BuzzFeed was internet native! BuzzFeed was viral! There were 15 reasons BuzzFeed understood social media like nobody else, and you wonât believe Number 7. In the end, none of this mattered, and now BuzzFeed News is finally closing down, with the loss of 180 jobs.
For the audience that BuzzFeed now tries to woo, the proposition that it was ever an award-winning news pioneer is a surprise. âThe quiz site?â, asked my teens, who are three years younger than BuzzFeed, and who were astonished to discover that it had ever carried any serious news. Yet in its heyday, around a decade ago, media giants beat a path to its door. If they did not wish to emulate the BuzzFeed formula, then they came to learn. BuzzFeed was thought to be in possession of something very like ancient occult knowledge: how to build a digital audience, and apparently, grow revenue online.
BuzzFeed had been launched by Jonah Peretti in 2006 as a sideline, an amuse-bouche. Peretti had no journalism background, and as the dot com bubble exploded, he was completing a Masters degree at the MIT Media Lab, John Negroponteâs playpen for clever dilletantes, apparently having missed all the fun.
But a new bubble was emerging. The previous year, he had had helped start the Huffington Post with Andrew Breitbart. The New York Times called Peretti a âviral marketing hot dogâ. Â Peretti found that with no journalism baggage, he had an advantage when it came to seducing venture capitalists. He could hop shamelessly from one âbusiness model to another. Some of the tricks endured: listicles, pets, more pets and show business â the relentless repackaging of trivia and sponsored native content. BuzzFeed acquired a Pulitzer, then ran Christopher Steeleâs notorious âpiss dossierâ on Donald Trump, after everyone else passed on it.
New hires, including in the UK editorial staff poached from the Guardian, the Times and the BBC during BuzzFeedâs period of rapid growth, couldnât believe their luck. For a brief period, top line revenue trebled annually, but it was short-lived. News was always an awkward passenger on this ride, a high-maintenance trophy date, and in 2019 a chastened Peretti confessed that news had been a mistake.
Unlike Ariana Huffington, who sold her eponymous operation to AOL for ÂŁ350 million in 2011, Peretti never succeeded in selling the operation at or near its peak valuation. He never found a bigger fool, and had to keep hustling investors. So BuzzFeed was trapped in a cycle of over-raising capital, overspending, then cutting back and grasping for the next hustle. It even ended up, this year, publishing AI-generated articles.
BuzzFeed finally floated, thanks to a special purpose acquisition vehicle, in 2021. There was something of the dog returning to its own vomit as Peretti acquired HuffPo in between Covid lockdowns â and HuffPo now carries the news torch for BuzzFeed.
Underlying all of Perettiâs investor pitches was a problem no one to this day has really overcome: the belief that you can create a successful business from online advertising. This has been disproved repeatedly, as one senior industry executive who has devised strategy for global media companies told me: âIf you want to have a good business, you want to be able to set the price for what youâre selling. So that the more you sell, the more money you make,â he said. âThe online advertising market is controlled by large networks, and has infinite inventory â will not let that happen. So itâs a buyers marketâ.
The more you spend, the less you make. Realising this, many titles turned to a subscription model instead. But BuzzFeed, with its ephemeral, almost weightless content designed for âblow-throughâ grazers, was ill-placed to do so: nothing it did encouraged loyalty or returning readers.
Did anyone ever click on BuzzFeed to find out what it was saying about the big story or the big issues of the day? The question is so absurd, it answers itself.
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SubscribeBuzzFeed was just terrible and needed to go. Its news amounted to little more than listicles such as ’50 creepy things straight guys do’.
I agree it was terrible but, as the author suggests, I do think it was an informative experiment to test the idea that you can make a profit on the internet with nothing more than clickbait.
Turns out that running a profitable internet news/opinion site requires good content plus building a personal connection with your readers, for example by providing a comments section which I’m sure is a nuisance to support and moderate.
I agree it was terrible but, as the author suggests, I do think it was an informative experiment to test the idea that you can make a profit on the internet with nothing more than clickbait.
Turns out that running a profitable internet news/opinion site requires good content plus building a personal connection with your readers, for example by providing a comments section which I’m sure is a nuisance to support and moderate.
BuzzFeed was just terrible and needed to go. Its news amounted to little more than listicles such as ’50 creepy things straight guys do’.
It did occasionally produce original reporting on important stories.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/michigan-kidnapping-gretchen-whitmer-fbi-informant
It did occasionally produce original reporting on important stories.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/michigan-kidnapping-gretchen-whitmer-fbi-informant
Never heard of it
Never heard of it
does clickbait work with Salmon and trout?
does clickbait work with Salmon and trout?
Sadly, there are swathes of people who actually thought it was real journalism. Theyâll do well in an AI generated future
Sadly, there are swathes of people who actually thought it was real journalism. Theyâll do well in an AI generated future
Donât let the door hit you on the way out.
I enjoyed the quizzes (mostly during slack moments at work!) but I never looked at the other stuff.