tl;dr:
"An advertising company."
What is BuzzFeed, really?
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#32Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#33I 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…
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.
Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#34Omits 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 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.
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.
Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#35I 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…
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Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#36I 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…
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.
Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#37This 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…
FWIW, Buzzfeed chair Ken Lerer says the company isn't slashing its revenue targets this year and that it did hit its Q1 target[1]. No one seems to be denying that they missed their targets last year, though.
http://recode.net/2016/04/12/buzzfeed-revenue-advertising-20...
Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are bored with it, and other clickbait-style sites.
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.
According to Alexa, Buzzfeed has been dropping in daily pageviews and global ranking [1]. That's synonymous with people getting, bored, right?
Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#39Buzzfeed 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.
Re: What is BuzzFeed, really?
#40Buzzfeed is junk food