

BuzzFeed: An Open Letter to Ben Horowitz - nns
http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/09/07/buzzfeed-an-open-letter-to-ben-horowitz/

======
xux
The author is shorted sighted. I'm surprised so many people on HN following
his thought patterns, because what Buzzfeed is doing is nothing short of
classic disruption.

In a disruptive startup, you always start with a _worse_ product that appeals
to a marginally group of users who'll fervently love you.

The demographic that's on Buzzfeed all the time, is the type who wouldn't be
reading news anyways. So what if they look at cats and take quizes, and once
in a while eyeball an article about Ferguson / Ukraine / ISIS that they
wouldn't have done anyways. Look at
[http://www.buzzfeed.com/world](http://www.buzzfeed.com/world), how many of
those are linkbaits? How many are quality contents? It's not unimaginable that
overtime, the (vegetable news) : (shitty news) ratio can increase.

Hating on Buzzfeed is like hating on Pinterest in early days because it was
made for a bunch of old women, or AirBNB because it promotes unsafe and
unregulated travel, or Dropbox because it promotes uncontrolled privacy by
moving your stuff online. You can't please everyone all the time, so you start
with a niche and increase quality overtime to appeal the the mass audience.

Why can't people accept that Buzzfeed, at its current state, isn't meant to
appeal to everyone? Those who bash at Buzzfeed sound like the mindless YouTube
comments on Justin Bieber's videos saying how shitty his music is. It's not
for you. Don't listen to it.

~~~
riffraff
the piece relies on "We never saw a down/mass market product morphing into a
premium media", so yes, for him it is unimaginable.

I don't know if that is true, but if you argue against the letter you should
refute _that_ argument.

~~~
nl
Rolling Stone.

Cosmopolitan magazine.

Vice has been mentioned.

~~~
rdl
Playboy "read it for the articles" was probably the originator.

------
jokull
His main argument is that by funding BuzzFeed he is "contributing to
intellectual decrepitude" of young readers. This is an outrageous statement.
BuzzFeed started out with socially optimised content and were one of the first
to recognize the power of sharing over front page habits. Today they employ
many great journalists and are creating high quality content that is much
easier to consume and spreads more quickly (admittedly along with some pretty
banal stuff). A16Z enter the partnership based on future prospects, nothing
else. BuzzFeed may or may not become a good source of enlightened reporting in
the future, but at least that is their goal and they have a pretty good chance
at it for a generation that mostly consumes through social media.

~~~
nateparrott
Exactly. Sites like BuzzFeed and Vice have some pretty trashy stuff, so people
dismiss their small forays into "real" journalism as irrelevant posturing—but
I don't think that's the case. In the past, quality journalists went to
quality publications because the only place to find quality journalism was in
a quality publication. Now, with people getting their articles from
aggregators, social media and cross-linking, it's no longer important what
publication a writer writes for. A journalist for BuzzFeed can write (nearly)
the same article they would for the New York Times, and (nearly) the same
people (within the younger audience, at least) will be able to discover it.
The publication is less relevant as an institution and a brand — BuzzFeed,
HuffPo and the ilk are just investors and CMS's for the work of individual
writers.

Tl;dr: online news has been unbundled.

~~~
pearkes
I think you're absolutely correct about the writers having potentially
equitable quality, but I would challenge the following statement:

> The publication is less relevant as an institution and a brand

Journalism, and journalists, need to be trusted to deliver researched and
verifiable content. This seems to be enforced because of reputation – i.e, the
reputation of a publication.

When an organization does what BuzzFeed does to earn eyeballs, dollars and
readership, it makes you question what they would do in more serious,
"important" topics, such as describing world events to future voters.

I have trouble trusting BuzzFeed as an organization, as with Vice, due to this
"trashiness". I think we all should.

------
asaramis
This is a perfect combination of every short-sighted, angry old media, and old
man rant I've ever come across. I mean, to go from hating on BuzzFeed to
somehow ending up on the "Africa is one single country and let's help it"
trope is quite impressive.

Best article that sums up what Buzzfeed is really about, and why I believe it
is incredible for the future of journalism is this piece by Felix Salmon.
Basically, he makes the point that Buzzfeed is in effect a massive advertising
agency, and their content efforts are all experiments to better understand how
to reach younger people. They then make money off of selling that expertise to
brands.

That is a much more sustainable, legitimate form of funding a news business
vs. the world of doing anything you can to get eyeballs to your page and
selling ads around it. It means constant experimentation in the fields of
communication and storytelling built on the back of an incredible technology
company.

The best part of the entire Filloux piece, it was Chris Dixon who led the
investment (someone pointed that out nicely in the comments). Does he not even
realize that VC firms almost always have internal dissension and investments
aren't unanimous? He has zero way of knowing Ben Horowitz's take on the
investment.

[https://medium.com/@felixsalmon/normally-when-some-big-
deal-...](https://medium.com/@felixsalmon/normally-when-some-big-deal-is-
announced-in-the-business-world-a-rah-rah-press-release-goes-out-236f5ae86ee4)

------
thrush
I found this to be overly critical of Buzzfeed's content, and I believe that
Buzzfeed's potential and current success comes from the content structure. I
personally have faith that people are interested in consuming useful and
intelligent information in order to improve their knowledge, so that they may
perform better in the future for tasks like voting. With this assumption, it's
amazing how much traffic BF generates with the allegedly weak quality of
content that it possesses, which essentially is proof that something else must
be working. Now that we have a proven structure for content, we simply need to
fill in content. Isolated to one region, like the US, the content to be filled
in we are all familiar with. But imagine that we expand to all regions. It
must be at least an order of magnitude easier to start a news site using BF's
strategy in any place, like Africa, which I would guess is at least part of
the reason that a16z chose to invest.

------
camillomiller
Is anybody here really convinced that buzzfeed isn't a fad? Its numbers are so
badly intertwined with social media platforms that they actually depend on the
continued success of the platform themselves. How is that a good business
strategy?

~~~
jitnut
As long as they can figure out to stay on top new social properties whether is
snapchat / instagram / whatsapp / something new, I think they will do fine. Of
course not the same hockey stick growth. I was reading an piece on Buzzfeed
growth [http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/buzzfeed-secret-
growth-...](http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/buzzfeed-secret-growth-
weapon.html) . Seems like they gonna hire people just for that.

------
jgalt212
Wasn't this Chris Dixon's deal? I mean, I'm sure Ben and other partners had to
sign off on it, but I think Chris lead this one.

~~~
erdemg
Yep. Here's what Chris Dixon wrote about the deal.
[http://cdixon.org/2014/08/10/buzzfeed/](http://cdixon.org/2014/08/10/buzzfeed/)

~~~
staunch
He pretends people call Buzzfeed a "toy" (like 3d printers) when in reality
they call it "trash" (like tabloids). Head in sand.

------
sparkzilla
OMG. WTF. LOL. TRASH. FAIL. WIN.

------
boomzilla
I looked at a16z portfolio [1] and could not find any "real" liquidity event,
meaning IPO or big acquisition. There are a number of really high valuation
companies, though, which are mostly based on the last round funding, often led
by a16z. Now, a natural question is who exactly is benefiting from the high
valuation? OK, certainly not the employees as most of them are not vested, and
even if they have, they can't sell to anyone, and there is no cash dividend.
The founders and top management sometimes can negotiate a better deals
financially in these funding rounds [2], and in general can be resume boosters
for them, so they do benefit somewhat from the high valuation. The LPs are not
exactly getting anything at this time as the gain is not realized yet. That
leaves the VCs who have a huge incentives to lead big rounds, as their incomes
are proportional to the size of the funds they raise from LPs as detailed in
this HBR article [3]. Given this dynamics, I am not surprised to see average
startups with average products get funded at a hugely inflated valuation. I
just hope that the LPs are investing with their own money, and are not
retirement fund managers (specifically, not MY retirement fund).

[1] [http://a16z.com/portfolio/](http://a16z.com/portfolio/)

[2] [http://allthingsd.com/20111001/vcs-unite-chamath-
palihapitiy...](http://allthingsd.com/20111001/vcs-unite-chamath-palihapitiya-
decries-airbnbs-recent-112m-funding-for-excessive-founder-control-and-cashout-
in-email/)

[3] [http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/venture-capitalists-get-paid-
we...](http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/venture-capitalists-get-paid-well-to-lose-
money/)

~~~
spuiszis
The a16z website shows the current portfolio (most recent, un-exited
investment) and does not display their entire investment history. If you check
out their Crunchbase profile[1], they have already had some big exits with
Groupon, Zynga, Skype and Instagram, which is quite impressive since they only
started investing 3 years ago. I'm sure there have been some other
medium/large M&A liquidity events as well but it usually takes 3-5 years to
figure out if your VC portfolio is any good and 7+ years to realize any
returns. LPs know this and funds usually have a 10 year life cycle, sometimes
with options to extend it a year or two [2].

[1][http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/andreessen-
horowitz/i...](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/andreessen-
horowitz/investments) [2][http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-
Capitalis...](http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-
Capitalist/dp/1118443616/)

