Tribune Media Wants To Harness The Powers Of Clickbait With Spartz Partnership

By Mae Rice in News on Dec 9, 2015 6:32PM

Chicagoans, get ready to click on some content. Tribune Media, the TV broadcast company created when the Tribune separated its media and print arms, has partnered with Emerson Spartz, the 28-year-old digital entrepreneur behind Dose.com.

As of Wednesday morning, the main headline on Dose.com is the one above.

Tribune media will be the lead investor on a $25 million round of funding for Spartz’s site, which receives 50 million unique monthly visitors, according to Crain’s—a figure on par with Gawker and Vice. Next year, Spartz aims to reach 100 million uniques per month, a Buzzfeed level of traffic.

Spartz, who founded popular Harry Potter fan site MuggleNet at age 12, has a reputation as a viral content whisperer. A New Yorker profile of him this January—headlined “The Virologist”—notes that he mostly innovates by packaging content creatively.

Strategies he and his staff have toyed with, the New Yorker reports, include “placing unusually large share buttons at the top and the bottom of posts; experimenting with which headlines and photographs would be more seductive; devising strategies for making posts show up prominently in Facebook’s news feed.”

Crain’s frames Spartz’s recent fundraising success as a mark of a Chicago tech scene on the rise, but as Poynter notes, it’s also another sign of a “topsy-turvy” era in Chicago media, where old institutions struggle to garner web traffic.

As Crain’s noted, in exchange for the investment, “[Tribune Media] will get access to Dose's technology, which can be used to crank up traffic for the content produced by its TV stations and 42 websites.”