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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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