At BuzzFeed, a Pivot to Movies and Television | Hacker News Reader

At BuzzFeed, a Pivot to Movies and Television

nytimes.com

48 pointsminimaxir31 comments

Buzzfeed should also open restaurants and or at least license “Tasty,” to a restaurant juggernaut company so they can create Tasty restaurants.

It could be the first social media menu driven restaurant where the most liked Tasty videos/dishes establish the menu.

I mean I don't cook, but constantly salivate over their videos.

Their Tasty content is social media gold (well produced food "porn"). It's highly viral and well liked by many people. It's weird to me that you're getting downvotes for suggesting that Buzzfeed take this content and do more with it.

I may personally hate the idea of social media popularity being used to dictate the content of a menu, but I suspect there's a kernel of a great idea there. After all, this is essentially the big data or Netflix approach to deciding what content to make. Likes are just one metric that would be needed, but you can certainly get an idea of the kinds of things that make people drool.

Buzzfeed will likely first want to move into more cooking shows before opening a full restaurant to see if they can create some more fans, possibly even see if they can have their own homegrown celebrity chefs, then branch into restaurant/food space.

Yup, Tasty videos are a hit. They're one of the few parts of social media I actually enjoy. I will sometimes log on Facebook just to see if anyone has shared a new one.

If the doubters want to see their reach, just see how many people have taken the time to create their own parody videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMPaIgVeCT0

Tasty itself is in a few different languages and regions, so to the GP's point, it clearly has some brand power and "Tasty Cafe" or a concept along those lines could work.

They've been known to steal a ton of their recipes from other people, without acknowledging them.

https://mic.com/articles/163958/the-secret-ingredient-to-buz...

Also, there is a reason we have an executive chef developing menus. Ever heard of too many cooks spoiling the soup? That, and the general population has shit taste in everything from food, to entertainment. Having the children of buzzfeed deciding this, will end up with a menu full of macaroni and cheese, and pizza logs.

Can an executive chef be replaced with enough data? I'm inclined to believe so.

Also, recipes are not copyrightable or otherwise able to be locked up in some form of intellectual property. Thankfully. I would hate to see a world where I could only buy chocolate chips and chocolate chip cookie recipes from Nestle.

Of course, it would be nice if they add attribution as needed, but tough to prove for something like this (bacon weave being a fairly common new fangled technique applied to everything from tacos to ice cream).

> Can an executive chef be replaced with enough data? I'm inclined to believe so.

I want what tastes good to me, not what tastes good to most people. You can't solve personal subjective problems with data.

Especially when the masses enjoy justin bieber, and the olive garden.

Recipes are not copyrightable so there's no such thing as "stealing" them. They are passed around freely without attribution all over the virtual as well as physical world, that's not uncommon. It would be nice if BuzzFeed could cite where they got the recipe but it's not strictly required and they don't know of where they got it was the original source or not. Anyways, give me a break, bacon weaves are hardly a unique idea. In fact, they are really overdone.

Most internet recipes are made by food bloggers and grandmas, not executive chefs.

"Too many cooks spoil the soup" doesn't mean "most people can't make good recipes."

Tasty existing doesn't preclude pretentiousrecipes.com so I'm not sure I understand that criticism.

The key to a successful BuzzFeed restaurant would be lots of different restaurants, each catering to a different market segment.

It’s like the old story about how Prego discovered that you can’t just make one sauce everyone loves, you make a chunky and a smooth and a meaty and meet the needs of each different set of tastes. Just like how Netflix doesn’t have a single hit show, they hit all the different demos.

Yeah i was initially getting downvoted ... i guess for whatever reason some folks wouldn't go to a social media menu driven restaurant but millions more would Im sure!

Also, they could just license their name to say the owners of Ruby Tuesday's or another dying chain to revitalize itself(at least try something new).

One of the major drivers of this new age in BuzzFeed has been driven by Ze Frank[0] of all people. He ushered in an era of "viral" content before that was even a thing. I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of how he has helped transform them into more of a original content company.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze_Frank

Makes sense, the way I see it: Netflix is the distribution platform for long form non-live content. By building out these videos BuzzFeed realised they can v become an oven churning mildly interesting content to sell to Netflix that engages the 20-40 bracket. Basically stuff they want to see. Perhaps I'm wrong but that's how it feels it's going to go.

This makes sense to me because there are a lot of these youtube-esque clones that are finally reaching fairly good production value and can recut what they are building for a youtube format as well as a structured format. It feels like an easy landing area for these premium (in production) web channels, where their content has the youtube value curve of 1-3 days but easily could be repackaged in a form to be resold to someone else.

That is exactly what we're doing at TBD

http://www.tbd.com

Packaging top quality digital content from YouTube, and vimeo, getting the rights direct from creators and managers. Then repackaging it into 30 minute and 60 minute shows.

Oh neat, I didn't know firms involved yet.

I really hope not. Buzzfeed Canada is terrible a slimy tabloid organization I couldn't imagine in the 80s The National Enquirer starting a cable TV channel. Maybe the US version of Buzzfeed is different.

One day I was listening to an episode of Radiolab[1] (an NPR podcast) and I was surprised to hear they were collaborating with Buzzfeed. For the most part I still think of them as a listicles site but I guess they are trying to break into more serious journalism.

1. http://www.radiolab.org/story/60-words/

They've been doing serious journalism for a few years now. They use their clickbait nonsense to fund it. Here's a short article I wrote about it earlier this year: https://medium.com/@wwmeredith/10-reasons-not-to-write-off-b...

I don't write regularly, but I've had this conversation with so many of my friends and colleagues that I decided to put it down somewhere.

The basic gist is that the old newspapers funded deep investigative journalism with want ads, funny papers, sports pages, and the weather. They can't do that anymore, but Buzzfeed is finding a way. It's fascinating.

They should rebrand their serious journalism. I know about it, and know they sometimes produce important work, but I never read their articles unless another organization reports on it as being valuable. There's too much risk of getting a waste of time currently.

Under what circumstances do you update your priors?

They have been doing serious journalism for quite a while and have proven themselves very capable of it.

Here's stuff that's been submitted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com

Buzzfeed Canada is terrible a slimy tabloid organization

I don't doubt this necessarily, but could you provide a quick recap? As in, did they create a slimy tabloid site from scratch? Or did they, like, buy some site that was already slimy, and just continue trudging along in the path of sliminess?

Coz like "we needz the ad revenue from the slimy stuff to bankroll our dalliance with serious journalism", and all that.

I avoid the website unless I click a link by mistake. My brief encounters are enough to avoid them. I think there is a difference between the US and Canadian organizations.

The most recent incident was they stated white men need not apply for a job there, they often had anti make or anti white articles. Isn't that racism or at least bigotry?

https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/46mrmb/buzzfeed_can...

BuzzFeed News has a large investigative team with several Pulitzer Prize winners. Last year they were a finalist for international reporting: https://www.poynter.org/news/buzzfeed-news-gets-its-first-pu...

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