In this week’s program we present the Spanish media outlet with the largest community in , and the second in the world in any language, which is growing at a rate of 5,000 followers per day:
We find out how it was born a project aimed at explaining current events to Generation Z and that more than on its website, it has discovered that it connected with it through TikTok. And we will do it with its young founder Daniela Macarena or as she says in her professional name: Daniela McArena.
Interview with Daniela McArena (Ac2ality)
6:18 How did the Ac2ality project come about?
It is a digital newspaper aimed at the , the idea really came to me at the UN, where I did internships. There we had to make summaries of everything that happened and give it to the diplomats. There were topics that I couldn’t understand, not even reading newspaper articles. So I thought: I wish there was a newspaper where all the news were outlined with drawings and with an easier vocabulary. The new generations want things that are simpler, more direct and the less effort, the better. They prefer to watch videos than read news.
9:50 What size are you currently?
I started in 2019 alone in NY, searching on Google how to make a website. I read the newspapers, summarized the news and made the infographics. He began to be interested in the , they called me to do interviews and a friend He told me that I had to be on TikTok, which was the platform for Generation Z, and he started helping me make videos.. We have been on TikTok for less than 3 months and we have 641k followers, 5 thousand are uploaded every day and I intend to reach a million by the end of the year. it is very addictive and gives you the opportunity to have your videos seen by many people.
13:25 What traffic does the website currently have?
Currently I do not focus much on the web, I use it as a support for the networks, but our traffic is on the networks. On the web we will have 20 thousand visits per month. It has evolved so fast that I have had to focus on things. Now I have more equipment and we are going to focus on the web to give it a boost. Now I continue, 4 TikTokers girls, in English I have a boy and I’m going to incorporate a new girl too.
https:///tiktok-y–estaran-prohibidas-en-estados-unidos-a-partir-de-this-sunday/
19:55 Is there any media outlet in Spanish that has more followers than yours on TikTok?
No, yesterday we outperformed the Washington Post. Neither in English nor in Spanish. We only have to beat an American newspaper that is also aimed at young people, has 2 million and is of leftist ideology politics. We try to be as objective as possible.
22:00 Could we say that Ac2ality is the new generation of what a few years ago were projects like Playground or Buzzfeed?
I recently had a meeting with TikTok to make a proposal: since we are the most influential medium on this network why didn’t we do ac2ality by tiktok, he would be my ideal partner. What the meeting came to is being half partners, such as publishers with weekly hashtags for them to position themselves. Now they just launched the , where you can present yourself and depending on your content, you earn an amount of money with 50% for TikTok. In addition, they launched a kind of marketplace of , you look for the certain characteristics that you need to advertise your products and they tell you which influencer or creators fit. For you to be on that list you have to meet a series of requirements, once you meet them TikTok sends you a message. Now we are in England, in Spain it is still being created.
29:56 TikTok has a lot of limitations on putting links, which makes it difficult to attribute results when you do campaigns.
Yes, they say anyway, and they should put links because Walmart itself will want to sell its products through the platform. So from one moment to another it will change because much more could be monetized than what is done. For now it can only be measured by results.
31:33 What is your vision with the rest of the networks?
It is true that we focus on TikTok but tWe upload everything to Instagram, we have a Whatsapp group with our followers to send news and Twitter. The only network we don’t have is Facebook because it doesn’t matter. When I have more equipment I will exploit the rest more. On Instagram, the Spanish account has 14k followers.
35:56 How are you experiencing the birth of Instagram Reels?
We do but I think it will not work because of the Instagram algorithm. Always position, regardless of comments and followers, the strongest. That is to say, the Reels of influencers will always be more positioned before someone who is just starting out. They only last 15 seconds and the way to edit them is not intuitive, it has nothing to do with TikTok. I think everyone is trying to copy TikTok.
39:15 How long does it take to make a TikTok?
We are going faster and faster because we have got the hang of it. But before, I could stay all day to make a TikTok video. You have to look for the information, contrast it and record it. It seems easy, but if you have to talk about the war in Turkey and Greece in less than a minute with easy vocabulary and understand it, plus all the visual content that is of good quality with a text that TikTok does not delete. A video takes a lot of work. In fact, we edit everything within the app. We have everything very automated. At 8 am I begin to summarize the news, the girls record it and at 1 pm we have all the videos made.
43:27 How do you see yourself in 3 years?
I printed a photo of the TikTok screen with 2 million followers for all my girls, I wanted them to get up every day to see what we were going to achieve. Everything has happened very fast, I started alone thinking if this was going to work and in the end, you adapt. The new newspapers are going to be like that, it’s what they like now. My little cousins don’t even have Instagram, it will be left behind. The future is TikTok and videos. We have found this niche very quickly and soon in a market that needed it: local journalism, influencer journalism. We have known how to exploit it and we know what it likes. Traditional journalism is going to have to adapt. Surely in the future, newspapers will contact us so that we can do their news and thus capture generation Z.
49:41 Any idea of a possible interviewee?
Mazinn, is one, they have a very cool website and they advise big brands to attract new generations.
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