Perhaps he and CEO Simon Assaad are afraid that talking about the site’s apparent success would jinx it somehow or that they’d invite competition by publicizing their strategy. Nobel’s background is in local newspapers, and the same appears to be true of many of ’s regular contributors-which helps to explain their speed and fact-finding dexterity, along with the dryness of their prose.

But the shyness is in keeping with its ethos of keeping the focus on the stories’ subjects rather than their authors. So why won’t Heavy talk about any of this? The answer, alas, is not discoverable via basic internet research. Meanwhile, at a time when rivals such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Refinery29 are trying to develop fresh business models centered around custom advertising products, many of Heavy’s ads are your run-of-the-mill, programmatic display ads, placed on the page automatically by third-party ad brokers. And while it often embeds video in its posts, it seems to produce little video of its own these days. It is, in other words, something of a throwback in an era when other new media companies view social virality, reader loyalty, and original video content as the paths to profitability. With just 17,100 Twitter followers and 117,000 Facebook likes, Heavy’s social media presence is tiny for an outlet of its size. Nor does it typically adopt a snarky or knowing tone or attach provocative headlines meant to induce clicks and shares on social media.

It never really attempts a “take”-the veneer of opinion or commentary that many other websites apply to the day’s news in an effort to distinguish their coverage from that of their rivals. What’s interesting about Heavy’s approach is not only what it does but what it doesn’t do. Circuit Court of Appeals would hear a challenge to President Trump’s travel ban, Heavy was quick to post backgrounders on the three judges involved, including one headlined, “ Michelle Friedland: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.” started with the basics of what was known at the time, then updated the story multiple times throughout the night and next morning until it ran nearly 3,000 words. For example, when people were shot at a Quebec City mosque in January, Heavy’s story-“ Quebec City Mosque Shooting: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know”-was among the first to be published on an English-language site. The site often manages this within hours of a big story breaking sometimes it does it within minutes. When big news breaks, particularly around a person or topic that was not previously in the news, Heavy seems to make it its mission to dig up, verify, and neatly package the relevant background information more quickly than anyone else. Rather, the goals seems to strive for are clarity, speed, and ease of reading, with accuracy and comprehensiveness sometimes emerging iteratively as more information comes in. For a news site of its size, it has attracted very little press or public attention in recent years, and its editor in chief, Aaron Nobel, declined Slate’s requests for comment on this story. Whereas many other websites heavily feature their star writers and promote them on social media, relies largely on paid freelancers, many of whom contribute regularly. Its journalists are not famous-or even internet-famous.While publishes other types of content, the site specializes in “5 Fast Facts” posts, which quickly aggregate key facts about trending news topics and people-especially topics and people that have not been widely covered in the media before. It has more than doubled in size since then. It quietly rebooted in 2012 as a news site, and by mid-2014 it was reaching 4 million readers a month. was founded by entrepreneurs Simon Assaad and David Carson in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, as a video-focused entertainment site aimed primarily at young men. It’s been around a surprisingly long time.And last year it added a Spanish-language sibling,. But Heavy’s own traffic claims are much higher: 35 million monthly uniques, according to its LinkedIn page. Alexa ranks it as about the 800 th most popular website in the United States.

According to Comscore, more than 9 million people visited the site in January, giving it roughly half as many online readers as the Atlantic or New Yorker websites and about the same number as Salon. It might be the biggest national news site you’ve never heard of.

Heavy r a safe website