There was a time when Carlo Padial (Barcelona, 46 years old) thought he was going to change the internet. And that the Internet was going to change his life thanks to viral videos. In a newsroom that was becoming increasingly larger and more crowded, he saw how native digital media managed, with little effort, to gain millions of views on social networks. During those years, PlayGround, the startup where I worked as director of reports and content, came to compete in virality with all the Facebook profiles of traditional Spanish media. He surpassed even The New York Times.
“It was crazy. We were not prepared for so much. It was clear that things were going to end badly,” Padial now acknowledges in the cafeteria of a hotel in the center of Madrid. Since the digital bubble burst at the end of the last decade, he left videos behind viral videos of teenagers at the door of Apple Stores and has returned to the world of cinema and television, but not without pulling one last ace out of his sleeve. The iPhone notes that she wrote frantically so as not to forget a single one of the absurd situations that she witnessed in those offices have found a place in Content (Blackie Books, 2023), an entertaining and highly credible satire that portrays the most “chaotic and exciting” years of the Internet.
Ask. “Content” is a word that we try to avoid in newsrooms.
Answer. There is a certain fear when it comes to talking about content, it is a bit taboo. When I was in PlayGround I made a video column that talked about how much we are content, anything is content. So when I decided to write a book about a start up Spanish, that described the differences between my experience and what we see in the HBO series about Silicon Valley, seemed to me the most appropriate word to describe that delirium.
Q. And what was the reality like?
R. Absolute nonsense. Starting with the CEO who was walking around with an HBO backpack, and everyone speculating that we were going to be absorbed. But it would not be correct to say that a single person was responsible for this chaos, because it was a collective delirium. The cultural and digital model in Spain is permanently in collapse. In our case there was someone who detected a model and the possibility of smashing it in a very short time. But the talent, the research that characterizes Silicon Valley, was missing. There was nothing. Here the digital transformation has been totally affected by the only culture that really exists in Spain, which is that of hitting the ball.
Q. At one point, it seemed that the success of PlayGround It was going to be unstoppable.
R. We live through several phases in the magazine. A very chaotic first one where that had very little significance, but this allowed little by little each one to begin to find their personality. The coolest thing, and the purest, was the feeling of freedom when performing. You came to PlayGround and the craziest ideas, which other media would have found stupid, were welcome. She was kind of Far West of the internet, where everything was possible for a few months.
Q. Until the problems started.
R. Clear. This lasted very little. Immediately, as this experimentation was successful, advertisers began to arrive to open our eyes. It was no longer enough to be viral, we had to start making money. This idea of a much more politicized Internet is also beginning to develop, meaning that content cannot be merely artistic, but must have an intention. And as it became successful and we moved to a larger and larger location, excited people arrived for their first work experience thinking that this model was going to work.
The coolest thing, and the purest, was the feeling of freedom
Q. Did you think that this was going to be the future of the media?
R. We didn’t know. I had the feeling of entering a very strange place, of not understanding anything that was happening. Adapt a little to what I saw that could work, understand it, totally smash it and then enter a spiral of changes and uncontrolled growth that ended with an absolute implosion.
Q. In January 2018, a change to the Facebook algorithm [que el protagonista del libro llama “el Vietnam millennial”] made PlayGround lost 80% of its traffic, which was an economic catastrophe for the company. At that time, you were video director for Grupo Zeta, but you returned a year later, when the digital medium made public an ERE that affected almost half of its editors. Why did he come back?
R. In a totally crazy way, I thought I could help fix the situation. I also returned because I was not entirely happy in Zeta, which was a normal reality, where you had to make videos about politics, about society… After having lived through the chaos of PlayGround I went to work at a traditional media outlet, but I felt like I no longer fit in. So I went back and arrived in time to see the collapse. The ERE, which was very hard to watch, a real slap in the face from the real world. But this is also the cultural and digital world in Spain: the permanent cycle of collapse. In 2018 it was the digital native media and now it is the advertising agencies. influencers that are beginning to show signs of exhaustion.
Q. Do you think that the influencers Will it be the next bubble to burst?
R. I think it’s already happening. Agencies are going through a very big crisis. The media is still in the same crisis. And digital advertising, which seemed like the last stronghold, is not safe either. The thing is that it is not being said, we always come to recognize it later. Partly because saying it raises alarm bells, but if you talk to people in these sectors privately, that’s what they say.
The reality of native digital media is that they appeared, they opened a space that did not exist, and once this space was generated, people with more resources and more strength arrived and took it away.
Q. How much did Facebook’s algorithm change influence the fall of PlayGround?
R. A lot, but it wasn’t just the algorithm’s fault. Nothing was working. The reality of native digital media is that they appeared, they opened a space that did not exist, and once this space was generated, people with more resources and more strength arrived and took it away. I used to use my cell phone to watch videos of PlayGroundwhile now I have the app from Netflix. There were media outlets that did not even have a Twitter account at that time, or they had 50 followers. Nobody had thought that there was a place for them on social networks. Now, all television programs and media have their YouTube channel, they put clips of the interviews on Instagram and TikTok.
Q. If they had managed it better would they have been able to survive?
R. Yes, there are media outlets that have achieved it because they did not trust everything to Facebook, which also took care of a website, while PlayGround He put it all on Facebook. I was in these meetings where they told us that our business was there and that the rest didn’t matter. Still, I think the business was unsustainable, unless they had been very cautious, which none of them were.
Q. In five years, Facebook has gone from being the social network that allowed millions to be earned from ads, to becoming irrelevant.
R. Completely. Nobody is on Facebook anymore. A handful of people have remained and we don’t really know what they are looking for. It has become the ghetto of social media.
Q. Where can the content be seen now?
R. Things no longer come to you from a single place. Now everyone has a timeline totally different. Probably, we do not share more than 20% of the content that is on the internet, because reality is much more polarized than a decade ago. When selecting content you have to do a kind of extreme curation: you choose a podcast, a Netflix series that no one has seen, a documentary that is on Filmin, a Twitter account of a writer who never stops proposing ideas… The panorama is deeply fragmented.
I’m fantasizing about buying an old phone that doesn’t have internet
Q. Isn’t there a risk of saturating users with so many stimuli?
R. Sure, people are tired. I’m fantasizing about buying an old phone that doesn’t have internet. This is no longer enough. It has made us all sick and we are going to need a few years to put ourselves and the friendships that have been put into question back together. Our concentration, how we relate to the world. And everything has been for the smartphonessomething that we have created ourselves and that is brutal, but sometimes it is also too much.
Q. In the book he talks about native digital media as the “sects” of Facebook. What would be the sect of 2023?
R. The Kings League. And a type sect Midsommar Also, very tacky, very Spanish. The other day I saw an entire broadcast for the first time, because until now I had only come across fragments on networks, and I almost fell off my chair.
Q. In the years of maximum virality, there was talk of PlayGround like the millennial press. What is the centennial press?
R. There is a very funny issue with this, and that is that we don’t know anything about them. Many times I am in meetings where it is about speculating what centenarians like. You can’t ask them directly because, unlike millennials, they are not in these spaces. It is evident that they are in other moves. We know that they are on TikTok, that they are on Twitch, that video games are probably their cinema, and that something has been broken in a more definitive way. But the rest is speculation, and if you try to listen to them, nothing is clear either.
Q. Despite the striking similarities, more than the history of PlayGround, Content It is the story of a generation that thought that thanks to the Internet they were going to change the world. They made it?
R. Perhaps there was a certain naivety in thinking this was possible. The novelty was so brutal that no one could gauge its consequences and everything it was going to bring. We went into all of this thinking that we were going to be able to put an end to the rude people who didn’t let us do cool things, but really the problem is the people. Nothing of boomers, millennials or centennials. So once the new spaces were drawn, the same old problems arose. We have taken a very stupid trip to end up with the same thing or worse. All the experimentation that audiovisual brought with the arrival of 4G to mobile phones has ended up culminating in the reconstruction of television, in the most painful way.
Q. What viral video would you record today?
R. I would like to make a very funny video about how Spain is going to get down to business with the topic of artificial intelligence. Spaniards trying to explain to artificial intelligence what it means to be Spanish, or concepts like “I’ll come in ten minutes” and that you never arrive. We would cry with laughter at that.
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