Disruption is something you must experience yourself
Jimmy Maymann (Denmark) is an award-winning entrepreneur and leader. He has founded a number of companies including GoViral, which he sold to AOL for more than $80 million. He is former CEO of The Huffington Post, former executive vice president at AOL Content and Consumer Brands, and is currently, among other things, chair of the United Nations project UNLive Online.
It was back in 2005 that I, the editor of this book, first heard about Jimmy Maymann, when he and some friends founded the company GoViral. At about the same time, my own startup began getting interested in video as a part of our communication, and the boys at GoViral went all out in precisely the field of video.
Before YouTube became really popular, Maymann and his co-founder Claus Moseholm began striving to make their vision grow large—by helping companies get their marketing messages out through viral, video-based marketing.
It was then that I talked with Jimmy for the first time, and I’ve followed his exciting career since from the sideline. After he and Moseholm made their large, three-digit-million exit from GoViral in 2012, Maymann was offered the top job at the internet media outlet The Huffington Post, which was quickly storming ahead, and he accepted.
Jimmy Maymann’s job target was to double The Huffington Post’s 40 million monthly users within 2 years, but 3 years later, Jimmy had increased the number of users fivefold and had increased The Huffington Post’s presence from 2 to 14 markets. That echoed in the rest of the world, and in connection with a large round of acquisitions, Jimmy Maymann was given the responsibility for “consumer brands” at mass-media giant AOL.
When doing this interview, Jimmy was still CEO of The Huffington Post.
Jimmy, everybody’s not only talking about innovation at the moment. The new buzzword is disruption. I’m currently attending an e-commerce conference with 1100 people, and this is no exception. How does disruption seem to you with your job and experience?
I think we must start by defining what it is we’re talking about. In my view there’s a considerable difference between digital transformation and disruption. In digital transformation, there are new technologies and a digitalization process that mean that many branches can and must develop. These open new possibilities for them but can also be an extension of and support for what we’re already doing to some degree in business and innovation terms.
Disruption is quite different. It’s completely new ways of acting or trading, such as the development of the sharing economy, which presuppose fundamentally new business models.
Unlike many competitors, you’ve experienced growth in the number of users and in your earnings. What have you done differently?
First and foremost, we’ve had a different culture than that of the traditional, older media groups.
On the one hand, we consider ourselves to be media, but we’re more than that. We’re a platform. Our approach is to use news to generate discussions and our community is very vital to us.
When we focus on some of the things that people are really interested in, then the involvement is 15 to 20 times larger than on The New York Times’s website, for example. We have more people sharing news and more who interact and debate.
When I came to The Huffington Post, the social media really started to play a very vital role for media such as us. Until I started there, we’d been world leaders in search engine optimization (SEO) and we’d ranked highly with our news in search results. We’re still good at that type of thing, but now we focus just as hard on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and, soon, Snapchat.
We want to be world champion in understanding how people interact with news and with each other, and incisive in what is required for users to share the things we publish.
When you describe it like that, I can’t help wondering whether you’re actually delivering news. Aren’t you really describing here how you became good at running and controlling online traffic?
Let me give you an example: One of our journalists writes a story of 1000 words. That takes her perhaps 3 hours. At some media groups, the journalist may retain a self-impression of writing stories but not headlines. That’s not what it’s like at Huffington.
At our media group, the journalist who writes the 1000-word story must also provide catchy headlines and find appropriate pictures. Our journalistic staff know that their news coverage is a matter of getting the message across to as many readers as possible.
It takes the journalist I mentioned 3 hours to write the story, no matter what, so why not see it as something quite natural that she should also contribute to getting people to actually interest themselves in the content?
But isn’t it just clickbait that you’re describing here? The media try to tempt the readers with headlines that may not represent the content, but get us to click on the page so they can earn money on their advertisements.
No. Fundamentally, this is about tomorrow’s journalists, who in the future must be able to do more than write the basic story in an article. They must not sit back and say, “Journalists don’t do that.”
With regard to tempting people to click, we’re very much aware of our responsibility. We reach over 200 million people, so we don’t just put anything on the front page. You will often see a front page which also has stories that don’t spread much but on the basis of fundamental news criteria are important stories. That’s why they’re there.
The click part should also be understood as emphasizing that we’re experts in data. We know that people say one thing but often do something else. We know precisely what they look at and click on, and therefore we have the in-house mantra “People come for the Kardashians, but stay for the Obamas.”
Does that also mean that you recruit some other profiles than your competitors?
Yes, we do that to a great degree. Take, for example, us and The Washington Post. Our average age is 32 years. Theirs is somewhere in the 40s. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times have fantastic journalists, but they’re not very open to change.
Our journalists are from the younger generation, and they’ve grown up with the new media. Thinking digitally is natural for them. For example, they understand that, when something happens here and now, we can make use of an authentic picture from a person actually “at the crime scene.” The quality may not be quite as high as you’d normally expect of a photograph used in a newspaper, but it’s important to get the story out. A traditional journalist or photographer would be against that attitude.
Are you in this way also calling on other businesses to take on younger people to a larger extent?
Without it sounding like age discrimination, yes. It is incumbent on us to create a mix—also in terms of age. I often see businesses that do not manage to get the new generation into central positions. That’s something they must do.
As far as I’m concerned, I regularly ask young people from our teams to come in and tell me about a new technology that I may not really understand. I similarly often have exciting startups come past my office to pitch their new ideas and innovations to me.
You have to think in that way or else you miss out on a lot of the things that are taking place at the moment in the subcultures but which will very soon become mainstream.
Now you’re part of a large organization. I’m thinking on behalf of small and medium-sized companies in particular. For them, the disruption challenge can seem really enormous. They don’t have AOL’s resources or your network, so what should they do with regard to the disruption agenda?
I come myself from the startup environment, so I know everything about lacking resources and lacking a network.
What is most decisive is that you get out and experience some of the many exciting new technologies yourself. You can’t really understand 3D printing, virtual reality, or other phenomena if you haven’t tried them. One thing is reading articles about them; it’s something else to stand in the midst of it all.
For example, we’re testing virtual reality right now at The Huffington Post. In the future, it can give us a completely unique opportunity for experiencing the stories and news. Instead of hearing abstractions about the Syrian refugee crisis, you can suddenly put VR equipment on and stand in the midst of it. Put yourself in the place of the narrator and feel the emotions and the people in a completely different way.
By trying out virtual reality yourself, it and other technologies that are growing by leaps and bounds become real in a completely different way, so you’re better able to relate to them and see their potential—also for your own, smaller business.
So we must go out and try it, even if it seems scary?
Yes, but hopefully scary and exciting at the same time. We’re facing a pronounced development on a par with the industrial revolutions that we’ve seen historically, but we’re only at the beginning.
It will come, and it’s coming in things like quantum computing, the internet of things, 3D printing, self-driving cars, and much more.
I believe that, as a business owner, you need to prioritize your time and get out and experience phenomena such as these yourself. Talk to the people who are building them right now and understand the possibilities they offer, rather than only looking at all the negative aspects. It’s definitely worth the investment.