Mashable

Location
New York City
Politics
Mashable has no overarching political slant, outside of being beholden to status quo, wire-service conventions. This might be by design given top editor Jim Roberts’ history with establishment media like Reuters and the New York Times.

Money Matters

Pete Cashmore, Mashable founder and CEO, is the company’s majority owner. Mashable received $17 million from Time Warner Investments in 2015 and $14 million from several investors led by Tribune Digital Ventures.

Essentials

Cashmore founded Mashable in 2005. It gained fame as one of Time’s Best 25 Blogs 2009, describing the site as "the largest and most popular blog focused on social networking." Mashable currently has 45 million unique visitors a month. It has more than 25 million social media followers, including 3 million Facebook ‘likes’ and more than 6 million Twitter followers.

Mashable bills itself as "news, resources, inspiration and fun for the connected generation." Its specialties remain potentially-viral content, technology, and business news. "Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world," it says on LinkedIn.


Like most modern media companies, it relies heavily on social media platforms to trumpet its work. Mashable has separate editions for Asia, Australia, UK and India. The site also hosts an online awards show, originally called the International Open Web Awards, but now dubbed the Mashable Awards or Mashies. Prize categories include Best Mobile Game, Best Use of an API, Best Web Video, Most Promising New Company and Entrepreneur of the Year. Mashable also holds several conferences, including the Social Good Summit, Social Media Day, Mashcon and Mashable Media Summit.

Key People

Pete
Cashmore

At the age of 19, Cashmore — dubbed "Brad Pitt of the blogosphere and the planet’s sexiest geek" by Success.com — famously created Mashable from his bedroom at his parents’ house in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He later moved to San Francisco in 2008 — then New York City in 2011 — following years of diligent work building up Mashable.

 

The site’s Brand Kit says "three Mashable stories are shared each second," which is part of Cashmore’s strategy to allow content consumers to avoid visiting the site to in order to find Mashable’s work. "That’s what we do," Cashmore told Success.com. "We create content that’s sharable."

Mashable also attempts to mix social-media-friendly content with news on technology and world events.





With social-centric strategies that include lighter fare alongside harder news, BuzzFeed and Mashable are examples of websites that "are designed to be consumed out of context and in small chunks," Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute told Digiday. "This is an unsolved problem right now because their audience doesn’t expect serious news, so it doesn’t resonate."

Mashable currently has 45 million unique visitors a month.

In October 2015 Mashable joined the US First Lady’s campaign ‘Better Make Room’, aimed at inspiring teenagers. The outlet "will tell the stories of those who are participating in #bettermakeroom and create awareness of the tools and support available to the digital generation for continued education."

But Mashable being just a media company is not enough for Cashmore. "It’s been interesting for us to really be a true tech-news hybrid," he said. "Maybe in the way Bloomberg has its terminals, we have our Velocity." Launched in 2012, Velocity’s algorithm forecasts when a story will go viral using Facebook and Twitter data. Its spin-off for branded content is Knowledge Graph, which predicts how information posted on a site will spread "across various social networks, including difficult-to-track ones like email and text messaging," according to AdAge.

 

Jim
Roberts

Mashable’s executive editor and chief content officer, is the former executive editor of Reuters Digital. Prior to that, he held many web and print positions with the New York Times. Roberts was hired in 2013 partly based on his advocacy of digital platforms, and to strengthen Mashable’s expanding news division.

"Mashable’s core has really focused on the confluence between technology and digital culture, and those topics are still really essential to us and are really at the heart of what we do," Roberts told Nieman Journalism Lab. "I guess what I’m trying to do is, to the extent that this is possible, is cling to that core, reinforce it as much as possible, and then build around it in a very natural way."

Controversies

‘Disaster porn’

As Neiman Lab detailed, the Euromaidan protest movement in Ukraine in 2014 "was one of Mashable’s first major attempts under Roberts’ leadership to take on a significant global story." Mashable’s coverage of the protests became integral within a loose partnership among sites usually considered in competition with one another. The sites — Vice, Mother Jones, Breaking News, Digg, Quartz, and Mashable — used the hashtag #UkraineDesk in order to streamline coverage.

For Mashable, though, this melding hard news with its penchant for flippant viral content did not come without criticism. Politico Magazine ran a piece that decried the brand of list-based "disaster porn" that came out of coverage of the dramatic and violent actions occurring on the ground in Ukraine.



The coverage, Sarah Kendzior wrote in the piece posted on Thursday, February 20, 2014, resembled cynical clickbait.

"By the end of the day on Wednesday, Business Insider, Talking Points Memo, BuzzFeed and Mashable had all published their own listicle versions of what Huffington Post called ‘Ukraine Crisis: 12 Apocalyptic Pictures After Nation’s Deadliest Day.’ High in resolution, low on explanation, the articles painted Ukraine’s carnage by numbers," she wrote.

"A new genre had been born: the apocalypsticle."

Roberts countered, telling Digiday that Mashable’s varied Ukraine "coverage should be viewed in its entirety."

"I was outraged by [the Politico piece]," Roberts said at a Social Media Week panel, according to Ad Week. "It bothered me personally because I had invested a lot of real dollars in covering that story since December... To take a swipe [at Mashable] really got my blood boiling."

Ad-driven content

Like some of its competitors, Mashable has been scrutinized for its advertiser-driven branded content that muddies the line between editorial and marketing. Mashable produces branded videos for major corporate clients such as Gap, 3M, and American Express. The videos are posted exclusively on a YouTube channel called Mashable Originals.

"Branded video is the quickest-growing segment of our business right now," Adam Ostrow, chief strategy officer for Mashable, said. "It’s really the bread and butter of how we monetize."

In addition, Mashable’s Social Lift was introduced about two years ago as the company’s jump into "real-time marketing." It combined content from a brand in one ad unit, that looked pretty similar to Mashable editorial content.

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