Belam: "Trinity wants to grow audience and audience beyond the core Daily Mirror readership and demographic. We thought by doing a different type of content, we could reach those people."

Belam: "We also wanted to experiment to see if we could make content in a lightweight way that was very socially shareable. We wanted to see if we could have a crack at the viral propagation of content that Buzzfeed and Upworthy and similar sites have been so successful with."

Belam: "It’s delivered lots and lots of unique users who would never visit or hadn’t visited a Trinity Mirror property before. Our peak month was around 7 million uniques and it now hovers around three or four million. Most months it ticks over 3 or 4 million uniques users, which isn’t as big as the Daily Mirror but is bigger than some of the regional sites we run as a group."

Belam: "We've started making things for a few clients and it’s started delivering some revenue. We've begun turning it from what was a fun idea into a viable business unit within Trinity Mirror."

Belam: "There’s no magic formula for viral. It's very difficult to predict.

"What we’ve found is the things that are the most successful are things which have the most authentic voice or people share because it allows them to express something about themselves, some kind of awe or wonder. Rage also gets people to share, but there are diminishing returns with rage. You’re better with upbeat, positive things.

"The most popular thing was our North-O-Meter. For a small island we really care about the micro differences between where we live. The tweet that comes out of the end of the game gives you a percentage rating of how northern you are. People were tweeting I am 100% Northern, and adding their own ‘thank God’. While others were tweeting I am 0% Northern, 'thank God'."

Belam: "Patterns of usage on the internet have shifted every couple of years. Maybe we will reach quiz saturation point soon. Everytime we try and do something we try and twist the format slightly. We don’t have just one template. We always try and develop something to give it the very best treatment we can."

Belam" We have this mantra that we are 100% accurate with our facts but we don’t mind having an angle and expressing an opinion alongside those facts and numbers. "

Belam: "Ampp3d has a tone that is more akin to the vernacular of the web. It blends news and opinion and can be a bit snarky and jokey."

Belam: "The majority of our users most of the time are on mobile rather than desktop, so every story has to work for mobile which is a really big challenge.

"I can't see any other people caring about the mobile user experience with this kind of storytelling. I am only really interested in what it looks like on the phone."

Belam: "We did a live counter where it counts up the cost of smoking in real time to the NHS. I think it’s four cigarettes a second are being smoked in the UK. When you see figures presented like that it’s a very dramatic and different way of telling a story."

Belam: "People are less interested in unemployment figures than cat gifs."

Belam: "What we are trying to do with Ampp3d and now Mirror Row Zed, a sport version of Us v Th3m, is build tools into the main content management system for Trinity Mirror so that all game formats are available for everyone across the regions."

Belam: ""If your content is good enough that it is being shared and your SEO is good enough that it is being found then the proportion of visits that start at your home page should have been diminishing over the past couple of years. If they aren't, you are in a slightly quirky business or you’ve been doing something wrong."

Belam: "The home page isn’t dead but the homepage as the primary source of your traffic has been ailing for a very long time. Homepages are still important. For a news organisation there is something very important about the statement you are making that these are the most important stories today."

Belam: "I just look at the numbers and think if Facebook was providing 100% organic reach for brands to get to users then Facebook would lose all of its users because they’d never see anything from their friends."

Belam: "We have this phrase of using Twitter as a canary. If it goes alright on Twitter, it means it will probably do alright on Facebook if you can get the presentation right.

Things that do well on Facebook send an awful lot more traffic to us than Twitter and over a sustained period of time."

Belam: "You can’t design your way out of bad content and you can’t make something that’s not interesting go viral by spending some ad money on it."

Belam: "When you have something like the North-O-Meter and seven million people play it, it’s like seven million grains of sand going through your hands.

"If you can clutch a few of them to like you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter then you’ve primed a few more people to share something next time you’ve got a big thing."

Belam: "With Us v Th3m we’ve just concentrated on making really good stuff about what’s going on the web.

We make it with a team of people who live and breathe the internet, love the internet and love internet memes so it resonates with that authenticity. There’s nobody in our team who used to work in the print side of the business and moved over to online. Everyone’s really digital."

Watch Belam's interview with us:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpsuN_CX2gFCFpUbTW5spw53wQmGLs8Hw