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BuzzFeed, Inc.

Type of business	Private
Type of site	Entertainment News
Available in	English French Spanish Arabic German Portuguese Japanese
Founded	November 1, 2006; 11 years ago (2006-11-01)
Headquarters	New York City, U.S.
Key people	Jonah Peretti (co-founder and CEO) John S. Johnson III (co-founder)
Revenue	US$167 million (2015)[1][2]
Employees	1,701 (December 2017)[3]
Website	www.buzzfeed.com
Alexa rank	188 (February 2018)[4]
Advertising	Native
Registration	Optional
Current status	Active

BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media and news company based in New York City. The firm is a news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media.^[5] BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 as a viral lab focusing on tracking viral content, by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III. Kenneth Lerer, co-founder and chairman of The Huffington Post, started as a co-founder and investor in BuzzFeed and is now the executive chairman as well.

Originally known for online quizzes, "listicles", and pop culture articles, the company has grown into a global media and technology company providing coverage on a variety of topics including politics, DIY, animals and business.^[6][7] In late 2011, Ben Smith of Politico was hired as editor-in-chief to expand the site into serious journalism, long-form journalism, and reportage.^[8] After years of investment into investigative journalism, BuzzFeed News had by 2018 won the National Magazine Award^[9] and the George Polk Award^[10], and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize^[9][11] and the Michael Kelly Award.^[9]

History

Jonah Peretti founded BuzzFeed in November 2006

Prior to establishing BuzzFeed, Peretti was director of research and development and the OpenLab at Eyebeam, Johnson's New York City-based art and technology nonprofit, where he experimented with other viral media.^[12][13]

While working at the Huffington Post, Peretti started BuzzFeed (originally called BuzzFeed Laboratories)^[14] as a side project, in 2006, in partnership with his former supervisor John Johnson. In the beginning, BuzzFeed employed no writers or editors, just an "algorithm to cull stories from around the web that were showing stirrings of virality."^[15] The site initially launched an instant messaging client, BuzzBot, which messaged users a link to popular content. The messages were sent based on algorithms which examined the links that were being quickly disseminated, scouring through the feeds of hundreds of blogs that were aggregating them. Later, the site began spotlighting the most popular links that BuzzBot found. Peretti hired curators to help describe the content that was popular around the web.^[16] In 2011, Peretti hired Politico's Ben Smith, who earlier had achieved much attention as a political blogger, to assemble a news operation in addition to the many aggregated "listicles".^[17]

In 2016, BuzzFeed formally separated its news and entertainment content into BuzzFeed News and the newly formed BuzzFeed Entertainment Group, which also includes BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.^[18][19] As of 2016, BuzzFeed had correspondents from 12 countries,^[20] and foreign editions in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom,^[21] By the end of 2017, BuzzFeed employed around 1,700 employees worldwide, although it announced plans in November to lay off around 100 employees in the U.S. and 45 in the U.K;^[3][22][23] and 100 in France in June 2018.^[24]

Funding

In August 2014, BuzzFeed raised $50 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, more than doubling previous rounds of funding.^[25] The site was reportedly valued at around $850 million by Andreessen Horowitz.^[25] BuzzFeed generates its advertising revenue through native advertising that matches its own editorial content, and does not rely on banner ads.^[16] BuzzFeed also uses its familiarity with social media to target conventional advertising through other channels, such as Facebook.^[26]

In December 2014, growth equity firm General Atlantic acquired $50M in secondary stock of the company.^[27]

In August 2015, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in BuzzFeed.^[28] Along with plans to hire more journalists to build a more prominent "investigative" unit, BuzzFeed is hiring journalists around the world and plans to open outposts in India, Germany, Mexico, and Japan.^[29]

In October 2016, BuzzFeed raised $200 million from Comcast's TV and movie arm NBCUniversal, at a valuation of roughly $1.7 billion.^[30]

Acquisitions

BuzzFeed's first acquisition was in 2012 when the company purchased Kingfish Labs, a startup founded by Rob Fishman, initially focused on optimizing Facebook ads.^[31]

On October 28, 2014, BuzzFeed announced its next acquisition, taking hold of Torando Labs. The Torando team was to become BuzzFeed's first data engineering team.^[32]

Content

BuzzFeed produces daily content, in which the work of staff reporters, contributors, syndicated cartoon artists, and its community are featured. Popular formats on the website include lists, videos, and quizzes. The style of such content inspired the parody website ClickHole.^[6][33] While BuzzFeed initially was focused exclusively on such viral content, according to The New York Times, "it added more traditional content, building a track record for delivering breaking news and deeply reported articles" in the years up to 2014.^[34] In that year, BuzzFeed deleted over 4000 early posts, "apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider", as observed by The New Yorker.^[35]

BuzzFeed consistently ranked at the top of NewsWhip's "Facebook Publisher Rankings" from December 2013 to April 2014, until The Huffington Post entered the position.^[36]

News

BuzzFeed's news division began in December 2011 with the appointment of Ben Smith as editor-in-chief. In 2013, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs of ProPublica was hired as head of investigative reporting.^[37] By 2016, Buzzfeed had 20 investigative journalists.^[9]

Video

BuzzFeed Video, BuzzFeed Motion Picture's flagship YouTube channel,^[38] produces original content. Its production studio and team are based in Los Angeles. Since hiring Ze Frank in 2012, BuzzFeed Video has produced several video series, including "The Try Guys". In August 2014, the company announced a new division, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, which may produce feature-length films.^[34] As of August 27, 2018, BuzzFeed Video's YouTube channel had garnered more than 13.8 billion views and more than 17.2 million subscribers.^[39] It recently was announced that YouTube has signed on for two feature length series to be created by BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, entitled Broke and Squad Wars.^[40]

Community

On July 17, 2012, humor website McSweeney's Internet Tendency published a satirical piece entitled "Suggested BuzzFeed Articles",^[41] prompting BuzzFeed to create many of the suggestions.^{[42][43][44][45]} BuzzFeed listed McSweeney's as a "Community Contributor."^[42] The post subsequently received more than 350,000 page views,^[43] prompted BuzzFeed to ask for user submissions,^[42][46] and received media attention.^{[43][44][46][47]} Subsequently, the website launched the "Community" section in May 2013 to enable users to submit content. Users initially are limited to publishing only one post per day, but may increase their submission capacity by raising their "Cat Power",^[48] described on the BuzzFeed website as "an official measure of your rank in BuzzFeed's Community." A user's Cat Power increases as they achieve greater prominence on the site.^[49]

Technology and social media

BuzzFeed receives the majority of its traffic by creating content that is shared on social media websites. BuzzFeed works by judging their content on how viral it will become, operating in a "continuous feedback loop" where all of its articles and videos are used as input for its sophisticated data operation.^[26] The site continues to test and track their custom content with an in-house team of data scientists and an external-facing "social dashboard." Using an algorithm dubbed "Viral Rank" created by Jonah Peretti and Duncan Watts, the company uses this formula to let editors, users, and advertisers try lots of different ideas, which maximizes distribution.^[50] Staff writers are ranked by views on an internal leaderboard. In 2014, BuzzFeed received 75% of its views from links on social media outlets such as Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook.^[16][34]

Tasty

BuzzFeed's video series on comfort food, Tasty, is made for Facebook, where it has ninety million followers as of November 2017^[update].^{[citation needed]} The channel has substantially more views than BuzzFeed's dedicated food site.^[51] The channel included five spinoff segments: "Tasty Junior"—which eventually spun off into its own page,^[52] "Tasty Happy Hour" (alcoholic beverages), "Tasty Fresh", "Tasty Vegetarian", and "Tasty Story"—which has celebrities making and discussing their own recipes. Tasty has also released a cookbook.^[53]
The company also operates these international versions of Tasty in other languages.^{[citation needed]}Tasty has also released its own kitchenware, which includes several products such as spatulas, cooking sheets, and mixing bowls. These products are sold in collaboration with Walmart.^[54]Tasty also sells their "One Top", which is a smart induction cooktop,^[55] as well as "Tasty Kits", which are kits that contain cooking items for cooking at home.^[56]

Worth It

Since 2016, Tasty also sponsors a show named Worth It starring Steven Lim, Andrew Ilnyckyj, and Adam Bianchi.^[57] In each episode, the trio visit three different food places with three drastically different price points in one food category. Steven Lim also stars in BuzzFeed Blue's "Worth It – Lifestyle" videos. The series is similar, in that three items or experiences are valued from different companies, each at their different price point, but focus on material items and experiences, such as plane seats, hotel rooms, and haircuts.

BuzzFeed Unsolved

BuzzFeed Unsolved is the most successful web series on BuzzFeed's BuzzFeedBlue, created by Ryan Bergara. The show features Bergara and Shane Madej (who replaced original co-host Brent Bennett). The show covers some of history's most famous unsolved mysteries, presenting them and the theories that surround them in a comedic manner. In some episodes, they even visit the places involved with the mystery, often ghost hunting during Supernatural episodes.

The Try Guys

The Try Guys are a quartet of friends (Eugene Lee Yang, Ned Fulmer, Keith Habersberger, and Zach Kornfeld) who put themselves in different, and at times, compromising situations and record the results.^[58] In June 2018, the four left BuzzFeed and created their own independent channel, also titled "The Try Guys".^[59]

Night In / Night Out

Night In/Night Out is a channel run by Ned and Ariel Fulmer. This show features the couple on two different dates, one at home featuring a homemade meal (using a Buzzfeed Tasty Recipe) and one at a restaurant in the Los Angeles area. Each episode focuses on one particular meal, such as baked salmon or hamburgers. At the end of each episode, Ned and Ariel decide whether they preferred the home-cooked meal (and the accompanying ambience and price tag) or the meal at the restaurant.^[60]

Notable stories

"The dress"

In February 2015, a post resulting in a debate over the color of an item of clothing from BuzzFeed's Tumblr editor Cates Holderness garnered more than 28 million views in one day, setting a record for most concurrent visitors to a BuzzFeed post.^[62] Holderness had shown the picture to other members of the site's social media team, who immediately began arguing about the dress colors among themselves. After creating a simple poll for users of the site, she left work and took the subway back to her Brooklyn home. When she got off the train and checked her telephone, it was overwhelmed by the messages on various sites. "I couldn't open Twitter because it kept crashing. I thought somebody had died, maybe. I didn't know what was going on." Later in the evening the page set a new record at BuzzFeed for concurrent visitors, which would reach 673,000 at its peak.^[61][63]

Watermelon stunt

On April 8, 2016, two BuzzFeed interns created a live stream on Facebook, during which rubber bands were wrapped one by one around a watermelon until the pressure caused it to explode. The Daily Dot compared it to something from America's Funniest Home Videos or by the comedian Gallagher, and "just as stupid-funny, but with incredible immediacy and zero production costs". The video is seen as part of Facebook's strategy to shift to live video, Facebook Live, to counter the rise of Snapchat and Periscope among a younger audience.^[64]

Awards and recognition

In 2017, BuzzFeed won Webby Awards for Best News App and Best Interview/Talk Show (for Another Round),^[65] and president Greg Coleman was named Publishing Executive of the Year by Digiday.^[66]

Criticism and controversies

Plagiarism

Benny Johnson was fired from BuzzFeed in July 2014 for plagiarism

BuzzFeed has been accused of plagiarizing original content from competitors throughout the online and offline press. In June 2012, Gawker's Adrian Chen observed that one of BuzzFeed's most popular writers—Matt Stopera—frequently had copied and pasted "chunks of text into lists without attribution."^[67] In March 2013, The Atlantic Wire also reported several "listicles" had apparently been copied from Reddit and other websites.^[68] In July 2014, BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson was accused of multiple instances of plagiarism.^[69] Two anonymous Twitter users chronicled Johnson attributing work that was not his own, but "directly lift[ed] from other reporters, Wikipedia, and Yahoo! Answers", all without credit.^[70] BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith initially defended Johnson, calling him a "deeply original writer".^[71] Days later, Smith acknowledged that Johnson had plagiarized the work of others 40 times and announced that Johnson had been fired, and apologized to BuzzFeed readers. "Plagiarism, much less copying unchecked facts from Wikipedia or other sources, is an act of disrespect to the reader", Smith said. "We are deeply embarrassed and sorry to have misled you."^[71] In total, 41 instances of plagiarism were found and corrected.^[72] In 2016, claims surfaced of the YouTube channel BuzzFeedVideo stealing ideas and content from other creators.^[73] Among the accusers are YouTube users Akilah Obviously, Cr1TiKaL(penguinz0)^[74] and JaclynGlenn.^{[citation needed]}

BuzzFeed has been the subject of multiple copyright infringement lawsuits, for both using content it had no rights to and encouraging its proliferation without attributing its sources: one for an individual photographer's photograph,^[75] and another for nine celebrity photographs from a single photography company.^[76]

Accuracy and reliability

In October 2014, a Pew Research Center survey^[77] found that in the United States, BuzzFeed was viewed as an unreliable source by the majority of people, regardless of political affiliation.^[78][79]Adweek noted that most respondents had not heard of BuzzFeed, and many users do not consider BuzzFeed a news site.^[80] In a subsequent Pew report based on 2014 surveys,^[81] BuzzFeed was among the least trusted sources by millennials.^[82][83] A 2016 study by the Columbia Journalism Review found readers less likely to trust a story (originally published in Mother Jones) that appeared to originate on BuzzFeed than the same article on The New Yorker website.^[84]

In 2013, Buzzfeed named "My Lips are for Blowing" as one of "21 Awkwardly Sexual Albums"; the Museum of Hoaxes subsequently reported there was no such album and that the image of the album used in the Buzzfeed article had been lifted from a 2010 fictitious album cover design created by a blogger going by the name Estancia de la Ding Dong.^[85]

Advertiser influence on editorial

In April 2015, BuzzFeed drew scrutiny after Gawker observed the publication had deleted two posts that criticized advertisers.^[86] One of the posts criticized Dove soap (manufactured by Unilever), while another criticized Hasbro.^[87] Both companies advertise with BuzzFeed. Ben Smith apologized in a memo to staff for his actions. "I blew it," Smith wrote. "Twice in the past couple of months, I've asked editors—over their better judgment and without any respect to our standards or process—to delete recently published posts from the site. Both involved the same thing: my overreaction to questions we've been wrestling with about the place of personal opinion pieces on our site. I reacted impulsively when I saw the posts and I was wrong to do that. We've reinstated both with a brief note."^[88] Days later, one of the authors of the deleted posts, Arabelle Sicardi, resigned.^[89] An internal review by the company found three additional posts deleted for being critical of products or advertisements (by Microsoft, Pepsi, and Unilever).^[90]

In 2016, the Advertising Standards Authority of the United Kingdom ruled that BuzzFeed broke the UK advertising rules for failing to make it clear that an article on "14 Laundry Fails We've All Experienced" that promoted Dylon was an online advertorial paid for by the brand.^[91][92] Although the ASA agreed with BuzzFeed's defense that links to the piece from its homepage and search results clearly labelled the article as "sponsored content," this failed to take into account that individuals might link to the story directly, ruling that the labeling "was not sufficient to make clear that the main content of the web page was an advertorial and that editorial content was therefore retained by the advertiser."^[92][93]

Hiring practices

In February 2016, Scaachi Koul, a Senior Writer for BuzzFeed Canada, tweeted a request for pitches stating that BuzzFeed was "...looking for mostly non-white non-men" followed by "If you are a white man upset that we are looking mostly for non-white non-men I don't care about you go write for Maclean's." When confronted, she followed with the tweet "White men are still permitted to pitch, I will read it, I will consider it. I'm just less interested because, ugh, men." In response to the tweets, Koul received numerous rape and death threats and racist insults.^[94][95] Sarmishta Subramanian, a former colleague of Koul's, writing for Maclean's, condemned the reaction to the tweets, and commented that Koul's request for diversity was appropriate. Subramanian said that her provocative approach raised concerns of tokenism that might hamper BuzzFeed's stated goals.^[96]

See also

• Mic (media company)


• Upworthy


• Vice Media, Inc.


• Vox Media

References

Further reading

• 
  Küng, Lucy (2015). "BuzzFeed – Making Life More Interesting for the Hundreds of Millions Bored at Work". Innovators in Digital News. I.B.Tauris & Co. pp. 55–74. ISBN 978-1784534165. 
  

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to BuzzFeed.

• Official website