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.