
BuzzFeed Raises $50M from Andreessen Horowitz - minimaxir
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/a-move-to-go-beyond-lists-for-content-at-buzzfeed.html
======
hodgesmr
_> "Most of BuzzFeed’s revenue is derived from BuzzFeed Creative, the
company’s 75-person unit dedicated to creating [ads that pretend to be news
stories]"_

Maybe BuzzFeed has cracked the code for online "journalism" being profitable.
But if this is the method, I feel bad for consumers.

~~~
afafsd
I like to think that consumers will eventually develop a mental immunity to
BuzzFeed-style headlines, and then they'll be a bit stuck.

There's only so many times a human can click on "Ten Amazing Things About
Something Or Other That We Bet You Won't Believe" before it finally clicks in
their brain that _hey, wait a minute, last time I read one of these it wasn 't
_that_ amazing..._

~~~
patio11
Take a look at the August 1985 issue of Cosmopolitan and see how tired they
are of the formula. The Chilling Lure of Cocaine - Could You Be Hooked? The
Bottom Line on Office Sex. 25 Ways To Ignite A Love Affair.

Seriously, all real titles from one month picked at random.

~~~
jackweirdy
It never ceases to amaze me how long unsustainable things stick around for

~~~
jh3
If something's been around for a long time, it must be somewhat sustainable.

~~~
jackweirdy
True. But knowingly using up finite resources doesn't seem to deter people.

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Kiro
So I went to buzzfeed.com and was expecting misleading headlines. Instead I
was met with "23 Adorable Quokkas That Will Instantly Make Your Day Better",
clicked the link and saw 23 pictures of Quokkas.

Most of the stuff on the site seems to be these kind of lists, which I
honestly have nothing against. They are linkbaits, sure, but not misleading
and I'm seldom disappointed after clicking one. I don't see BuzzFeed claiming
to be The Economist or about high quality journalism at all. They seem to
focus on serving articles that are easy to digest and sometimes that's exactly
what I want.

~~~
sytelus
In one of the experiments, there were two groups: One was asked to write a
original creative essay and other was asked to use a template created by an
expert and just fill it out. One of such popular template comes in the form of
"X number of reason why Y is not true". Although these bullet points doesn't
seem such a "creative" content, in the experiment these kind of template-based
approach won hands down VS asking people to come up with something original.
Why? Because most people suck at being original and creative. It requires
years of experience + some level of genius gene and avoiding pitfalls and
keeping delicate balance to be original. So if you can't hire 75 Oscar Wilds,
then your best bet to create the popular content is follow the templates.

BuzzFeed's model is simple. You can hire pretty much average Joes who can be
assigned some interesting topic everyday like "Cheap Private Islands". These
Joes will then do research on Internet for few hours and fill out the template
with what they found: "25 Amazing Private Islands That You Can Rent Now". Is
this click worthy? Absolutely.

I think people who frown upon this don't get "entertainment industry". When
you want a TV series or a movie, the goal is not to educate you but entertain
you. To provide you some amusement and excitement in your day - however short
living that may be. If you click on BuzzFeed's link and if you found it did
provided you amusement, they did your job and in return you gave them some
CPI. This is no different than watching a soap opera. In other words, Internet
is replacing TV as the source of entertainment and BuzzFeed is now a core
provider of content in this arena.

------
underwater
BuzzFeed are the Zynga of journalism. Great at getting you in, but lacking in
substance.

When their current social network-driven linkbait approach starts to fail I
don't see how they can differentiate themselves from other news sites. Zynga
tried to turn themselves onto a destination and failed miserably.

~~~
walterbell
Is there anything to learn from Demand Media's trajectory? They wrote search-
engine-bait rather than social-network-bait, but didn't bother to create cover
traffic / quality journalism.

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staunch
Quality wins in the long run and BuzzFeed is not focused on quality. Their
company should be called Linkbait, Inc. They're the problem, not the solution.
I'd bet against this if I could.

~~~
morgante
Disrupters rarely start with quality. Mini mills were strictly inferior to
integrated steel mills, web-based software was less powerful than desktop
software, digital photography was inferior to film. (Many of these are from
Clay Christensen.)

The history of progress & technology is of fast, simple, low-end solutions
getting better over time to the point where they're strictly superior to the
legacy alternatives. I have little doubt that Buzzfeed, or another upstart
media company, will someday be able to do "real" journalism better and faster
than the NYT.

(If anyone else believes this, come help me make it happen:
[http://www.cafe.com/developers](http://www.cafe.com/developers))

~~~
idlewords
Journalism is not a technology. It serves an important civic and moral purpose
that isn't accounted for at all when you frame it as yet another case of
'disruption'.

~~~
morgante
I absolutely agree that it serves an important civic & moral purpose, but that
is precisely _why_ journalism needs to adopt new technology to reach people on
their level.

~~~
jmathai
I'm not seeing how BuzzFeed is adopting new technology nor how adopting new
technology is what journalism needs.

I see BuzzFeed as a company that's found a way to exploit people's pull
towards instant gratification. But it serves a terrible purpose which has
short term benefits for the company but little benefit for others.

They're similar to payday loan companies. Many argue that they're meeting a
market need. They maybe but they're doing it in an exploitative way. That's
bad for everyone.

------
JonLim
The part that caught my eye is that Ze Frank is working there, and is leading
the Motion Pictures division.

That's... incredible.

I'm looking forward to what they produce, video-wise, simply because Ze Frank
is there to shepherd their efforts.

~~~
mkal_tsr
I want to support Ze but not Buzzfeed, this is causing conflicting emotions
for me :-(

~~~
walterbell
How many "quality journalism" articles or content pieces must an outlet
produce per month, and to what level of traffic exposure must they promote
those quality articles, in order to recruit more talent like Ze?

~~~
mkal_tsr
I don't think it comes down to "quality journalism" it's all about money.
That's what online "journalism" is ... ad revenue from clickbait titles. I
have yet to see anything of high quality investigative journalism from
Buzzfeed/ViralNova/Upworthy/etc. They're click-bait farms and they provide no
real "journalism" value.

------
AVTizzle
An interesting thing I think nobody seems to be talking about with this deal
is the marriage between media platforms and venture capital [1]

There are big incentives for investors to take part in media plays. Look at
some recent patterns:

\- PandoDaily backed by Peter Theil, Tony Hseih, SV Angel Lerer Ventures, etc…

\- BusinessInsider backed by Bezos, Marc Andreeson, RRE, and more (to the tune
of $30M+!)

\- Washington Post owned by Bezos

\- BuzzFeed itself was co-founded by Kenneth Lerer of Lerer Ventures (same
team behind HuffPo)

Even if there are firewalls and a commitment to journalistic
autonomy/integrity, when you invested in a media company, your interests align
with theirs from the very top.

[1] [http://crewlab.net/buzzfeed](http://crewlab.net/buzzfeed)

------
adamnemecek
Reminds me of The Onion's spoof of Buzzfeed called Clickhole
[http://www.clickhole.com/](http://www.clickhole.com/)

------
danso
FWIW, here's Chris Dixon's blog post on the subject, which includes additional
context on BuzzFeed's technological chops:

[http://cdixon.org/2014/08/10/buzzfeed/](http://cdixon.org/2014/08/10/buzzfeed/)

> _BuzzFeed has technology at its core. Its 100+ person tech team has created
> world-class systems for analytics, advertising, and content management.
> Engineers are 1st class citizens. Everything is built for mobile devices
> from the outset. Internet native formats like lists, tweets, pins, animated
> GIFs, etc. are treated as equals to older formats like photos, videos, and
> long form essays. BuzzFeed takes the internet and computer science
> seriously._

The last line, about taking "computer science seriously"...maybe BF doesn't
have a dev team of the likes of Google and Facebook, but it must certainly be
one of the best in the media business. I've looked through their job postings
from time to time, and unlike most major media companies, the job descriptions
treat engineering/dev positions as the complex, specialized fields that they
often are...what I mean is that at a news company, a dev is expected to do
many different things...not because the news company really wants a "full
stack" developer or will pay the salary for what that entails, but because
there are so many legacy technologies to juggle, and since the traditional
news company has only so much money to spend on tech...a Java developer could
be expected to crank on the CMS and also figure out video delivery solutions
for the media company's bespoke legacy system...and maybe also do some front-
end design. At BuzzFeed, even though it seems the organization is relatively
flat, with not many layers/walls between tech and editorial, when they want a
MySQL developer, they just want someone who can do some serious administration
and performance hacking...not a MySQL dev who also might also be expected to
hack on some animal quiz code.

I think besides the quality of their CMS (which is pretty damn good, no matter
what you think of the editorial content)...one of their most impressive feats
was rebuilding the entire site, basically from scratch, during the week that
Hurricane Sandy flooded their servers in lower Manhattan. In fact, I believe
Gawker had their servers in the same area, but was reduced to creating a
Tumblr and posting to it for some time after the hurricane.

edit: Also, another thing I admire: despite their technological chops, they
tend to be fairly conservative about how they push the constraints of the web.
Their lists are simply lists that work in any browser, any device...because
text and static images _work perfectly fine_ in conveying a message. Even
their gigantic longform stories don't do crazy shit...for being a "gimmicky"
tabloidesque site, BuzzFeed seems to have great confidence in the power of
plaintext and big photos...compare this to major news organizations trying to
parallax-scroll everything for every occasion.

------
owenwil
Interesting, but not particularly surprising. Despite many people's hate for
Buzzfeed they are quickly building up a powerful journalism team. I suspect
they will be the biggest media/journalism/content powerhouse online within a
few years (they technically already are).

~~~
TruffleLabs
Watch John Oliver's Last Week Tonight video segment on native advertisement
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc)
(10 min long). There is a bit on BuzzFeed where he points out that many of the
posts that are "top" are really from paid advertisers.

Saying BuzzFeed is developing a journalism team is probably not the best
wording. I would suggest BuzzFeed is building up a great PR, advertising, and
marketing engine. They will make money. But is it journalism?

~~~
blumkvist
They are developing long form features and op-eds, no?

~~~
potatolicious
Without a very thick, tall, barb-wire-topped wall between editorial and sales,
BuzzFeed will never be a respectable source for journalism.

So longer as they are running ads as content, no amount of long-form writing
and New Yorker-esque vocabulary will move them from the "clickbait" side to
the "journalism" side.

~~~
blumkvist
Oh, so you believe in free and objective journalism? I have bad news for
you...

------
jhonovich
Quantcast, based on direct numbers from Buzzfeed, shows Buzzfeed's traffic
essentially flat this year -
[https://www.quantcast.com/buzzfeed.com](https://www.quantcast.com/buzzfeed.com)

Is this a concern? What is the future growth potential?

~~~
lingben
this is not 1999, "eyeballs", I mean, "traffic" growth means little when you
are able to monetize the traffic you have and grow that (even if your traffic
isn't growing)

------
ehurrell
This is interesting, especially in the context of this interview Andreesen did
in Stanford Graduate Business School:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYYsXzt1VDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYYsXzt1VDc)
where he talks about consuming news and how current news is ripe for
disruption because it exists on a fragile framework of selling "objectivity",
and he seems genuinely interested in how this can be changed.

Buzzfeed has the audience, but maybe only a tangential focus on what we are
used to as 'news', I wonder if this is the result of that thinking, ('what we
know as news is changing') or something completely different.

------
alberth
Marc Andreessen, in March of this year, explains his perspective on journalism
& BuzzFeed in the video below at 41:00 minute mark.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYYsXzt1VDc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYYsXzt1VDc)

He covers topics like:

\- why objective journalism started due to monopolies

\- technology in journalism

\- content creation

This video should answer most of the questions in this thread as to why he'd
make an investment.

Edit: formatting

------
thathonkey
The most puzzling part about this article is that apparently BuzzFeed has an
editor-in-chief.

------
jgalt212
When will advertisers understand that linkbait/clickbait is more effective at
attracting bots than humans?

Or do they already realize this? Does anyone have any metrics on where
Buzzfeeds CPMs trade versus other news sites/blogs?

------
aligajani
Buzzfeed should pay a load of that to "Reddit"

------
zxcvvcxz
Relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc)

------
jseifer
You won't believe what happened next.

------
trevmckendrick
I want to believe BuzzFeed has found the future of sustainable and profitable
news.

I get how being a full-stack tech news startup can do things like create great
lists/linkbait.

But I don't understand how the tech gets you profitable journalism and news.

~~~
trevmckendrick
I wasn't trying to be incredulous... genuinely looking for understanding in to
how they get an advantage in journalism with modern tech!

------
minimaxir
Note: Original article title is "A Move to Go Beyond Lists for Content at
BuzzFeed", which is not particularly explanitory, which is why I changed it in
the submission.

~~~
jedberg
Honest question: How do we as users know when it is ok to editorialize
headlines and when it isn't?

~~~
plorkyeran
Does it matter? There's no punishment for having the title of your submission
changed beyond wasted whatever effort you put into coming up with a new title.
If you feel your title is better, submit it and see if the moderators agree.

~~~
jedberg
Then why do the site's guidelines specifically state "Please use the original
title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."?

I'm fine with the mods changing the titles, but I don't like the fact that the
rules don't apply equally to everyone.

~~~
dang
The rules apply equally to everyone. The article's title is currently "50
Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists".
That's obviously linkbait, so we didn't revert the submitter's title.

~~~
mbesto
> _That 's obviously linkbait_

This is a whole new meta that my brain is really having a hard time grokking.

~~~
dang
Sure, it's a meta ironic reference to Buzzfeed linkbait by the NYT, but the
point stands. If I ironically mimic somebody screaming, I'm still screaming.

------
mkal_tsr
As a result, any company invested in by Andreessen Horowitz is now of lesser
value, lower integrity, and less worth of promotion in my opinion. We can talk
and discuss and debate "free market" and monetizing content and whatever other
rationalization you have for this investment, but in the end, BuzzFeed is not
real journalism and does not conduct itself ethically (looking at you,
BuzzFeed writers taking content from Reddit and only sometimes giving credit),
and as a result, I think that's a message AH is sending, "integrity, ethics,
and quality is not important, just $$$"

Edit: once again, anything that goes against the grain of the HN-hivemind is
being downvoted without explanation :-) For a site that prides itself in not
being Reddit, HN sure acts like Reddit wrt downvotes.

~~~
dang
It's against the HN guidelines to go on about getting downvoted. Please don't.

Complaints about the HN hive-mind are also tedious. And they're (mostly)
evenly distributed across ideologies, so they say more about the complainer
than they do about HN.

~~~
mkal_tsr
> It's against the HN guidelines to go on about getting downvoted. Please
> don't.

Technically it's not, it's discouraged, direct quote:

> Resist complaining about being downmodded.

I have no qualms with downvotes, but I do have issue with people not
explaining their rational for either up or downvotes. By simply
downvoting/upvoting and moving on, discussion and debate cannot occur and no
one can have their opinion challenged.

~~~
lotharbot
There are an order of magnitude more votes than comments on HN. Asking people
to supply a comment with every vote would quickly degrade the signal,
overwhelming it with noisy "I agree" or "you're wrong"s.

People occasionally explain downvotes. They are not obligated to.

~~~
read
Good observation. Why aren't they obligated to?

You don't have to ask people to supply a comment for every upvote. But you can
ask them for downvotes. There are an order of magnitude less downvotes than
upvotes.

