8 ms·
What is BuzzFeed, really?
- takno 10y agoBuzzfeed is about 20% of my "Hide from Timeline" list on Facebook
- cylinder 10y agoI hid it a couple of years ago and I was actually recently surprised it still exists; I never see their links anywhere.
- takno 10y agoThey really only intrude into my life when a particularly overenthusiastic friend actually bothers to manually paste a link rather than hitting the share button
- Exuma 10y agoThat has more to do with Facebook's content algorithm than anything.
- AJ007 10y agoDistribution: 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.
- mcintyre1994 10y agoIs there a way to see that list? I'd be interested how many I've hid by now..
- minimaxir 10y agoThis 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-target-for-2016.html http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/buzzfeed-halves-revenue-t... 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 10y agoPeople are bored with it, and other clickbait-style sites.
- vonmoltke 10y agoBased on the number of links she sends me,my wife isn't bored with it yet.
- actionwords 10y agowomen are the top market for clickbait articles... wonder why they're more susceptible. Might be similar to why they're more obsessed on average with celebrity than their male counterparts.
- minimaxir 10y agoPeople 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 10y agoAccording 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
- kough 10y agoOmits 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-the-significant-and-the-silly.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/business/media/at-buzzfeed...
- cylinder 10y agoThe 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 10y agoTo 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.
- hderms 10y agoIf your measurements are good enough you can make a methodology out of throwing spaghetti at a wall.
- tedmiston 10y agoRelated: "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 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- b0t 10y agohell
- etr71115 10y agoEveryone always complains about the cat gifs and listicles. No one ever praises the Zenefits exposé or leaking John McCain's running mate.
- balls187 10y agoBuild a thousands bridges...
- justinlardinois 10y agoBuzzFeed was around in 2008?
- etr71115 10y agoYes, founded in 2006.
- vitd 10y agoDo 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.
- justboxing 10y agoI 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-delongs-viralnova-for-100-million-2015-7 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 10y agoFirst, 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 10y agoWhich completely ignores the fact that after a certain point as you add headcount you often deteriorate productivity and communication.
- 813594 10y agoI'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 10y agogreat 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-williams-medium-content-fast-food http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/10/twitter-ev-will...
- shade23 10y agoI 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
- felix_thursday 10y ago^ 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.
- smacktoward 10y agoThe 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.
- harel 10y agoIt's the site that makes my browser cry in exhaustion.
- HemanHeartYou 10y agoA bad website
- beatpanda 10y agotl;dr: "An advertising company."
- no_wave 10y agoBuzzfeed 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.
- devopsproject 10y agoBuzzfeed is junk food
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- alaskamiller 10y agoThey 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.
- reality_czech 10y agohttp://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2014/11/06/it-must-be-fed/ http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2014/11/06/it-must-be-fed/
- akgerber 10y ago'“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-his-marxist-roots-lol/ http://www.critical-theory.com/buzzfeed-founder-responds-to-...
- dredmorbius 10y agoBuzzFeed'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.
- swagv 10y ago"Buzzfeed" sends me running screaming every time. I avoid it like ebola.
- samsolomon 10y agoAs 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.
- JohnTHaller 10y agoI think of BuzzFeed as the company built on stolen content that sends cease & desist notices to other people that use their stolen content.