What is BuzzFeed, really? | Hacker News Reader

What is BuzzFeed, really?

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94 pointszackliscio65 comments

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...

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.

If your measurements are good enough you can make a methodology out of throwing spaghetti at a wall.

Related: "Is Computer Science Science?" 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.

...

Science is manmade and man is of nature.

It's true that most programmers do not do computer science but CS as a science does exist. CS is the study of data structures and algorithms. CS can be viewed as a branch of mathematics but it is much more process oriented than most math disciplines.

If aliens ever land they're going to have the exact same sorting algorithms we have. Their history of CPUs will be the same as ours.

Unless they chose the ternary path. It’s closer to base e and therefore closer to optimal than binary.

Unless they have quantum computers or something completely different that we have not thought of. There's a good chance that our conception of computer science, or even science for that mater, is completely unique in the universe, like a snowflake. Science is merely a model humans use to understand the world around them, with limited success.

Spammy blogs just wither and die. They do not produce a huge company like Buzzfeed.

I felt similarly until I saw Fletcher Heisler (TrackMaven) give the talk Analyzing social media data with Python at PyOhio '14.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSUUJFiHFY

Code + Jupyter Notebook: https://github.com/fheisler/pyohio2014

Not even that profitable, as another commenter linked to:

http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/buzzfeed-halves-revenue-t...

Huh, didn't even know this. So this is why BuzzFeed comes across as ADD in website form...

See also http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/issues/96w/96w_perett... , note the author. Negations was a humanities journal.

Very interesting -- thanks for the pointer

Yeah I always kinda wrote off BuzzFeed as listicles for people who can't take the time to actually read news (which it definitely still is in some sense) but then I saw Jonah Peretti speak [0] and I've been a lot more interested in it since then

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82JTa3iJfk

Who was also a co-founder of The Huffington Post and, most interestingly to me, is the brother of comedian Chelsea Peretti.

An experiment? Hardly. At least certainly not any more.

They use data to deliver their cancerous content, just in the same way coke uses AB flavor testing to determine what the most addictive coke formula is.

Calling them "scientists" performing "experiments" seems far too dignified.

Original coke. That's the addictive one. New coke didn't work.

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.

People are bored with it, and other clickbait-style sites.

Based on the number of links she sends me,my wife isn't bored with it yet.

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?

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com

Or everyone else is just stealing the playbook, and consumers really don't care where the content comes from.

Readers of clickbait presumably get to such pages from social shares aimed to grab a click, and probably have no loyalty to the site producing the clickbait.

> probably have no loyalty to the site producing the clickbait

I think that's spot on. There's more competition in clickbait and the strategy ultimately doesn't result in any sort of loyalty. They are there for the headline, quickly consume what little content there is and close the tab.

It's a process of finding a new "weird trick" and then overuse it until people get sick of seeing it. Then find a new hook and repeat the process ad infinitum.

Based on the original article, their strategy has become sponsored content across 30+ platforms. Their site is only 1 part of this.

There will always be an audience for clickbait. There must be other factors at play.

I'm wondering what really lead to such a huge miss. Whether it was just an incompetent estimate or what. Guide down is kinda crazy too.

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...

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?

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.

Which completely ignores the fact that after a certain point as you add headcount you often deteriorate productivity and communication.

Perhaps the job is to find that point, and they found it. Or perhaps they're nowhere near that point and the management team just did a shitty job scaling the business.

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.

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

^ 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.

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.

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

I hid it a couple of years ago and I was actually recently surprised it still exists; I never see their links anywhere.

They really only intrude into my life when a particularly overenthusiastic friend actually bothers to manually paste a link rather than hitting the share button

That has more to do with Facebook's content algorithm than anything.

Distribution: 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.

Is there a way to see that list? I'd be interested how many I've hid by now..

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

Build a thousands bridges...

In Buzzfeeds case it's more like "fuck a thousand goats, but do they remember the one bridge?"

Surely you mean "17 species of Bovidae we fucked, You'll never guess what happened next".

BuzzFeed was around in 2008?

Yes, founded in 2006.

Do 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.

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.

great thread on this very idea of content junk food: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11475367 and http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/10/twitter-ev-will...

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.

http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2014/11/06/it-must-be-fed/

tl;dr:

"An advertising company."

hell

Buzzfeed is junk food

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com