Nine-second news

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Daisy Alioto interviews the founders of Volv, a trending short-form news app.

It’s no secret that the engines for digital discovery and virality have shifted abruptly from text to video over the past ten years. In January, Instagram’s co-founders announced Artifact, an app using machine learning to curate news excerpts into a feed.

Shannon Almeida and Priyanka Vazirani have been reimagining news consumption and discovery for Gen Z since 2019, with their app Volv. The two co-founders are high school friends and Volv is their second company together. As a publisher who has seen the arc of various distribution strategies over the last decade (include the extremely ill-fated pivot to video) I was very interested to hear more about Volv and how it’s keeping the needs of individual publishers in mind–as well as creators (Substackers, bloggers) that don’t want to put their mug on TikTok for all to see. Check out our condensed conversation below. —Daisy Alioto

Daisy Alioto: What are the specific media consumption patterns that you’ve optimized for?

Shannon Almeida: No one has adapted to how Gen Z wants to consume text content. We designed the entire app around nine seconds, that was our benchmark, because your attention span is right about 9 seconds. But for Gen Z, it’s not about just giving them nine seconds of something, it’s designing an app that can be habitual. When we launched Volv, it wasn’t even TikTok, it was Tinder that helped us conceptualize the whole idea.

Instead of swiping left to right, we were like why don’t we just do it like Instagram? So we combined the up and down motion with the nine second reads. Right now, the average Volv user spends two minutes and fifty seconds on the app. So they are reading at least thirty articles or more, and even clicking through to read more from the source. Once we are able to scale out to 1000, 2000 stories per day the user’s time spent on the app will be much higher.

Priyanka Vazirani: We obviously deliver things you should read–Russia, the earthquake in Turkey, Covid—important things you should know. But along with that, we’ve adapted to what exactly our generation wants to know about. When you’re at a restaurant with your friends, what are you talking about?

TikTok is almost like a huge ocean that surprises you with stuff you didn’t know you would like. That type of discoverability should exist for text as well. When you’re swiping through Volv, you should see things you didn’t know you were interested in.

DA: There’s a long history of intelligent adults consuming content that’s written to be more digestible. Axios, which is supposed to be for a very serious audience, their whole thing is “smart brevity.” And of course there is The Skimm, although I was never really a fan. Do you think publishers will have a “Volv” voice?

SA: Obviously, we have our in-house Chat-GPT which is producing all our content summaries today, and you can kind of tell it what kind of tone you want to use. So while Volv doesn’t have a specific tone, we try to make it conversational. I think that’s different from peppering in pop culture references, which is what The Skimm did.

DA: Will you keep an in-house Chat-GPT creator for publishers that have opted into having that versus self-managing their Volv posts?

SA: Yeah, definitely. I think the number one thing is to give them a creator tool. Long form isn’t going anywhere, but the goal is to help them adapt and summarize for our particular audience. Our demographic is people who wouldn’t otherwise be reading or discovering the long form article.

PV: We started beta testing with about ten publishers in order to understand what’s working and where the problems are. We’re building our creator tools to cater to their needs and make sure we get rid of any hindrances. We already have a waitlist of over 100 creators.

DA: My last question was around the Collective Media pledge, with shared principles that include, “We are building with our communities who are tired of big social and looking for a ‘new internet’ that they can shape into their own.”

What does this pledge mean to you? How does it reflect Volv’s values?

SA: The way we view social media today, there is a lot of noise and less signal. There’s a lot of great content that’s not being discovered by the right readers, and we want to change that. We are currently building features that will allow users to show their true multifaceted selves on Volv and [the concept of] Collective Media is really about a digital space that will help you form deeper connections.

PV: There are currently limited pathways to discoverability for non-video creators–podcasters, newsletter writers, etc. are feeling pressure to become performers and entertainers to get their content out there. Not everyone needs to be doing video. You shouldn’t have to change who you are.

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Reboot editor-in-chief Jasmine Sun on the current landscape of tech criticism.

  • Sun links to "The California Ideology," a 1995 essay by two English academics that is a criticism of the "dotcom neoliberalism" in vogue at the time. It's incredible how prescient and relevant this piece is, especially on the rise of "the virtual class," skilled workers employed by the tech and media industries.

• Behind the scenes of Barack Obama's annual reading list. (Esquire)

• I'm trying to make sense of this quote Fran Lebowitz gave to ArtNews at Bennett Miller's AI-generated show: "These are not real photographs, but what are real photographs?” Lebowitz begins. “Are the only real photographs the ones made on film, not the digital ones? My friend Peter Hujar [who died in 1987] would say so.”

• Why disgusting clickbait cuisine is being broadcasted on MTA subway screens. (Hellgate)

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