal then, along with the incredible Upworthy editorial team, will be to make it even more engaging and fun to lift those ideas up every day, together. I can’t wait to dive in.

Sincerely yours,

Amy

We Wanted To Draw Attention To Climate Change. So Did You. And The UN. And Unilever. Check It Out…

There are a lot of important, pressing, timely issues in the world right now, but there’s probably no prospect more existentially terrifying than the devastating effects of climate change. It’s a fact we know you’re familiar with because when we asked earlier this year, you told us it’s the #1 thing you’d like us to cover this year.

Despite the serious threat it poses and the inarguable fact that the effects of climate change are already being felt, there is an alarming lack of consensus and action among our world leaders.

We want to help change that.

That’s why we’re proud to announce a special collaboration with the United Nations in which we’ll be highlighting the small ways each of us can personally address climate change as well as the big ways we can demand action from our leaders globally.

We’ve launched a special section, and we’ll be unveiling curated and original content all leading up to the UN Climate Summit 2014 on Sept. 23, a massive effort to galvanize folks from government, business, finance, and civil society to take meaningful climate action and foster global agreement for the 21st Conference of the Parties on Climate Change 2015. It’ll be the most intense one-month campaign we’ve  embarked on yet, with #UpChats, direct emails, and lots of great stuff that’ll unpack climate change and impel folks to take action. 

We’re off to a great start. In its first seven days, the campaign has engaged almost 10 million people worldwide, with the average piece of content generating more than 400,000 views. On climate change.

We also want to give a special shoutout to Unilever’s Project Sunlight, whose generosity has made this campaign possible. They weren’t just ahead of the curve on joining as an Upworthy Collaborations partner, they’ve been ahead of the curve on standing up for sustainable practices and addressing climate change in a meaningful manner as well. In making this campaign possible, they are deepening both of those commitments in big ways. Its that kind of leadership that’s going to allow us to really make a dent in our fight against climate change.

Speaking of which, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting our first #UpChat Twitter discussion of the campaign on Monday, September 15th, 2014 at 11 am ET on the realities and impact of climate change. We’ll be joined by Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other great folks including: Climate Reality, 350.org, NRDC, Discovery News, and the father of environmental justice himself, Dr. Bob Bullard.

We’ve got a lot more in store with this project, but for now, check out our newly launched section, join the #UpChat on September 15th at 11am ET, and join the #Climate2014 movement today!

Let’s make people take notice,

Team Upworthy