A Q&A with Moviepilot's Chief Creative Officer

We talked to Jon Handschin, Chief Creative Officer at Moviepilot, about the rise of the site that he co-founded, and how they reach film fans through Facebook. 
Throughout the second half of 2014, Moviepilot came to our attention as a site that was quickly climbing through our top 25 Facebook publishers’ charts. Having made a splash on Facebook with their mix of user-generated content and stories from their editorial team. We talked to Jon Handschin, Chief Creative Officer, to find out more about the site’s approach to social publishing, and how they’re using Spike.

Can you tell us about your role at Moviepilot?

I’m the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Moviepilot. Basically, I’m responsible for any kind of content we produce in house. So, what is MoviePilot? We see ourselves as an open platform for movie fans, who want to produce any kind of content on movies, from blog entries to editorial content to fan art, reviews and videos.
At the same time, we are not a pure platform. We are one of these emerging hybrids that you see in different verticals. We have a dedicated in-house team of about 20 editors in Berlin and Los Angeles. That team is divided again: one is a social content team that has social first and foremost in their mind, whereas the other is independent from Facebook, or social overall. My role as CCO is to balance these two teams, and try to understand what’s the right mix, and what’s the type of content we truly want to create.

How do you find working with user-generated content?

When we started two years ago, we were a pure publisher.  While we moved into the platform direction, we started to redevelop our whole CMS and basically opened it to the public. These days, an in-house editor uses the same interface and tech as anyone who signs up to the platform.
The creators on our platform mainly come from our vast readership. They publish their content on moviepilot.com not only because they hope to engage with like-minded people, but because the have a chance to get massive distribution for their creativity.

Speaking about distribution: Moviepilot is huge on Facebook. There are around 30 million Facebook subscribers. What kind of work goes into promoting your content on social media, from the editorial side?

We truly focused on building scale and distribution on Facebook in the first place. From day one, that was at the core of what we were doing.  We created this network of sub-communities on Facebook. We serve everything a film fan can ask for – Animation, Superheroes, Horror and many more.
I think this is the fascinating thing about Facebook: you can very easily and efficiently reach out to various audiences that might be into one topic and not at all into another. If you take the diversity between our horror page, and the legendary directors’ page, people couldn’t be more different. 

That’s interesting to hear about how you’re almost segregating your readers. If you have readers coming through social, they’re just seeing the stuff they really want to see. Is that the logical conclusion to the death of homepages?

Yes, absolutely. The homepage might be dead for publishers but it is integral when you are a platform. So we witness extreme maneuvers, from the likes of NowThis, which scraps its homepage overall. On the other hand, we see platforms like Flipboard moving to the web trying to be a home destination for people there as well. So, I think no one knows at the end of the day, how journalistic platforms are shaping up in the near future. But I think that believing and following one idea for your project is the only thing to do. 

Just to go into how you measure the success of the posts that your community are writing… What metrics are you looking at?

It depends on the content form. For the typical article, the foremost metric is growth, so do we create hits, and visits from the content that we post? But we try to evaluate the quality of the engagement it stirs at the same time. So we analyze the shares, comments, sometimes the amounts of poll answers. And we also regularly try to assess the overall level of quality the discussion stirs. Again, it’s a balance we are trying to find – in this case between relevance and impact.

What are your opinions about Facebook native content? Is it dangerous for publishers, or is it something that you’re happy to experiment with?

The numbers that Facebook video are producing right now are tremendously high. With the network that we have, you can achieve numbers that are truly insane, you have to admit it. So yes, it’s really interesting to us.
We also try to think what content looks like that we produce in house for Facebook. Since we are so Facebook-centric, we really focus on it. We believe that Facebook video can be something different, as YouTube was different. There are new things – autoplay, mute, discovery mode of the user in front of the screen and obviously that leads to different types of content.
Besides video, Chris Cox has just emphasised again, how interested Facebook is in directly hosting content from publishers. Obviously everyone will ask about monetization of such a model. But Facebook right now show that only with the amount of reach they can offer they already have quite a good argument on their side.

Are other channels besides Facebook important to you?

Sure, we are interested in YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, and all these other channels as well. But at the end of the day, we are a pretty small team, and we try to focus on what delivers numbers right now. 

Moving on to Spike, you say that you’re using the Creators feature a lot particularly?

Yes, what I really like is with our growing amount of creators, outside and in house, that it’s a cool assessment tool to talk about the social success of writers, especially for our social team. You get this automatic ranking, you can see how much stuff has he or she written in the past week, but also how that has performed socially. That’s something that we’re thinking about making public to the team here, so they can check where they are, and how well stories performed for them. That’s a very interesting tool, and drew a lot of attention from us.
And obviously, it’s also a cool feature to learn about writers and creators in the outside world. You suddenly understand who has a true talent for social writing out there.

What can we expect from Moviepilot in 2015?

The main part is broadening the participatory aspect of the platform, so that is understood that this is truly an open platform, open to fans and film makers alike. We want to create a  ‘digital ComicCon’ experience. Basically, it’s three people coming to the table – fans, the talent that makes the movies, and us as moderators in the middle. And that’s something that we still have to build up this year.

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