As hard as it is for me to believe, I started writing for the Odyssey nine months ago and published about 40 articles. In this time however not much has changed for the Odyssey. The website still does not have an advanced search, site visitors have no place to go after reading the initial article on their Facebook feed and content creators are still paid the same way. Yet still, the Odyssey managed to add 10 million new users in 2016 and has a total of 30 million unique monthly visitors.
Fortunately things seem more likely to change after the Odyssey closed its first round of funding by raising $25 million, which increases the total amount of money raised to $32 million. With this raised capital these changes should allow for the company to hire more engineers and make it even easier to target millennials.
One of my ideas for the Odyssey—to create suggested articles based on the articles that visitor's click. However, after a visitor clicks on an article the site doesn’t intelligently send you anywhere. Whereas if you watch a show like "Breaking Bad" on Netflix, after you are done watching the show they will suggest you to watch a show that is similar to breaking bad like "Sons of Anarchy." Currently this doesn’t exist with the Odyssey. However with the raised money, the Odyssey will be able to hire more engineers that can build the site to have suggested articles. Therefore, if you click on an article about Tupac, after you are done reading, the site would have the capacity to suggest five more articles on similar topics related to Tupac.
The change I am most anticipating is for the Odyssey creators to have their own writer profiles. When I wrote an article on Staten Island I had over 20,000 people view the article but I wasn’t able to capture their long-term attention because there was no subscription feature. So when I wrote my next article, I only had 100 views. As a writer I want people to keep reading what I have to say, so that I can maintain 20,000 views on all of my articles. The best way for the company to do this is to create profiles for their writers in a similar fashion to Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. This way readers don’t just click through your article but have a place to stay.
Another plan is to change the incentives for content creators. The way content creators get paid is by getting $20 if they have the most shared article in their community. In this model only the top performers get paid but nowhere near comparable to their performance. However, the Odyssey wants to change their model into something similar to YouTube where the top performers get paid if you get a certain number of shares for an article.This gives writers the incentive to create premium content and get rewarded accordingly.
The Odyssey started by drawing content creators specifically from university’s Greek affiliations but is now expanding. Instead of having all of the communities located at universities, the Odyssey is building teams into actual communities like Staten Island and Brooklyn by having content creators lead the communities.
While these changes have the potential to exponentially increase the growth at Odyssey, it still requires a lot of patience. Change doesn’t happen overnight. However if these changes are executed properly, then the media industry will be totally different in the next five years, especially in how they plan to target the millennials.