How a young entrepreneur built an empire by repackaging memes

Later, over the phone, he explained that ringing a digital gong at meetings had become “an office meme.”

When we spoke, DeBaise was reading “In Persuasion Nation,” a book of dystopian short stories by George Saunders, in which the oppressive force is not a totalitarian government but the all-seeing eye of targeted advertising.

“I was willing to sort of put my journalism practice on the back burner,” she said.

He commissions even more detailed reports from his data scientists, in an effort to predict visitors’ clicking habits at a pixel-by-pixel level of specificity.

...images or story lines, ones that create a lot of resonant emotion, and I would make those into a short video—under three minutes—with clear, simple words and statistics. Short, declarative sentences. And at the end I’d give people something they can do, something to feel hopeful about.”

” The headlines that “win,” according to Spartz’s testing algorithm, are usually hyperbolic, and many of them begin with dangling participles or end with prepositions.

It was a clever illustration of global diversity and inequity: an American truck driver holding a tray of cheeseburgers and Starbucks Frappuccinos; a Maasai woman posing with eight hundred calories’ worth of milk and porridge.

His hair style (a tidy mop top) and clothing preferences (heathered T-shirt, dark jeans, black sneakers) have not changed much since his tween years.

“I realized that influence was inextricably linked to impact—the more influence you had, the more impact you could create. . . . The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest that we could get to having a human superpower.”

Apart from the biographies and enough algebra to satisfy state requirements, the Spartz pedagogy was flexible and self-directed.

Tom Spartz speaks in passionate bursts that sound like unrelated fortune-cookie aphorisms spliced together.

When the data indicated that optimism was attracting more visitors than Schadenfreude, Spartz let his “fail” sites languish and focussed on promoting GivesMeHope, a repository for anonymous, uplifting anecdotes.

“We spend a lot of time doing a lot of back-end things, a lot of tweaking,” he said.

In our data-obsessed moment, it is subversive to assert that the value of a product is not reducible to its salability.

When the data indicated that optimism was attracting more visitors than Schadenfreude, Spartz let his “fail” sites languish and focussed on promoting GivesMeHope, a repository for anonymous, uplifting anecdotes.

He told me that Spartz’s approach seemed most indebted to Upworthy, which became famous for tantalizing viewers with headlines containing such phrases as “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.”

Whenever I glanced at Spartz’s screen, he was almost always studying one of several data-analytics programs, which break down his sites’ traffic into dozens of metrics.

She grew up in Quito, Ecuador, and studied at an international school; now twenty-seven, she is petite and pale, and it is easy to imagine her as an indoor kid.

When you see the momentum, you’ll be laughing at how obvious it all was.”

At school, he was a precocious student who chafed at classroom structure.

A screen in front of a velvet curtain displayed, in jaunty type, “Hi! I’m Emerson Spartz. I want to change the world.”

The office layout is ostensibly non-hierarchical, but the workstation next to Spartz belongs to Matt Thacker, the chief financial officer, who has an M.B.A. and describes himself as the company’s oldest employee “by a hundred years.”

People giggled, then disbanded.

MuggleNet made hundreds of thousands of dollars through advertising, and Spartz funnelled his earnings into a new company: Spartz, Inc. His first employee was his younger brother Dylan, who designed the site; during college, at Notre Dame, Emerson started working with Gaby Montero, then his girlfriend and now his wife.

Spartz’s algorithm measures which headline is attracting clicks most quickly, and after a few hours, when a statistically significant threshold is reached, the “winning” headline automatically supplants all others.

They learned arithmetic in part through “Kroger math”—on trips to the supermarket, Emerson and Dylan kept a tally of prices while Tom added items to the cart.

Tom showed me the den, which he had used as the boys’ classroom, with desks, whiteboards, and inspirational posters.

The offices of Spartz, Inc., are in a loft space with polished-cement floors, bright-red walls, a hammock, and an aquarium full of sea monkeys.

People giggled, then disbanded.

At school, he was a precocious student who chafed at classroom structure.

When the data indicated that optimism was attracting more visitors than Schadenfreude, Spartz let his “fail” sites languish and focussed on promoting GivesMeHope, a repository for anonymous, uplifting anecdotes.

People who achieve success at an early age often retain a childlike aspect into adulthood, and Spartz has the saucer eyes and cuspidated chin of a cartoon fawn.

“But since I’ve come here I’ve found that a lot of those skills—attention to detail, an affinity for research—have come into play. I was surprised, in a pleasant way.”

To me, that’s a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio.”

Each distilled a life of accomplishment into a moral.

It has been viewed on YouTube more than a hundred million times, but it did not achieve its ultimate goal: Kony remains at large, as does his militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army.

So is the goal for people to look at it and be, like, ‘Wow, that girl wrote a really articulate headline’? At some point, you have to check your ego.”

Eye-level screens then show them “images reflective of the Personal Preferences we’d stated,” imploring them, for example, to visit a nearby Burger King.

Matt Thacker, the C.F.O., clapped me on the back and said, “Exciting day, huh?”

A screen in front of a velvet curtain displayed, in jaunty type, “Hi! I’m Emerson Spartz. I want to change the world.”

That post, in turn, had linked to UrbanTimes (“80 People, 30 Countries and How Much They Eat on a Daily Basis”), which had credited Amusing Planet (“What People Eat Around the World”), which had cited a 2010 radio interview with Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, the writer and the photographer behind the project.

At one point, he told me, “The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that’s fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”

Around the office, posts on Dose are called “lists,” and one hears comments like “The list about albino animals is crushing it right now.”

As the narrator and his grandson walk the streets, devices implanted in the sidewalk mine digital information from strips in their shoes.

He said, of his role in Emerson’s intellectual growth, “I don’t care what expectations you have, all of the great—we’ll call them ‘developers’—were just continually shaking with energy.

“Even though I’m one of the most avid readers I know, I don’t usually read straight news. It’s conveyed in a very boring way, and you tend to see the same patterns repeated again and again.”

Emerson is a quick thinker with impressive recall, as is Gaby; I never saw him introduce a concept that she didn’t immediately grasp.

“If you want to build a successful virus, you can start by trying to engineer the DNA from scratch—or, much more efficient, you take a virus that you already know is potent, mutate it a tiny bit, and expose it to a new cluster of people.”

From a refrigerator, which was permanently stocked with hummus and Muscle Milk, came bottles of André sparkling wine.