
What is BuzzFeed, really? - zackliscio
http://blog.naytev.com/buzzfeed-networks/
======
kough
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".

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/business/media/at-
buzzfeed...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/business/media/at-buzzfeed-the-
significant-and-the-silly.html?_r=1)

~~~
cylinder
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.

~~~
GuiA
To be fair though the "science" of anything social always seems like fluffy
nonsense made to make spaghetti throwing on the wall seem like methodical,
analytical research.

~~~
tedmiston
Related: "Is Computer Science Science?"
[https://www.cs.mtu.edu/~john/jenning.pdf](https://www.cs.mtu.edu/~john/jenning.pdf)

> What is your profession?

Computer science.

> Oh? Is that a science?

Sure, it is the science of information processes and their interactions with
the world.

> I’ll accept that what you do is technology; but not science. Science deals
> with fundamental laws of nature. Computers are manmade. Their principles
> come from other fields such as physics and electronics engineering.

...

~~~
jcoffland
Science is manmade and man is of nature.

It's true that most programmers do not do computer science but CS as a science
does exist. CS is the study of data structures and algorithms. CS can be
viewed as a branch of mathematics but it is much more process oriented than
most math disciplines.

~~~
Atheros
If aliens ever land they're going to have the exact same sorting algorithms we
have. Their history of CPUs will be the same as ours.

~~~
jcoffland
Unless they have quantum computers or something completely different that we
have not thought of. There's a good chance that our conception of computer
science, or even science for that mater, is completely unique in the universe,
like a snowflake. Science is merely a model humans use to understand the world
around them, with limited success.

------
minimaxir
This article doesn't incorporate yesterday's news that BuzzFeed has missed
revenue targets this year, and is forecasted to miss revenue targets next
year: [http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/buzzfeed-halves-
revenue-t...](http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/buzzfeed-halves-revenue-
target-for-2016.html)

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
People are bored with it, and other clickbait-style sites.

~~~
minimaxir
People aren't bored, but the economics have changed in terms of ad revenue,
and the notion of linkbait has been tragedy-of-the-commonsed since everyone is
doing it.

~~~
bduerst
According to Alexa, Buzzfeed has been dropping in daily pageviews and global
ranking [1]. That's synonymous with people getting, bored, right?

[http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com)

~~~
CameronBanga
Or everyone else is just stealing the playbook, and consumers really don't
care where the content comes from.

Readers of clickbait presumably get to such pages from social shares aimed to
grab a click, and probably have no loyalty to the site producing the
clickbait.

~~~
Reedx
> probably have no loyalty to the site producing the clickbait

I think that's spot on. There's more competition in clickbait and the strategy
ultimately doesn't result in any sort of loyalty. They are there for the
headline, quickly consume what little content there is and close the tab.

It's a process of finding a new "weird trick" and then overuse it until people
get sick of seeing it. Then find a new hook and repeat the process ad
infinitum.

------
justboxing
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 $.

Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/zealot-media-buys-scott-
delon...](http://www.businessinsider.com/zealot-media-buys-scott-delongs-
viralnova-for-100-million-2015-7)

> 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
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.

~~~
marknutter
Which completely ignores the fact that after a certain point as you add
headcount you often deteriorate productivity and communication.

~~~
imjk
Perhaps the job is to find that point, and they found it. Or perhaps they're
nowhere near that point and the management team just did a shitty job scaling
the business.

------
shade23
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.

[1]:[https://www.buzzfeed.com/news](https://www.buzzfeed.com/news)

~~~
smacktoward
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.

------
no_wave
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.

------
takno
Buzzfeed is about 20% of my "Hide from Timeline" list on Facebook

~~~
cylinder
I hid it a couple of years ago and I was actually recently surprised it still
exists; I never see their links anywhere.

~~~
Exuma
That has more to do with Facebook's content algorithm than anything.

~~~
AJ007
Distribution: No one actually visits our site to read it, we are reliant on
third parties. At least 50% of our users come from Facebook, which helps mask
if the other sources are even profitable by themselves.

Content: We publish content on other platforms which will slowly drain our
visibility if they do too well.

Audience: We were in front of the curve and road it at its peak when Facebook
opened up their newsfeed to content.

Technology: When one of our spam articles does really well with organic
traffic, we spend a bunch of money to pay to promote it on the most visible
channels.

As Facebook gave and took away Zynga's free traffic, so goes Buzzfeed's
traffic.

------
etr71115
Everyone always complains about the cat gifs and listicles. No one ever
praises the Zenefits exposé or leaking John McCain's running mate.

~~~
balls187
Build a thousands bridges...

~~~
monknomo
In Buzzfeeds case it's more like "fuck a thousand goats, but do they remember
the one bridge?"

~~~
noir_lord
Surely you mean "17 species of Bovidae we fucked, You'll never guess what
happened next".

------
813594
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.

~~~
pj_costello
great thread on this very idea of content junk food:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11475367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11475367)
and [http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/10/twitter-ev-
will...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/10/twitter-ev-williams-
medium-content-fast-food)

------
dredmorbius
BuzzFeed's biggest problem, at least as I view it, is an immense negative
equity as yet another exploiter of weaponised viral clickbait crap.

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
'“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.”'

\-- [http://www.critical-theory.com/buzzfeed-founder-responds-
to-...](http://www.critical-theory.com/buzzfeed-founder-responds-to-his-
marxist-roots-lol/)

------
samsolomon
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.

------
alaskamiller
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.

------
JohnTHaller
I think of BuzzFeed as the company built on stolen content that sends cease &
desist notices to other people that use their stolen content.

------
reality_czech
[http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2014/11/06/it-must-be-
fed/](http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2014/11/06/it-must-be-fed/)

------
beatpanda
tl;dr:

"An advertising company."

------
b0t
hell

------
devopsproject
Buzzfeed is junk food

------
harel
It's the site that makes my browser cry in exhaustion.

