Omits one of the most interesting facts about BuzzFeed: it was started by a member of MIT's Media Lab [0]. It all made sense once I started viewing it as the result of research into content virality. Internally I think of it more like a "profitable social/cultural experiment" than "media company".
The whole thing about the "science of viral content" has always seemed like fluffy nonsense to me to make the stakeholders feel like they are part of something "higher brow" and more complex than just a spammy blog.
Yeah I always kinda wrote off BuzzFeed as listicles for people who can't take the time to actually read news (which it definitely still is in some sense) but then I saw Jonah Peretti speak [0] and I've been a lot more interested in it since then
An experiment? Hardly. At least certainly not any more.
They use data to deliver their cancerous content, just in the same way coke uses AB flavor testing to determine what the most addictive coke formula is.
Calling them "scientists" performing "experiments" seems far too dignified.
This is even after a pivot to video-content like all the major players in the industry are doing, which was done because BuzzFeed's current model, the one praised in this post, is not sustainable.
The viral approach is an approach that only works once.
FWIW, Buzzfeed chair Ken Lerer says the company isn't slashing its revenue targets this year and that it did hit its Q1 target[1]. No one seems to be denying that they missed their targets last year, though.
I think the idea of complex algorithms is overplayed. For instance, ViralNova.com was/is a click-baity site very similar to BuzzFeed.
It was started by a single hacker like most of us here on this forum, with 2 part-time writers. Initially it was just a wordpress blog, that he later turned into a custom CMS because wordpress is so inefficient and kept crashing when he had spikes in traffic. Scott (founder) sold it in 18 months for somewhere around 80 Million $.
> For a while, ViralNova was a one-man startup run entirely by DeLong and two freelance writers. Together they were able to grow their website to Buzzfeed's size and scale — about 100 million monthly readers
Doesn't this mean that BuzzFeed has too much "fat" ( in terms of employees) that cuts into their profits?
First, I'll start by saying that, personally, I'd rather run a ViralNova than a Buzzfeed. However, to answer your question, the reason that a company like Buzzfeed would add that many more employees is because of the idea that the economies of scale would work in its favor. Let's make up some numbers and say with two employees, Viral Nova was doing $20MM. The idea is that with 100 employees, they could potentially grow to $100MM and the incremental cost of those employees at say a $50K average salary would only be an additional $5MM. And then you add another 200 employees and add another $100MM in revenue for only another $5MM in salaries. Add 500 more employees and you get to $500MM in revenue, etc. Of course there's other overhead costs like office space, etc. but the incremental cost of growing those aspects of the business become less and less compared to the revenue growth. Obviously in this case, the revenue growth didn't scale to the level that they hoped for, but that's the principle behind the growth in employees. There's also many other social and cultural factors as to why you would want to build a Buzzfeed versus ViralNova that could be a full essay of its own.
Scott started VN with a very small crew, he shared a picture once showing how often he was eating takeout between work sessions, I wouldn't be surprised to find out he was putting in 12+ hour days initially. Leading up to the eventual sale the company grew quickly though. He's been creating profitable sites for years and VN was just the next evolution. The key difference was seeing the potential in taking VN further then just a site run by a couple of people.
I've been told the change was when he hired an executive team to go after bigger ad buys and to shape the business to be more then just a small group operation.
I've been reluctant to ask him personally about the details but this is what I've put together talking to acquaintances. Say what you want about VN, Scott is a top notch guy that has hit it out of the park many times.
It highlights one of the biggest issues in tech today. Buzzfeed is one of many tech companies that really should just be a fun little mid sized company that makes enough to go around, but in the end has gotten caught up in the Silicon Valley hype and is biting way more than they can chew with pumped up valuations.
I fancy BuzzFeed quite a bit.Yes the sheer volume and omnipresence can be discerning and irritating.But while they use this model I enjoy the fact that they give serious readers good long form writing too[1].
So keeping apart all of the reasons for why buzzfeed might/will/will-not grow/crash/stalemate in the market.I enjoy serious journalism which they sometimes do add. I hope they someday manage to incorporate that into their business model too.
The ironic thing is that everyone who complains about BuzzFeed's fluff appears to have never read an actual newspaper.
I mean, go pick up a copy of the New York Times, which is the gold standard of print journalism. It has hard news, sure, but it also comes with a lot of... fluff. Style/trend pieces! Entertainment coverage! Movie & restaurant reviews! A crossword puzzle! And other newspapers offer even more fluff. A comics page! A gossip page! A picture of a bikini model! Today's horoscope!
The thing about journalism is that fluff is always what has paid the bills. Even in the golden age of newspapering, a paper that was nothing but 100% long-form hard news wouldn't sell. Except for a tiny, tiny number, people never picked up a newspaper for the hard news; they picked it up to find out how the Mets did yesterday, or to read the funnies, or for some other bit of fluff that appeals to them. Fluff is what makes mass-market journalism economically possible. The money the fluff brings is what pays for the hard-news reporting, because that reporting has never paid for itself.
The major business mistake newspapers made in the modern era was forgetting this, and letting a key part of the fluff that sold papers -- the classified ads -- get stolen out from under them. They let themselves get sufficiently divorced from the realities of their market that they thought classifieds weren't important. But they were! They were what kept the lights on, not high-minded fantasies of being the next Woodward & Bernstein.
^ Agree. Not so into the meme factory, but I think their actual news is solid, and built for the under 40 crowd. I subscribe to their daily newsletter of actual news, and it is by far and away the best explainer on what's happening in the world.
Buzzfeed always gets the kid gloves treatment in the media and somehow became one of "the cool kids" despite being a website built on dumb viral content like so many others.
No surprise, I guess - big names like Andreessen Horowitz invested so now we all have to pretend like this all means something. Watching something as unimpressive as Buzzfeed get treated this seriously in the press makes me wonder just how little you have to pay a tech journalist to own them.
Do you often remember stories that are either buried or pushed off to a sidebar? Looking at their home page now, there's one "serious" story at the top. Below that are hundreds of crap stories about celebrities with titles in blue, indicating they're clickable, and a description of the article below. Off to the right, with titles in black and no description, are the "serious" articles. It's clear that they either don't think their users value the serious articles or they can't make enough money off of them, so they deemphasize them. You can hardly blame users for not remembering them.
I've always explained it like the digital equivalent of those trash magazines at grocery store checkout stands. It's not for everyone, but it works for some.
'“Capitalism, Peretti concluded, needs to be constantly producing identities for peoples if the system is to survive,” Matthews writes. “And ten years later, he built a factory to fill that precise need.
Matthews later reached out to Peretti to ask if he felt that Buzzfeed embodies the principles outlined in Peretti’s “Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” Peretti simply responded “lol.”'
As someone who's worked in publishing and advertising, the rise of Buzzfeed has been fascinating to watch. There are two really amazing things about it's business:
- Buzzfeed has no banner ads, zero—every ad comes in the form of native content.
- Companies pay Buzzfeed to distribute Buzzfeed content through ad networks. You'll see Buzzfeed Partner videos on Facebook, these are videos that Buzzfeed has been paid to create that includes a brand in some way or another. They are then paid again to run this content on ad networks.
Creative, media buys and more—Buzzfeed is essentially an advertising agency that gets paid to create and distribute assets for it's own brand.
They make social viruses, they figured out what worked and hasn't worked, hires kids for the low rates and talent and teaches them to also make social viruses.
If Facebook is social layer OS then Buzzfeed was the stuff McAfee and Norton would warn you about.
[+] [-] kough|10 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/business/media/at-buzzfeed...
[+] [-] cylinder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chipgap98|10 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82JTa3iJfk
[+] [-] steveklabnik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xlm1717|10 years ago|reply
http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/buzzfeed-halves-revenue-t...
[+] [-] cha5m|10 years ago|reply
They use data to deliver their cancerous content, just in the same way coke uses AB flavor testing to determine what the most addictive coke formula is.
Calling them "scientists" performing "experiments" seems far too dignified.
[+] [-] BlahBoy3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chinjut|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
This is even after a pivot to video-content like all the major players in the industry are doing, which was done because BuzzFeed's current model, the one praised in this post, is not sustainable.
The viral approach is an approach that only works once.
[+] [-] sparkzilla|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatok|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klint|10 years ago|reply
http://recode.net/2016/04/12/buzzfeed-revenue-advertising-20...
[+] [-] justboxing|10 years ago|reply
It was started by a single hacker like most of us here on this forum, with 2 part-time writers. Initially it was just a wordpress blog, that he later turned into a custom CMS because wordpress is so inefficient and kept crashing when he had spikes in traffic. Scott (founder) sold it in 18 months for somewhere around 80 Million $.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/zealot-media-buys-scott-delon...
> For a while, ViralNova was a one-man startup run entirely by DeLong and two freelance writers. Together they were able to grow their website to Buzzfeed's size and scale — about 100 million monthly readers
Doesn't this mean that BuzzFeed has too much "fat" ( in terms of employees) that cuts into their profits?
Thoughts?
[+] [-] imjk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loader|10 years ago|reply
I've been told the change was when he hired an executive team to go after bigger ad buys and to shape the business to be more then just a small group operation.
I've been reluctant to ask him personally about the details but this is what I've put together talking to acquaintances. Say what you want about VN, Scott is a top notch guy that has hit it out of the park many times.
[+] [-] majani|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shade23|10 years ago|reply
[1]:https://www.buzzfeed.com/news
[+] [-] smacktoward|10 years ago|reply
I mean, go pick up a copy of the New York Times, which is the gold standard of print journalism. It has hard news, sure, but it also comes with a lot of... fluff. Style/trend pieces! Entertainment coverage! Movie & restaurant reviews! A crossword puzzle! And other newspapers offer even more fluff. A comics page! A gossip page! A picture of a bikini model! Today's horoscope!
The thing about journalism is that fluff is always what has paid the bills. Even in the golden age of newspapering, a paper that was nothing but 100% long-form hard news wouldn't sell. Except for a tiny, tiny number, people never picked up a newspaper for the hard news; they picked it up to find out how the Mets did yesterday, or to read the funnies, or for some other bit of fluff that appeals to them. Fluff is what makes mass-market journalism economically possible. The money the fluff brings is what pays for the hard-news reporting, because that reporting has never paid for itself.
The major business mistake newspapers made in the modern era was forgetting this, and letting a key part of the fluff that sold papers -- the classified ads -- get stolen out from under them. They let themselves get sufficiently divorced from the realities of their market that they thought classifieds weren't important. But they were! They were what kept the lights on, not high-minded fantasies of being the next Woodward & Bernstein.
[+] [-] felix_thursday|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_wave|10 years ago|reply
No surprise, I guess - big names like Andreessen Horowitz invested so now we all have to pretend like this all means something. Watching something as unimpressive as Buzzfeed get treated this seriously in the press makes me wonder just how little you have to pay a tech journalist to own them.
[+] [-] takno|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cylinder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etr71115|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinlardinois|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 813594|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pj_costello|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|10 years ago|reply
I'm aware that the company produces other material, but it continues to rely heavily on clickbait. And so I say: die in a fire.
[+] [-] akgerber|10 years ago|reply
Matthews later reached out to Peretti to ask if he felt that Buzzfeed embodies the principles outlined in Peretti’s “Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” Peretti simply responded “lol.”'
-- http://www.critical-theory.com/buzzfeed-founder-responds-to-...
[+] [-] samsolomon|10 years ago|reply
- Buzzfeed has no banner ads, zero—every ad comes in the form of native content.
- Companies pay Buzzfeed to distribute Buzzfeed content through ad networks. You'll see Buzzfeed Partner videos on Facebook, these are videos that Buzzfeed has been paid to create that includes a brand in some way or another. They are then paid again to run this content on ad networks.
Creative, media buys and more—Buzzfeed is essentially an advertising agency that gets paid to create and distribute assets for it's own brand.
[+] [-] alaskamiller|10 years ago|reply
If Facebook is social layer OS then Buzzfeed was the stuff McAfee and Norton would warn you about.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JohnTHaller|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reality_czech|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beatpanda|10 years ago|reply
"An advertising company."
[+] [-] HemanHeartYou|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] swagv|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] b0t|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devopsproject|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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