It is very difficult to arrest attention of people in this attention deficit economy. Some youngsters set up an online news vehicle ScoopWhoop in 2013 to experiment with ideas how content could be disseminated online. You require a snappier mix of news and entertainment. ScoopWhoop uses a lot of pictures and pithy caption draw our attention to it. The text is less. The stories are original or curated. In the newsroom, the editors and staffers figure out the top stories of the day. There is a software tool that curates what is trending or popular on the social media.There is a filter to decide whether any news has the potential to be shared and easy to consume. The team understands the mix of trending stories, text and video. To scale, they require 40-50 million uniques. That calls for prolific content in different formats. They do so by creating sub-properties such as for women, food, entertainment and others. ScoopWhoop Talkies makes videos. The content is not expensive to produce and so they can scale up. The brand talks to the youngsters. It is the BuzzFeed of India. It has 20 million unique users.

ScoopWhoop can monetise itself by convincing the brands to shift their ad spends to digital. More than 80 percent plus revenue comes from native advertising. Sponsored posts or advertorials are roughly five percent of all content. The site currently charges a flat Rs.1.5 lac for a sponsored article.

Its 65-70 percent of total traffic comes from Facebook. Its 25 percent traffic comes directly. Its app brings six to eight percent traffic. Thus it is highly dependent on social media. This situation is faced by BuzzFeed too.

The days are not far off when huge digital media publishers would emerge, since media consumtion habits in India are changing. The content of ScoopWhoop is consumed off-site on social media. It is distributed content. BuzzFeed who poineered this concept was formed in 2006. Along with Huffington Post or The Guardian, BuzzFeed pursues this model — audience beyond their own website and app.