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Millennials make great influencers, but you have to let them be co-creators of content

Two months after the YouTube video went viral in late September and earned a Guinness World Record for shortest song (45 seconds) to enter the Billboard Top 100, PPAP (“Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen”) is probably still the earworm of many people.

If the song is still stuck in your head, do not just blame the singer, Japanese comedian Pikotaro, but also the popular user-generated entertainment content platform, 9GAG.

Just like many other internet memes, PPAP was given a huge boost by 9GAG users. 9GAG not only featured PPAP on its Facebook page, but also invited Pikotaro for a live chat on its mobile and web platforms that reach out to millennials across the globe.

The result?

“This took a life of its own,” 9GAG Co-Founder and CEO Ray Chan told e27. The original video post went beyond 170 million in reach, 69 million views, 1.2 million shares and 546,000 comments. After the live chat, more than 500 user-generated posts added another 4.6 million in reach, 2 million in shares, and 1.5 million comments.

‘Go Fun Yourself’

“That is the power of ‘fun’. Fun is addictive and proves to bring in better ROI for brands via reach and engagement,” Chan stressed. Chan, who was the keynote speaker at Echelon 2014, has proven the effectiveness of 9GAG’s “Go Fun Yourself” philosophy over the years.

Understanding millennials and keeping them engaged is a struggle for many brands. So why do many millennials love using 9GAG and what keeps them loyal to the platform?

“9GAG gave them exactly what they craved for,” Chan pointed out.

At the risk of generalising, these are some of the characteristics of millennials, according to 9GAG: they have short attention spans, communicate via memes, GIFs and emojis, are highly engaged when using mobile phones, and like to engage in mindless activity via messenger or image-based media when bored or have spare time.

Somehow, 9GAG seems tailor-made for millennials.

“The other learning was, even though millennials make great influencers, you have to let them be co-creators of content. Fun has no boundaries and our 70 million active user base spread across the globe are our catalysts for virality,” Chan said.

Lilian Leong, the former Managing Director of IPG Mediabrands Hong Kong who has joined 9GAG as its new global COO, also shared the steps the company is taking to keep attracting millennials across the globe.

“It’s never easy to stay young when we grow old every day. We hire people who are young at heart, curious, witty and willing to learn. We are very aggressive in recruiting new blood. We have just launched an intern recruitment campaign on Facebook, targeting high school/college students. We got over 300 applications in two days. We intend to recruit 10 this year,” Leong said.

Global community of millennials

Leong stressed the importance of building and managing 9GAG’s community of millennials.

“We keep telling ourselves that we don’t own the community. We are just custodians of the community. We help it by keeping it running, giving our users what they want, learning and improvising along the way,” she said.

9GAG has reaped great success as a user-generated site, where people upvote the content they like and downvote what they do not. So how was 9GAG able to address the challenge of managing a massive amount of user-generated content?

“There are tens of thousands of content submitted by our users every hour. A big challenge is how to distinguish valuable content from the noise, and how we can help give it more exposure while limiting spam. Fortunately, we have great support from our users and our team, plus we have built a system for our users to upvote, downvote, and report the content; and with the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and user efforts, we can continue to improve the quality and shareability of content,” Chan said.

Hong Kong-based 9GAG is backed by Freestyle Capital, True Ventures, First Round Capital, Greycroft Partners, 500 Startups, Y Combinator and other angel investors in the United States, including Chris Sacca, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Tim Ferriss. With the kind of loyalty the site generates, particularly among millennials, how is 9GAG looking at translating its reach and engagement to revenue streams?

“Our millennial users spend a considerable amount of time on our site, 19 minutes on mobile and 9.5 minutes on the desktop. They consume loads of content, and also actively engage with each another. I would say 9GAG is an entertainment platform that’s strong in both publishing and engagement. We also have a huge follower base on social pages (33 million on Facebook. 34 million on Instagram and another 7.5 million on Twitter). In view of our strengths, we take paid advertising (across our platforms and social pages) and marketing partnerships, if the partnership content fits our users’ tastes and our site style. It’s an incredible platform for advertisers who want to deeply engage with millennials,” Leong said.

9GAG’s origin story

When one considers the global popularity of 9GAG and the internet memes it has popularised over the years, it is hard to imagine the site’s humble beginnings in 2008. Chan, who was then a University of Hong Kong student, co-founded 9GAG with his brother Chris and others mainly out of sheer boredom.

“On a boring evening in 2008, my co-founders and I had trouble finding some good jokes to brighten up our day. So we came up with a simple idea — press a button, get a laugh. We spent about a month to launch the very first version of 9GAG,” Chan recounted.

Asked whether he ever imagined 9GAG become a global phenomenon, Chan replied: “Surely… not. We were just scratching our own itch, solving our own problem. It turns out many people have the same itch.“

Chan pointed out that 9GAG has evolved and grown with its users over the years, supporting more content formats, topics, and social platforms.

“One thing that doesn’t change is our mission — Make The World Laugh. We don’t predict the future at 9GAG. Instead, we listen to our users closely, analyse the data, and move as fast as possible to make things our users want,” Chan said.

And while Chan has declined to divulge the origin of the name “9GAG” despite all the people who have asked him over the years, we figured we would take a shot and ask him: Where did the name 9GAG come from?

Chan’s reply via e-mail?

He quoted the popular saying and meme: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

With a smiley, of course.

The post Just for fun: 9GAG Co-Founder and CEO Ray Chan on harnessing user-generated content and engaging millennials appeared first on e27.

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