BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed
Type of business Private
Type of site
 News and Entertainment
Available in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Japanese
Founded November 1, 2006 (2006-11-01)
Headquarters New York City, New York, U.S.
Owner BuzzFeed Inc.
Key people Jonah Peretti (CEO)
Revenue Decrease US$ 167 million (2015)[1][2]
Employees 770 (October 2014)[3]
Slogan(s) "The Media Company for the Social Age"
Website www.buzzfeed.com
Alexa rank Decrease 145 (September 2016)[4]
Advertising Native
Registration Optional
Current status Active

BuzzFeed is an American private Internet media company based in New York City. The firm describes itself as a "social news and entertainment company" with a focus on digital media and digital technology in order to provide "the most shareable breaking news, original reporting, entertainment, and video."[5] BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 as a viral lab, focusing on tracking viral content, by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III.[6] Kenneth Lerer, co-founder and chairman of The Huffington Post, started as a co-founder and investor in BuzzFeed and is now the executive chairman as well.[6]

Prior to establishing BuzzFeed, Peretti experimented with other viral media as director of research and development and the OpenLab at Eyebeam, Johnson's New York City-based art and technology non-profit.[7][8] The company has grown into a global[9] media and technology company providing coverage on a variety of topics including politics, DIY, animals and business. In late 2011 Ben Smith of Politico was hired as Editor-in-Chief to expand the site into serious journalism, long-form journalism, and reportage.[10]

History

Jonah Peretti founded BuzzFeed in November 2006.

Funding

In August 2014, BuzzFeed raised $50 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, more than doubling previous rounds of funding.[11] The site was reportedly valued at around $850 million by Andreessen Horowitz.[11] BuzzFeed generates its advertising revenue through native advertising that matches its own editorial content, and does not rely on banner ads.[12] Buzzfeed also uses its familiarity with social media to target conventional advertising through other channels, like Facebook.[13]

In August 2015, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in Buzzfeed.[14] Along with plans to hire more journalists to build a more prominent "investigative" unit, BuzzFeed is hiring journalists around the world and plans to open outposts in India, Germany, Mexico and Japan.[15]

In December 2014, growth equity firm General Atlantic acquired $50M in secondary stock of the company.[16]

In October 2016, BuzzFeed raised $200 million from Comcast’s TV and movie arm NBCUniversal, at a valuation of roughly $1.7 billion.[17]

Acquisitions

BuzzFeed's first acquisition was in 2012 when the company purchased Kingfish Labs, a startup founded by Rob Fishman, initially focused on optimizing Facebook ads.[18]

On October 28, 2014, BuzzFeed announced its next acquisition, taking hold of Torando Labs. The Torando team was to become BuzzFeed's first data engineering team.[19]

Content

BuzzFeed produces daily content, in which the work of staff reporters, contributors, syndicated cartoon artists, and its community are featured. Popular formats on the website include lists, videos, and quizzes. While BuzzFeed was initially focused exclusively on such viral content, according to The New York Times, "it added more traditional content, building a track record for delivering breaking news and deeply reported articles" in the years up to 2014.[20] In that year, BuzzFeed deleted over 4000 early posts, "apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider", as observed by The New Yorker.[21]

BuzzFeed consistently ranked at the top of NewsWhip's "Facebook Publisher Rankings" from December 2013 to April 2014, until The Huffington Post entered the position.[22][23][24][25][26]

"The dress"

The most interesting thing to me, is that it traveled. It went from New York media circle-jerk Twitter to international. And you could see it in my Twitter notifications because people started having conversations in, like, Spanish and Portuguese and then Japanese and Chinese and Thai and Arabic. It was amazing to watch this move from a local thing to, like, a massive international phenomenon.[27]

Cates Holderness

A post about a debate over the color of an item of clothing from BuzzFeed's Tumblr editor Cates Holderness garnered more than 28 million views in one day, setting a record for most concurrent visitors to a BuzzFeed post.[28] Holderness had showed the picture to other members of the site's social media team, who immediately began arguing about the dress's colors among themselves. After creating a simple poll for users of the site, she left work and took the subway back to her Brooklyn home. When she got off the train and checked her phone, it was overwhelmed by the messages on various sites. "I couldn't open Twitter because it kept crashing. I thought somebody had died, maybe. I didn't know what was going on." Later in the evening the page set a new record at BuzzFeed for concurrent visitors, which would reach 673,000 at its peak.[27][29]

Video

BuzzFeed Video, BuzzFeed Motion Picture's flagship channel,[30] produces original content, and its production studio and team is based in Los Angeles. Since hiring Ze Frank in 2012, BuzzFeed Video has produced several video series including "The Creep Series", "The Try Guys", and "Fun Facts." In August 2014, the company announced a new division, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, which may produce feature-length films.[20] As of December 13, 2015, BuzzFeed Video's YouTube had garnered over 6.3 billion views and more than 9.3 million subscribers.[31] It was recently announced that YouTube has signed on for two feature length series to be created by BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, titled Broke and Squad Wars.[32]

Watermelon stunt

On April 8, 2016, BuzzFeed created a live stream on Facebook, during which two staffers wrapped rubber bands around a watermelon until the pressure of the rubber bands caused it to explode. The stunt was notable for drawing a very large online audience.[33]

Community

On July 17, 2012, humor website McSweeney's Internet Tendency published a satirical piece entitled "Suggested BuzzFeed Articles",[34] prompting BuzzFeed to create many of the suggestions.[35][36][37][38] BuzzFeed listed McSweeney's as a "Community Contributor."[35] The post subsequently received more than 350,000 page views,[36] prompted BuzzFeed to ask for user submissions[35][39] and received media attention.[36][37][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] Subsequently, the website launched the "Community" section in May 2013 to enable users to submit content. Users are initially limited to publishing only one post per day, but can increase their submission capacity by raising their "Cat Power",[47] described on the BuzzFeed website as "an official measure of your rank in BuzzFeed's Community." A user's Cat Power increases as they achieve greater prominence on the site.[48]

Technology and social media

BuzzFeed receives the majority of its traffic by creating content that is shared on social media websites. BuzzFeed works by judging their content on how viral it will become. Operating in a “continuous feedback loop” where all of its articles and videos are used as input for its sophisticated data operation.[13] The site continues to test and track their custom content with an in-house team of data scientists and external-facing “social dashboard.” Using an algorithm dubbed "Viral Rank" created by Jonah Peretti and Duncan Watts, the company uses this formula to let editors, users, and advertisers try lots of different ideas which maximizes distribution.[49] Staff writers are ranked by views on an internal leaderboard. In 2014, BuzzFeed received 75% of its views from links on social media outlets such as Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook.[12][20]

Tasty

BuzzFeed's video series on comfort food, "Tasty", is tailor made for Facebook, where it had over thirty million followers as of January 2016. The channel has substantially more views than BuzzFeed's dedicated food site.[50] At the end of every video, a male voice can be heard saying the catchphrase, "Oh yes!". The channel included three spinoff segments such as "Tasty Junior"--features meals the whole family can make, "Tasty Happy Hour"--featuring alcoholic beverages, and "Tasty Story"--featuring a celebrity making their own recipes and telling their stories about them. As of November 23, 2016, "Tasty" has released their own customizable cookbook.[51]

The company also operates the following international versions of "Tasty", each in their own respective languages:

Spinoffs

BuzzFeed also operates two more video series on Facebook.

Criticism and controversy

Benny Johnson was fired from BuzzFeed in July 2014 for plagiarism.

BuzzFeed has been accused of plagiarizing original content from competitors throughout the online and offline press. On June 28, 2012, Gawker's Adrian Chen posted a story titled "BuzzFeed and the Plagiarism Problem". In the article, Chen observed that one of BuzzFeed's most popular writers – Matt Stopera – had frequently copied and pasted "chunks of text into lists without attribution."[52] On March 8, 2013, The Atlantic Wire also published an article concerning BuzzFeed and plagiarism.[53]

BuzzFeed has been the subject of multiple copyright infringement lawsuits for both using content it had no rights to and encouraging its proliferation without attributing its sources: one for an individual photographer's photograph,[54] and another for nine celebrity photographs from a single photography company.[55]

In July 2014, BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson was accused of multiple instances of plagiarism.[56] Two anonymous Twitter users chronicled Johnson attributing work that was not his own, but "directly lift[ed] from other reporters, Wikipedia, and Yahoo! Answers," all without credit.[57] BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith initially defended Johnson, calling him a "deeply original writer".[58] Days later, Smith acknowledged that Johnson had plagiarized others' work 40 times, announced that Johnson had been fired, and apologized to BuzzFeed readers. "Plagiarism, much less copying unchecked facts from Wikipedia or other sources, is an act of disrespect to the reader," Smith said. "We are deeply embarrassed and sorry to have misled you."[58] In total, 41 instances of plagiarism were found and corrected.[59] Johnson, who had previously worked for the Mitt Romney 2008 Presidential campaign, was subsequently hired by the conservative magazine National Review as their social media editor.[60]

In October 2014, it was noted by the Pew Research Center that in the United States, BuzzFeed was viewed as an unreliable source by the majority of people, regardless of political affiliation. Other news outlets deemed more untrustworthy than trustworthy in the survey were The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Glenn Beck Program, Al Jazeera America and The Sean Hannity Show.[61][62][63]

In April 2015, BuzzFeed drew scrutiny after Gawker observed the publication had deleted two posts that criticized advertisers.[64] One of the posts criticized Dove soap (manufactured by Unilever), while another criticized Hasbro.[65] Both companies advertise with BuzzFeed. Ben Smith apologized in a memo to staff for his actions. "I blew it," Smith wrote. "Twice in the past couple of months, I've asked editors — over their better judgment and without any respect to our standards or process — to delete recently published posts from the site. Both involved the same thing: my overreaction to questions we've been wrestling with about the place of personal opinion pieces on our site. I reacted impulsively when I saw the posts and I was wrong to do that. We've reinstated both with a brief note."[66] Days later, one of the authors of the deleted posts, Arabelle Sicardi, resigned.[67] An internal review by the company found three additional posts deleted for being critical of products or advertisements (by Microsoft, Pepsi, and Unilever).[68]

In September 2015, The Christian Post wrote that a video by BuzzFeed titled I'm Christian But I'm Not... was getting criticism from conservative Christians for not specifically mentioning Christ or certain Biblical values.[69]

In 2016, the Advertising Standards Authority of the UK ruled that BuzzFeed broke the UK advertising rules for failing to make it clear that an article on "14 Laundry Fails We've All Experienced" that promoted Dylon was an online advertorial paid for by the brand.[70][71] Although the ASA agreed with BuzzFeed's defence that links to the piece from its homepage and search results clearly labelled the article as "sponsored content", this failed to take into account that many people may link to the story directly, ruling that the labelling "was not sufficient to make clear that the main content of the web page was an advertorial and that editorial content was therefore retained by the advertiser".[71][72]

In February 2016, Scaachi Koul, a Senior Writer for BuzzFeed Canada tweeted a request for pitches stating that BuzzFeed was "...looking for mostly non-white non-men" followed by "If you are a white man upset that we are looking mostly for non-white non-men I don't care about you go write for Maclean's." When confronted, she followed with the tweet "White men are still permitted to pitch, I will read it, I will consider it. I'm just less interested because, ugh, men." In response to the tweets, Koul received numerous rape and death threats and racist insults.[73][74] Sarmishta Subramanian, a former colleague of Koul's writing for Maclean's condemned the reaction to the tweets, and commented that Koul's request for diversity was appropriate. Subramanian said that her provocative approach raised concerns of tokenism that might hamper BuzzFeed's stated goals.[75]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "BuzzFeed slashes forecasts after missing 2015 targets". Financial Times.
  2. ↑ Sam Thielman. "BuzzFeed cuts projected revenue by half after missing 2015 financial target". the Guardian.
  3. ↑ "What We're Doing To Keep Building A Diverse Editorial Operation". BuzzFeed. 1 October 2014. Retrieved July 28, 2015.
  4. ↑ "BuzzFeed.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 7 September 2016.
  5. ↑ "About BuzzFeed". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 22 August 2015.
  6. 1 2 "The BuzzFeed Team". BuzzFeed.
  7. ↑ "Jonah Peretti - eyebeam.org". eyebeam.org. Archived from the original on 2015-09-30.
  8. ↑ "Jonah Peretti, Director of R&D at Eyebeam". Gothamist.
  9. ↑ "BuzzFeed gets $50 mn cash infusion, to set up operations in India". The Economic Times. August 12, 2014.
  10. ↑ Stelter, Brian (2011-12-12). "BuzzFeed Adds Politico Writer". Mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2012-01-21.
  11. 1 2 "BuzzFeed raises another $50 million to fund expansion". CNN. August 10, 2014. Retrieved August 29, 2014.
  12. 1 2 Shontell, Alyson. "Inside BuzzFeed: The Story of How Jonah Peretti Built the Web's Most Beloved New Media Brand". Business Insider.
  13. 1 2 "How BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti Is Building A 100-Year Media Company". Fast Company. 2016-02-16. Retrieved 2016-06-11.
  14. ↑ Lien, Tracey (August 18, 2015). "NBCUniversal makes $200-million investment in Buzzfeed". Los Angeles Times. Tribune Publishing. Retrieved August 18, 2015.
  15. ↑ "BuzzFeed gets fed". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2015-10-21.
  16. ↑ Griffith, Erin. "Vox Media becomes a startup "unicorn" with NBCU funding". Fortune. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
  17. ↑ Kafka, Peter (2016-10-20). "NBCUniversal is doubling its bet on BuzzFeed by investing another $200 million". Recode. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  18. ↑ Constine, Josh September 13, 2012 TechCrunch. "BuzzFeed's First Acquisition Kingfish Labs Could Make Its FB Ads Go More Viral Than Football Cats"
  19. ↑ Ha, Anthony October 28, 2014 Techcrunch. "BuzzFeed Acquires Startup Torando Labs To Create Its First Data Engineering Team"
  20. 1 2 3 "50 Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists". New York Times. 11 August 2014. Retrieved March 26, 2015.
  21. ↑ Lepore, Jill. "The Cobweb. Can the Internet be archived?". The New Yorker (January 26, 2015 issue).
  22. ↑ Corcoran, Liam. "BuzzFeed Back On Top – The Biggest Facebook Publishers of December 2013". blog.newswhip.com. NewsWhip. Archived from the original on 23 October 2014. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  23. ↑ Corcoran, Liam. "The Biggest Facebook Publishers of January 2014". blog.newswhip.com. NewsWhip. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  24. ↑ Liam, Corcoran. "The Biggest Facebook Publishers of February 2014". blog.newswhip.com. NewsWhip. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  25. ↑ Corcoran, Liam. "The Biggest Facebook Publishers of March 2014". blog.newswhip.com. NewsWhip. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  26. ↑ Corcoran, Liam. "The Biggest Facebook Publishers of April 2014". blog.newswhip.com. NewsWhip. Archived from the original on 23 October 2014. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  27. 1 2 Warzel, Charlie (26 February 2015). "2/26: The Oral History". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 28 February 2016.
  28. ↑ "The Dress". Buzzfeed. 27 February 2014. Retrieved 12 June 2016.
  29. ↑ "#TheDress couple: 'we were completely left out from the story'". BBC News. 1 January 2016. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  30. ↑ "BuzzFeedVideo". YouTube. Retrieved 2015-10-21.
  31. ↑ "About". Buzzfeed Video on YouTube. Google Inc. 24 October 2014. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  32. ↑ Longwell, Todd. "With 2 scripted YouTube series, BuzzFeed looks to move beyond viral videos".
  33. ↑ Hathaway, Jay (8 April 2016). Welp, the future of Facebook is exploding watermelons, The Daily Dot
  34. ↑ "McSweeney's Internet Tendency: List: Suggested Buzzfeed Articles.". McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
  35. 1 2 3 "Suggested BuzzFeed Articles". BuzzFeed.
  36. 1 2 3 Carlson, Reb (August 6, 2012). "How to Respond When Your Content Strategy Comes Under Fire". contently.com.
  37. 1 2 Foster Kamer. "In Which Buzzfeed Answers a McSweeney's Parody of Their Site with Aplomb". New York Observer.
  38. ↑ "BuzzFeed - Yesterday, McSweeney's published a list of...". facebook.com.
  39. 1 2 "Buzzfeed's capable response to McSweeney's parody". UPI.
  40. ↑ "McSweeney's challenges BuzzFeed to listicle-off, loses". The Daily Dot.
  41. ↑ Jonathan Ore (19 September 2013). "Buzzfeed takes humour website's list suggestions literally". cbc.ca.
  42. ↑ "There's A Meme For That". The Dish.
  43. ↑ "Suggested Buzzfeed Articles". Neatorama. Archived from the original on 2014-12-20.
  44. ↑ "USA TODAY — Suggested BuzzFeed Articles". tumblr.com.
  45. ↑ "The alarming BuzzFeed/NRCC spawn". Washington Post. April 4, 2013.
  46. ↑ Ogburn, Peter (July 18, 2012). "Fish Food>Buzzfeed Reaches Parody Level". mediabistro.com.
  47. ↑ Jeff John Roberts (8 May 2013). "Get your cat on: BuzzFeed creates new section where readers can publish". Gigaom. Gigaom, Inc. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  48. ↑ "About BuzzFeed Community". BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed, Inc. 24 October 2014. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  49. ↑ Watts, Duncan, and Jonah Peretti, "Viral Marketing for the Real World", Harvard Business Review, May 2007.
  50. ↑ Griffith, Erin (January 19, 2016). "BuzzFeed's Foodie Channels Are Blowing Up on Facebook". Fortune. Retrieved June 11, 2016.
  51. ↑ Tasty - The Cookbook
  52. ↑ Adrian Chen. "Remix Everything: BuzzFeed and the Plagiarism Problem". Gawker. Gawker Media. Archived from the original on 2013-09-12.
  53. ↑ Philip Bump. "BuzzFeed's 'Happiest Facts of All Time' Were Mostly Plagiarized from Reddit". The Wire.
  54. ↑ Photographer sues BuzzFeed for $3.6M over viral sharing model — Tech News and Analysis
  55. ↑ "BuzzFeed Sued for $1.3M After Publishing 9 Celebrity Photos Without Permission". PetaPixel. Retrieved 22 August 2015.
  56. ↑ "BuzzFeed's Benny Johnson accused of plagiarism". Politico. 2014-07-25. Retrieved 2014-07-25.
  57. ↑ "3 Reasons Benny Johnson Shouldn't Call Out Plagiarism: He's A Plagiarist, He's A Plagiarist, And He's A Plagiarist". Our Bad Media. 2014-07-24. Retrieved 2014-07-24.
  58. 1 2 Farhi, Paul (July 26, 2014). "Buzzfeed fires Benny Johnson for plagiarism". Washington Post. Retrieved July 26, 2014.
  59. ↑ Stelter, Brian (July 26, 2014). "BuzzFeed fires viral politics editor for plagiarizing". CNN Money. Retrieved July 28, 2014.
  60. ↑ Mejia, Paula, "Ex-BuzzFeed Editor, Plagiarizer Benny Johnson Hired by National Review", Newsweek, September 6, 2014. Retrieved 2014-11-07.
  61. ↑ Leah Finnegan (July 21, 2014). "No One Trusts BuzzFeed :-(". Gawker. Archived from the original on August 15, 2015. Retrieved July 27, 2015.
  62. ↑ "Where News Audiences Fit on the Political Spectrum". journalism.org. Pew Research Center. October 21, 2014. Retrieved July 27, 2015.
  63. ↑ "Political Polarization & Media Habits". journalism.org. Pew Research Center. October 21, 2014. Retrieved July 27, 2014.
  64. ↑ Trotter, JK (2015-04-09). "BuzzFeed Deletes Post Critical of Dove, a BuzzFeed Advertiser". Gawker. Archived from the original on 2015-04-13. Retrieved 2015-04-13.
  65. ↑ Somaiya, Ravi (April 10, 2015). "BuzzFeed Restores 2 Posts Its Editor Deleted". The New York Times. Retrieved April 19, 2015.
  66. ↑ "BuzzFeed Editor-In-Chief Ben Smith Says He "Blew It" By Removing Post Criticizing Dove". TechCrunch. 2015-04-10. Retrieved 2015-04-13.
  67. ↑ Trotter, JK (2015-04-13). "Arabelle Sicardi, Author of Deleted Dove Post, Resigns From BuzzFeed". Gawker. Archived from the original on 2015-04-14. Retrieved 2015-04-13.
  68. ↑ Stack, Liam (April 19, 2015). "BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising Pressure". The New York Times. Retrieved April 19, 2015.
  69. ↑ Blair, Leonardo (September 9, 2015). "BuzzFeed Gets Blowback for Controversial 'I Am a Christian but I'm Not …' Video Featuring Gay, Feminist Christian Millenials". The Christian Post. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  70. ↑ Cookson, Robert (13 January 2016). "Watchdog criticises BuzzFeed for misleading readers". Financial Times. Retrieved 1 February 2016.
  71. 1 2 Sweney, Mark (13 January 2016). "BuzzFeed breaks UK ad rules over misleading advertorial". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 February 2016.
  72. ↑ "ASA Ruling on Henkel Ltd". ASA.org.uk. Advertising Standards Agency.
  73. ↑ June, Laura (February 26, 2016). "Talking About Diversity Earns Men Praise, Women Rape Threats". New York Magazine. Retrieved March 28, 2016.
  74. ↑ Chin, Jessica (February 21, 2016). "Scaachi Koul, BuzzFeed Writer, Harassed After Call For 'Not White And Not Male' Contributors". Huffington Post Canada. Retrieved March 28, 2016.
  75. ↑ Subramanian, Sarmishta (February 29, 2016). "What's missing in the outrage about media diversity". Maclean's. Retrieved March 28, 2016.

External links

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