Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Gimlet isn’t alone here; there other prominent examples of media companies with an emphasis on long-form that are attracting millennials – VICE and Netflix docu-series come to mind.  (It should be noted, even BuzzFeed, the king of snackable content, has invested in and attained recent success with long form.)

So why is this?  What are these companies doing that allow them to build large millennial audiences against the conventional wisdom that shorter is better?

For your consideration, here are three reasons why long-form is actually the ideal format to reach millennials....

Steve Hind: When readers are lured in and rewarded for their curiosity with good content, everyone wins. Sites like Buzzfeed use this to their advantage, and traditional media should take note..

.Last week the internet was treated to another great offering from Randall Munroe, author of the xkcd cartoon blog.

In it, Munroe re-imagined 20th century headlines if they were written to get more clicks. "This one weird mould kills all germs" could have applied to the discovery of penicillin in 1928. "You won't believe what these people did to the Berlin Wall" could have appeared in November 1989 for maximum effect.

His point, of course, was that the "clickbait-ification" of our news is cheapening it....