Pushing publishing forward in science and tech — Interesting Engineering

Over the past decade, Interesting Engineering has grown to become one of the most popular and reputable voices in the science and tech media landscape today.

With over 16 million followers across social media, 250 million video views a month,10+ million monthly page views, and around 100,000 subscribers to?The Blueprint, our daily newsletter, we’ve brought together a truly global community of science and innovation lovers.

As founder and CEO of Interesting Engineering (IE), being a part of this journey from the start has been a great joy for me and I’m extremely proud of the team of professionals that have helped make it all possible. As IE prepares to move into the future with a number of exciting new projects in the works, I wanted to take this opportunity to both give our audience a hint of what’s in store for our brand and look back at the extraordinary path we’ve taken to get where we are today. Millions of people around the world know about us — not many know how we got our start.

Back in 2009, I was studying for a degree in electrical engineering in my hometown of Gaziantep, Turkey, a city located just to the north of the Syrian border. At the time, I was helping run our family’s small internet cafe, which gave me access to my own computer, something I’d dreamed of having for years.

That cafe gave me the chance to start a simple blog that I used to get acquainted with subjects connected to my studies. I’d read up on things and do my best to write catchy, engineering-related content in English —?interestingengineering.blogspot.com, as it was originally known, became a project near and dear to my heart.

To my surprise, I saw that the site was attracting visitors, so I started looking into boosting and monetizing traffic through SEO practices and Google Adsense. A Facebook page followed shortly after, which boosted traffic even more.

In 2011, I hired our first freelancer and video editor, early team members who were crucial in increasing our output, which consisted of aggregated engineering and science content. By 2016, we’d begun honing our site’s growth strategy, and I moved the company to Istanbul to establish it as a more serious publishing entity. The next few years saw us grow significantly as a company, and we then focused on the recruitment of a remarkably talented editorial team who shifted the site’s focus from aggregating content to providing original analyses of the trends of industries dominating tech and innovation.

Our video content likewise began to soar during this time. Interesting Engineering’s YouTube channel, which we launched in 2017, was a key component of our content strategy, and proved to be so successful that, just last December, we recorded 300 million video views on Facebook alone.

Within the span of a few years, we had successfully gone from being an aggregator of viral, ad-sponsored content to an established and original voice on the most compelling and relevant topics of the day. Our reporting has been cited in?The Atlantic,?The New York Times,?Harvard Business Review, and other well-established media voices. Our Istanbul team is now roughly 40 full-time-employees strong, we’ve recently moved into a large new office space in the city’s business district, and our New York staff continue to grow in number as well.

It’s been incredible to look back at these achievements, but it’s even more galvanizing to think about what the future holds for us.

In the coming month, we’ll be launching a complete redesign of our website under a?freemium subscription-based model, keeping our aggregated content open to all while putting the long-form features and analyses of our excellent editorial team behind a paywall. Much of our audience is made up of engineers, a demographic keen to stay on top of trends within their fields, and we aim to be the premiere source of insight for such groups.

Other projects in the pipeline include the creation of a podcast series, where listeners can tune into interviews with industry professionals, and the development of?IE Studios, our brand’s in-house video production facility, to aid in our social media and original documentary film efforts. We’re also working on creating a meeting place to connect recruiters and potential employees on the engineering job market.

Fully realizing all of these projects will be challenging, but that’s been the case for us since day one. Through them, we aim to give back to the global community that has shown us so much love over the years and contribute to bettering the world by spreading a passion for and appreciation of the sciences, just like we always have.

We sincerely hope you’ll join us along the way.

Huseyin Kilic - founder @interestingengineering