Steven’s story—“The Man Who Hid in an Airplane Bathroom”—drew more than 6,000 unique views, Kayla’s piece, “Pedestrian Struck” drew more than 5,000. (To put that in some perspective, our most widely read story, measured by traffic to the BRT, remains Erika Hayasaki’s “The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die,” which has, at last count, over 30,000 unique views; the overall champ is the story we co-published with BuzzFeed, Jaime Joyce’s “Kill Me Now,” which is approaching a half million page views, most of them on BuzzFeed.)

The contest was inspired by this simple, painful realization about the patterns in our traffic: there are none.

Stories that we were sure were going to draw a large audience didn’t. Stories that we loved (we love them all, we really do) but worried might have a limited readership,soared. (A case in point, Katherine Olson’s account of a woman’s psychiatric ward, “Something More Wrong,” has drawn more than 18,000 unique views.)

We also had also seen traffic coming in mysterious ways: Kevin Heldman’s harrowing memoir of coming of age in such “therapeutic communities” as Phoenix House—“My Rehab: Coming of Age in Purgatory”—was enjoying a modest run when it was linked in, of all stories, a memoir, “Art School Ruined My Life” that appeared in Medium. The result: an immediate spike of nearly 13,000 readers.

Which left us scratching our heads—just as everyone else in the longform world is doing—and wondering, to quote Tom Wolfe, “what inna namea christ is this...?"

Perhaps a contest might tell us something.

It did.

Steven told us that he set off with a bold assumption: that contrary to the belief that the surest way to reach a wide audience was to rely on the power of Twitter and Facebook, he did not believe that this was the way people discovered big stories. Instead, he reasoned, he needed to find the “key influencers,” the people who, while largely unknown to most were well known and well regarded within their network. Think of the relative who, by force of personality, guilt, and persistent phone calling, holds the disparate ends of an extended family together.

Steven had research on his side. In his seminal book, Six Degrees, sociologist Duncan Watts makes sense of the complex ways social networks form. Watts argues that the challenge is transforming weak social connections into strong ones, thereby increasing the chances of, in the case of Steven’s hypothesis, a story breaking out a small group and going viral.

Steven believed that if he could find a “key influencer”—and therefore use those strong connections—he might be able to create a network.

But who? As it happened, Steven had a friend whose area of study was social justice. Perhaps, he reasoned, she might be interested in a story about a poor Indian man who, having sold his family’s plot of land to pay for his passage to the Gulf, finds himself living in the most demeaning circumstances. Finally, while cleaning an airplane toilet, he stows away on a flight to Mumbai.

Steven sent his friend the story. Her initial reaction was not what he, or we, had hoped for. But it was revealing: the story is long, she said. Is there an executive summary? Steven advised her there was not. And then he gave her a few days to discover the wonderful yarn he had placed in front of her.

It worked.

His friend liked the story—“she was surprised by it,” Steven said. And she began to share the story. And because she was well placed in the middle of a group of people inclined to be interested in a story that spoke to them, she was able to create a network of sharers, who in turn, propelled another level of sharing, and then another.

“You can push as much as you want,” Steven told us. “But it’s far more useful to have a few people really interested who will push on their networks. You need people who are so passionate about it they want to share it.”

Six thousand readers is a modest number, but it is one worth considering. Something happened here. A story found its audience; Steven regretted that he had no connection to a “key influencer” in India who might have been able to spread word of the story there. But he had found his person. And his person did what all “key influencers” can: she said to people under her influence—read this. They did.

But.

It doesn’t happen every time. We have tried this approach with other stories, with varying success. Duncan Watts, in fact, had made clear that there was no way of predicting when a network would form. You could replicate what appear to be the exact same set of circumstances and yet, nothing happens. (Think of the rhythmic clapping at a ballgame: suddenly it seems, 50,000 people are clapping in unison. The clapping presumably started with a single person. So you try to get 50,000 people clapping, waiting for a moment that has all the same elements as that earlier, magical moment. You clap. So do your friends. And maybe the people sitting close by. Then it stops. Why? Nobody knows.)

As it happened, last spring a group of students at Columbia’s Journalism School embarked on a project called “Project Wordsworth” (full disclosure: my students). The project’s public face was a website with 17 different stories. Ten days later 140,000 people had come to the site. Very cool. But, 120,000 of them came for one story. Not the piece about porn. Or the Holocaust. Or the life and death of a famous football player.

They came for the story about….math, the account of whether a hermit-like Japanese mathematician had solved the elusive ABC conjecture.

You are thinking, Huh?

So did we. There is a terrific postmortem on the project by my colleague, James Robinson, Director, News Analytics at The New York Times. Part of James’ report focused on the traffic to that one story.

His conclusion, in two words: Math Babe.

The key influencer, he believed, was a mathematician whose blog carried that name.

But what had Math Babe done to make this story so widely read?

So next time: The search for Math Babe.

Q. In describing the damage from the tsunami, you moved from the least terrible to the most terrible. Many writers might be tempted to do the reverse. Why did you make this choice? A. Even those who were in the midst of danger only recognized the damage incrementally. With communication and travel initially shut down, it took time to learn who and what had been lost. This was a disaster that got worse, and worse, and worse as the full picture became clear. We aren’t built to process our world changing so much, so drastically. There are hours of home footage of the waves taken by those who made it safely to the hills. From their vantage, they were some of the few to really see what was going on. The off-frame gasps and murmurs are all disbelief and awe, not fear or grief. The fear and the grief came later, with an understanding of the full picture.

Q. Did the writing of the piece help you think through and understand why Kamaishi had such a pull on you? A. Absolutely. Writing the story was an integral part of me processing everything that happened. I wasn’t sure I’d ever visit again—the boring fishing town six hours from Tokyo that I’d already spent PLENTY of time in—and then suddenly getting back was all I could think about. I hadn’t known how much I really cared. The story gave me a reason to go back, reporting it was an excuse to examine everything about it, and the actual writing forced me to crystallize my thoughts. Kamaishi is a frustrating, quirky, and sleepy little valley that is rightfully proud of a fascinating history. And it is my home in the alternate reality that is Japan, in the full sense of that place one came from, is a little embarrassed by, but never wants to change.

Longreads and Atavist led the charge in 2009. The former started simply, employing the hashtag #longreads on Twitter. The latter began with a custom-designed content management system and special-for-the-iPad eBook design. Then, Longform joined in the so-called “longform revival” in 2010, attempting to curate longform content of the past and the present in a format similar to Longreads. Byliner followed in 2011, when they set out to become the Internet’s longform library, positioning themselves as the Pandora of longform content. And this summer, we jumped in, with The Big Roundtable.

Point is, for those young’uns who are only now learning their ABCs and 123s, the longform nonfiction bust will be a blip in the distant past. The terms “longform revival” and “longform renaissance” are misnomers. Longform never died. The form was never forgotten, and it certainly isn’t new. As time marches on, the myth that longform nonfiction was ever in danger will be all but forgotten. Longform nonfiction won’t die; it’ll just live on the web. 

2. People will spend time reading. 

So longform nonfiction is safe from extinction, at least with a niche audience. But given the fear that our attention spans have never been shorter—capable only of absorbing tweets before we’re once again distracted—and that simultaneously our short attention spans have been been so hotly competed for, will future generations have the patience to read all those words? We’re can’t say for sure about the babies of the future, the ones who will have chips implanted in their heads, but we can say that the answer for us—for right now, at least—is a resounding yes.

When we log onto our analytics trackers, like Reinvigorate, we are continually always surprised by the amount of time people spend reading our pieces. For example, in its first week, The Big Roundtable’s latest piece, Erika Hayasaki’s “The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die,” had an average reading time of 9 minutes and 33 seconds. “Crash,” by our publisher Anna Hiatt, which was released July 9—and was 1,228 words shorter than Hayasaki’s piece—had an average reading time of 7 minutes and 40 seconds in its first week. 

3. People are willing to pay. 

Even with an interested readership and (seemingly) limitless space on the Internet, publications can’t continue to release longform nonfiction if it doesn’t generate revenue. It’s simple economics. When The Big Roundtable launched in June, it took a gamble with its “kickstarter for writers” revenue model, which wasn’t so much a model, really, as it was an experiment, a test of the theory that the Internet will pay for good content, even if it doesn’t have to. 

We believed readers would find our stories so compelling that they would willingly donate to writers. We couldn’t—and still can’t—however, guarantee money. Thankfully, though, people have been willing to pay. 

On average, readers of the Big Roundtable have donated $8.89. That’s compared to:

• Kindle Single pricing: From $0.99 to $4.99 • Atavist pricing:$1.99-2.99 per piece • Byliner pricing: $3 per piece 

Of course, that average is steep thanks in part to the large donations of a handful of folks, but the average, disregarding the few outliers, is still high. As you can see, people aren’t only willing to pay, they’re willing to pay generously. By taking off a piece’s price tag and instead asking readers to place a value of the story and the reporter’s work, Big Roundtable writers are actually getting paid. Not a lot, so far, but, as our traffic has grown, donations have become more numerous—and the money’s adding up. Of course, this delights us, but it also provokes a question: Are other articles within the online publishing pool being undervalued?