What BuzzFeed's Dao Nguyen Knows About Data, Intuition, And The Future Of Media

To understand what makes BuzzFeed tick, you need to know how Dao Nguyen thinks about data... As the value of content approaches zero, "Having technology, data science, and being able to know how to manage, optimize and coordinate your publishing is the thing that gives you a competitive advantage"...

One myth is data scientists are telling reporters what to write... That's totally untrue.... when I speak to editors ... They understand there are many things data can tell them. But they also understand there are many things data can't tell them. You have to use a lot of intuition and a lot of creativity, and the data is one part of the input ... The data never tells you why anything happens

There's data, which is quantitative. Then there's qualitative information you can gather... Reading comments, reading tweets, reading articles about your article—all of that is qualitative... the third part that is necessary, critical, is the culture encouraging all that.

Don't let all the attention get given to these viral ones. The attention should be on the bread and butter... That's where you're learning... the sample size is higher.

the business side and editorial side are really aligned... because we don't sell banner ads ... native advertising aligns groups within the organization in a way that makes everyone more effective, and advertisers happy.