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...

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...

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.

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...

> 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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

'“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-...

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.

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.

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

tl;dr:

"An advertising company."

hell

Buzzfeed is junk food

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

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.

Scott started VN with a very small crew, he shared a picture once showing how often he was eating takeout between work sessions, I wouldn't be surprised to find out he was putting in 12+ hour days initially. Leading up to the eventual sale the company grew quickly though. He's been creating profitable sites for years and VN was just the next evolution. The key difference was seeing the potential in taking VN further then just a site run by a couple of people.

I've been told the change was when he hired an executive team to go after bigger ad buys and to shape the business to be more then just a small group operation.

I've been reluctant to ask him personally about the details but this is what I've put together talking to acquaintances. Say what you want about VN, Scott is a top notch guy that has hit it out of the park many times.

It highlights one of the biggest issues in tech today. Buzzfeed is one of many tech companies that really should just be a fun little mid sized company that makes enough to go around, but in the end has gotten caught up in the Silicon Valley hype and is biting way more than they can chew with pumped up valuations.