Flooding the Zone

April 22, 2015 4:41 PM

In an interview with Lucky Peach, Lockhart Steele (previously) talks about "flooding the zone" in the blog era:

One of the things that I try to say to the team at all of our sites is, Hey, let’s not be afraid to still be weird. Because as you get bigger, you can get forced to just be so mainstream. You have more people coming to your site, so you have more readers who are going to be confused by your obsessions, who are going to be like, What’s the joke, I don’t get it. And you have to be okay with people not getting it.

via Super Punch
posted by Little Dawn (7 comments total)

We’re getting the readers and the commenters being like, Andrew Carmellini’s paying Eater. In fact, Andrew Carmellini’s PR came to us behind the scenes, and begged us to stop writing about The Dutch. They were like, please, please stop.

Hmm. It's a thing you really like but the people who own it are trying to tell you that you are hurting them in some way. I'm not sure that's to be celebrated?
posted by Glinn at 4:57 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

the blog era

Are we still in the blog era? I thought blogs died out a long time ago. Eater is probably more like a content mill, right?
posted by naju at 5:00 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

If it was a content mill you'd at least be induced to click on things due a provocative image to the link. They generate a fair amount of content, but content of dubious quality and without a model in a bikini tricking me into clicking. I offer exhibit A The Worlds 12 Spiciest Cuisines which isn't a list of the world 12 spiciest cuisines as a list of cuisines the usually reliable Robert Siestama has heard of.
posted by Keith Talent at 5:06 PM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

the primordial blog era could have been a better way to frame it...

What is it about blogs that caught on in the first place? It was that they catered to obsessions. Whether it’s a painting-your-toenails blog or it’s a blog about pizza, the idea is that you’re doing it about something that you’re really into. And I think now that our sites have all grown up, they’re not really blogs anymore—but they still are deeply obsessed publications.

posted by Little Dawn at 6:29 PM on April 22, 2015

Early on in Eater’s life somebody said to me as an insult: Eater’s just like Page Six. And I was like, If Eater’s just like Page Six, that’s the best news ever. Everybody loves Page Six.

Awesome line.
posted by limeonaire at 10:00 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

you have more readers who are going to be confused by your obsessions, who are going to be like, What’s the joke, I don’t get it. And you have to be okay with people not getting it

I've been listening to TBTL for the past several weeks, and that's exactly their attitude. Except they do explain things, sort of. It's oddly compelling, walking into a bunch of obsessive, inside jokes, and then instead of walking away confused, continuing to come back over and over, and the jokes begin to explain themselves after a while. After a while, you become obsessive and insider about their obsessive insiderness, even if you don't necessarily share their obsessions or feel like you're on the inside.

Well played all around.
posted by hippybear at 12:45 AM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've been obsessed with helping translate 'insider' language into something more broadly accessible to readers at the MeFi Wiki Get a lawyer page - there are a lot of questions on AskMe that seem to call for that kind of translation, and a variety of MetaTalk threads discuss how the process of finding an attorney can often be opaque and alienating to people who might otherwise benefit from legal advice. In the meantime, I've also been "flooding the zone" with links to the Get a lawyer page, and updating it with information from AskMe answers, especially for free and low-cost legal assistance.
posted by Little Dawn at 9:57 AM on April 23, 2015