Disclosure: I work at BuzzFeed
If you are curious how BuzzFeed's business model works (specifically, the diversification of revenue sources), see this post by BuzzFeed's CEO a year ago: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/9-boxes
If you are curious how BuzzFeed's business model works (specifically, the diversification of revenue sources), see this post by BuzzFeed's CEO a year ago: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/9-boxes
> The media is in crisis. Google and Facebook are taking the vast majority of ad revenue, and paying content creators far too little for the value they deliver to users.
Buzzfeed had & still has next to zero original content creators. They have content re-packagers. Take images & thoughts from other websites(reddit/twitter) and puts them in a list.
Take ideas which smaller (& more original) content creators make and re-make it.
Disgusting.
Even the "content repackaging" is still work. What you're deriding here is a form of curation. Personally, I quite enjoy their roundups of the latest funny stuff from Twitter and Tumblr. And some of these listicles are in fact original content rather than merely "repackaged" content.
If you don't like the fluff "repackaged content", that's perfectly fine. Don't read it. But don't mistake the existence of this for a lack of original content. BuzzFeed puts out that "repackaged content" because it's popular and drives eyeballs for advertising. If that's what they have to do to fund BuzzFeed News, I say more power to them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/worl...
Don't forget they diversified into psuedo-science quizzes as well.
> What you're deriding here is a form of curation
Repackaging content is not curation by any stretch of the word.
> If that's what they have to do to fund BuzzFeed News, I say more power to them.
I don't agree that this is a case where the ends justify the means.
> Repackaging content is not curation by any stretch of the word.
It is literally the definition of curation.
> I don't agree that this is a case where the ends justify the means.
The means of... putting out content that you personally don't enjoy but other people do? Why does 100% of BuzzFeed's content have to be relevant to you in order to justify its existence?
They, and others, have left BuzzFeed.
Videos about leaving BuzzFeed are a bit of a meme, mostly complaining about long work hours to churn out low-quality content.
In any case, the fact that Try Guys was popular enough that they felt they could leave BuzzFeed and make it on their own only strengthens the argument that BuzzFeed is putting out good original content.
Funnily enough that's exactly their business model.