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THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BUZZFEED

BUZZFEED BUILT A DIGITAL MEDIA EMPIRE IN PART BY AGGREGATING VIRAL CONTENT FROM
SOCIAL MEDIA. A DECADE LATER, WHAT’S NEXT?

By Mia Sato

Nov 16, 2022, 2:00 PM GMT|10 Comments / 10 New

SHARE THIS STORY

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Illustration by Daniel Jurman for The Verge
Illustration by Daniel Jurman for The Verge

Nina* was scrolling Apple News in July 2021 when she came across a headline that
looked familiar. Even before opening the story, she had a feeling she might be
in it.

The BuzzFeed article, titled “People Are Sharing Non-Obvious Signs That Are
Actually A Cry For Help, And It’s Eye-Opening,” was taken from a Reddit thread
posted earlier in the day asking how to recognize when someone is struggling
with mental health issues. The story pulled in more than a dozen Reddit
responses to create a numbered list. A comment Nina had left was right at the
top.

“I posted something extremely personal and it happened to be the first quote in
their article which was one of the top articles of the day on Apple News,” Nina
told The Verge in an email. (Nina requested a pseudonym to protect her privacy.)
“That’s scary. I had no idea, I didn’t know my username would be linked with it,
and it was a total accident I stumbled upon it.”

When Nina asked other Redditors about BuzzFeed’s sourcing practices, she found a
sense of resignation but also open frustration — a sense of theft. BuzzFeed was
“sleazy,” some said, and most journalism was a “clickbait fiesta.” Even a few
conspiracy theories emerged, like the suggestion that BuzzFeed writers planted
r/AskReddit questions for upcoming stories. (BuzzFeed spokesperson Matt
Mittenthal says the outlet doesn’t do this, instead crowdsourcing responses from
readers.)

BuzzFeed built an empire on posts like this — mining Reddit, Tumblr, and other
social media sites for content with the potential to go viral, repackaging it
for a broader audience, and collecting the resulting traffic from Facebook
shares. In the early to mid-2010s, the strategy seemed all but unstoppable: cute
animals and feel-good photos subsidized a ferociously ambitious hard news
division, and BuzzFeed’s ability to drive internet culture sparked outright
jealousy from others in the media.

“I hate myself because I don’t work at BuzzFeed,” the letter read

An anonymous note sent to The Awl’s advice columnist in 2015 captured BuzzFeed’s
cultural cachet: “I hate myself because I don’t work at BuzzFeed,” the letter
read. “BuzzFeed is the most widely recognized media brand among young people,
and will inevitably eclipse the major media organizations and one day become a
super-hegemonic media power the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

But what worked in 2015 is a far cry from what works in 2022. On Monday,
BuzzFeed reported earnings for the fourth time as a public company, recording
$103.7 million in revenue for the latest quarter, above its own projections. But
the rest of the news was dire: BuzzFeed lost $27 million, and the time audiences
spent with its content plunged 32 percent from a year ago — its fourth straight
quarterly decline. The company expects revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022 to
dip compared to last year as well.

BuzzFeed’s ability to reflect, amplify, and create massive cultural moments by
giving a staff of hundreds free rein to invent new formats led to a $1.7 billion
valuation in 2016. It built a Pulitzer-winning newsroom with BuzzFeed News,
popularized a genre of simple and stylized cooking content with Tasty, and
launched a slate of beloved shows like BuzzFeed Unsolved and Another Round.

Today, BuzzFeed’s high-profile hosts have moved on, its news division has been
gutted, and its core website pays contractors flat rates starting around $100
per post to chase trending topics. The company’s valuation is down to just $237
million, and dozens of current and former employees are suing BuzzFeed for
losing out on millions, saying they weren’t able to sell their shares during the
brief financial bright spot after the company went public last year. They now
watch from the outside as the company’s value plummets and newer, more ruthless
competitors native to the platforms themselves generate viral chum faster and
more cheaply.

As social platforms continue to limit its reach, BuzzFeed needs to generate one
more neat trick to reinvent digital media — and save itself in the process.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Former BuzzFeed employees had good things to say about their workplace at its
peak, describing it as a place filled with funny, smart people who were allowed
to experiment and create interesting work. Most importantly, that work got
attention. Viral quizzes like “What state do you actually belong in?” were
shared endlessly. Cute animal photos gathered from around the internet might not
have had journalistic impact, but they did reach millions of readers. One day on
Facebook Live, more than 800,000 people watched as BuzzFeed staffers
methodically placed rubber bands on a watermelon until it exploded.

Media circles and even the public at large often turned its nose up at classic
BuzzFeed content. But for a while, the viral format of classic BuzzFeed was good
for business: between 2012 and 2013, the company tripled its revenue to more
than $64 million and invested millions into its editorial operations, according
to documents that leaked in 2015.

And despite what the casual reader might think, there was an art to putting
together the kind of BuzzFeed post that set traffic records.

“It’s actually a lot of work.”

“It wasn’t just, ‘I’m gonna go on Twitter and slap in 18 different tweets about
this TV show,’” say Cates Holderness, who worked at BuzzFeed for more than seven
years. “It takes time to really curate things that would go into a list that
seemingly takes five minutes to make. It’s actually a lot of work.”

Holderness was a BuzzFeed user first and was then hired as a content moderator,
eventually working on audience development and running several of BuzzFeed’s
popular Tumblr accounts. She and other staff took care to nurture relationships
with communities on other platforms — especially on Tumblr.

“There was a very mutually beneficial relationship,” Holderness says. “We would
find content from Tumblr to post on BuzzFeed. We would take content from
BuzzFeed and post it on our Tumblr.”

The relationship between Holderness and Tumblr eventually led to The Dress, one
of BuzzFeed’s most iconic pieces of content.

In 2015, the grainy image of a two-toned dress wreaked havoc on the internet
when people realized they saw the garment in different colors. BuzzFeed reposted
the picture along with 27 words and a poll at the bottom of the article,
generating 28 million page views in a single day. But Holderness didn’t just
lift the photo from the microblogging platform: a Tumblr follower had actively
sent it to her and asked her to weigh in on whether it was blue and black or
white and gold. That interaction was typical — there was a mutually beneficial
feedback loop between BuzzFeed staffers and the spaces they were embedded in.

“There’s a lot of goodwill, I think, to this day, for a lot of the former people
at BuzzFeed who have gone on to different projects,” Holderness says. She is now
the head of editorial at Tumblr.

Making good BuzzFeed content depended on staff being in tune with communities,
knowing what was trending, and finding a unique angle that got people to click —
whether that was royal family drama, cat videos, or the latest episode of a
trending TV show. It didn’t really matter what color The Dress was, says
Holderness, because the debate was low stakes. BuzzFeed was about having a
positive, lighthearted perspective on the internet, remixing and amplifying what
was happening on the platforms, not just mirroring what was already popular
there.

Illustration by Daniel Jurman for The Verge

For a period in the early to mid-2010s, viral content publishers looked like the
winners. BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and HuffPost dominated Facebook feeds in 2013,
according to data from NewsWhip, a company that tracks social media engagement
and activity. In early 2014, BuzzFeed topped NewsWhip’s rankings of top
publishers on Facebook, raking in 50 million engagements like shares and
comments on its content in one month on the platform.

BuzzFeed’s major business breakthrough was selling sponsored versions of its
viral lists and roundups to advertisers as “native advertising” — for example,
cat articles sponsored by a pet food company. CEO Jonah Peretti criticized
traditional banners-and-boxes advertising as “slow” and “terrible,” and for a
moment, it looked like BuzzFeed had cracked a winning formula. Advertising that
looked like normal BuzzFeed content was then boosted on social media platforms
that readers frequented; BuzzFeed spent nearly $10 million in 2013 buying views
of those ads on Facebook and other platforms. The strategy worked so well that
other publishers raced to build “branded content studios” to compete.
(Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, does all of these things and
also competes with BuzzFeed.)

But outlets that depend on third-party platforms for traffic live and die
according to platforms’ whims. A Facebook algorithm change aimed at reducing
“clickbait” around 2014, for example, hit viral content mills the hardest.
Upworthy, which at one point was called “the fastest growing media site of all
time,” went from 87 million monthly visitors to 49 million in a matter of months
in late 2013 — more than 40 percent of traffic wiped out. Smaller outfits that
were almost entirely dependent on Facebook traffic — like Distractify or
LittleThings — have since shuttered completely or disappeared from the general
consciousness.

REDDIT COPIED BUZZFEED, TOO

While BuzzFeed was busy bringing in massive traffic from disgruntled Reddit
users, Reddit itself wanted what BuzzFeed had. Upvoted, a short-lived BuzzFeed
knockoff, was the platform’s play in 2015.

A Wayback Machine capture of the front page of Upvoted in 2016 is remarkably
similar to what might have appeared on BuzzFeed: a live coverage feed of the
Panama Papers sits right above a “trending” stories bar that includes a list of
photoshopped images of Kevin Spacey and a deep dive in the “NoFap revolution.” A
former Upvoted staffer told The Verge that the resemblance was intentional.

“They wanted to be the next BuzzFeed.”

Redditors are not exactly known to always be buttoned up or candid. Now imagine
a job where a writer is asked to only source from Reddit, interview and credit
the OP of threads, and publish content on a blog meant to showcase the
community.

“I struggled with being like, ‘Am I supposed to quote ButtPlug69?’” says the
former staffer. “It’s all anonymous. You can’t actually find out who the person
is even if you interview them because then they would be outed.”

Upvoted didn’t last very long and never got anywhere close to the impact that
BuzzFeed had — it was put “on hold” in 2016, eventually morphing into a
corporate blog with company updates. (Roxy Young, chief marketing officer, says
Reddit decided to wind down Upvoted when new features like embeds and the mobile
app came along.)

Reddit found out the hard way that harnessing virality is a tough business —
maybe even too hard for the outlets that were on top.

Certain algorithm changes, like a 2018 overhaul of the News Feed to weigh
certain kinds of interactions more heavily, meaningfully limited BuzzFeed’s
reach on the platform. According to emails obtained by The Wall Street Journal,
Peretti flagged to Facebook that year that the algorithm’s new focus on
interactions between users amplified conflict at the expense of BuzzFeed’s
lighthearted and inoffensive content.

NewsWhip data shows that BuzzFeed’s footprint on Facebook has withered away for
years as a result of these changes. In 2016, BuzzFeed stories posted on the
platform had 329 million engagements; by 2018, that number had fallen to less
than half. Last year, BuzzFeed posts received 29 million engagements, and this
year is shaping up to be even worse.

Peretti has tried to expand beyond BuzzFeed’s core viral model. BuzzFeed’s
newsroom, which launched in 2012 with Ben Smith as editor-in-chief, went on to
win a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, but it was downsized earlier
this year, hours before the company posted poor results for its first quarter as
a public company. Attempts at expanding into podcasts with acclaimed shows like
Another Round and See Something Say Something ended in cancellations after its
in-house podcast unit was disbanded. (Peretti later admitted BuzzFeed’s business
team was “bad at selling podcasts to clients.”)

The publication keeps bumping up against a core issue: the main service provided
by BuzzFeed.com is no longer unique. “That space was really filled by social
media, the rise of Instagram and TikTok, all these different places where people
can become internet famous directly,” a former staffer of Upvoted, Reddit’s
short-lived BuzzFeed copycat blog, says. “I feel like there’s almost a middleman
that’s been removed.”

Eventually, Peretti had to pivot. He allowed traditional web advertising on
BuzzFeed after years of shunning banner ads — making the economics of BuzzFeed
the same as other publishers trying to extract revenue from a dwindling amount
of social media traffic.

BuzzFeed insists that it’s still producing content that people want to read, and
Facebook is still sending audiences its way. Of the 2.7 million hits that
“Teachers Share Incidents With Students That Caused Them To Change Their
Policies” garnered, 1.7 million referrals came from Facebook, according to
BuzzFeed spokesperson Mittenthal.

But a more recent change in Facebook priorities is again eating away at
BuzzFeed’s reach. As Facebook prioritizes shortform video to compete with
TikTok, longform video content — the stuff that helped catapult BuzzFeed
personalities into stars — is hurting. On a call with investors earlier this
week, BuzzFeed executives said Facebook accounted for the majority of the dip in
the time its audience spent on its properties.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today, rewriting Reddit threads and viral posts from elsewhere is part of
BuzzFeed’s regular workflow, says one person who writes for the site who spoke
on the condition of anonymity so as to not jeopardize their role. According to
the writer, each week, freelancers receive an email from an editor with story
ideas to write. The emails will request content around trending topics like TV
shows or movies. They’ll also link to specific threads on Reddit and other sites
that can be rewritten as stories. Sometimes the content comes from inside the
house. Writers regularly ask BuzzFeed readers to comment and weigh in on various
topics — like being a transracial adoptee or having an out-of-touch boss — and
go on to use those responses in future stories.

The work is fairly easy, says the writer. Copying and pasting responses, finding
images, and writing a short intro doesn’t take long, and the pay isn’t bad once
they get into a rhythm: $100 a post, with the rate sometimes going up if more
items were in a list. (BuzzFeed says rates vary depending on the assignment and
writer.) Stories based on user-generated content tend to bring in the views, the
writer says, but someone is always angry about it — “write your own stories” is
a common complaint. When responses from BuzzFeed commenters are slim, they’ll go
to Reddit to find related comments to supplement the post.

“It’s not about whether I want my comment featured. It’s the principle behind
how it got there.”

BuzzFeed.com now has around 30 staffers, says Jess Probus, senior vice president
of editorial, with the classic viral content produced by full-time employees,
freelancers, and volunteer community writers. For the full-time staff, nobody’s
entire job is curating internet content for BuzzFeed — everyone is expected to
be able to do it.

For Redditors, having posts reused by BuzzFeed, TikTokers, or other viral
aggregators is so common it’s now a recurring joke. Some users have taken to
adding disclaimers at the top of their posts: BuzzFeed, don’t use this without
my permission. Others scheme to plant fake threads and answers, reveling in the
possibility that BuzzFeed might source and publish bullshit comments.

Nina, the Reddit user whose comment was pulled for a BuzzFeed story, says that
if the outlet had reached out to ask for permission, she would have been
“thrilled and very cooperative.”

“It’s not about whether I want my comment featured,” Nina says. “It’s the
principle behind how it got there.”

Probus defended the aggregation process, saying BuzzFeed has added more
prominent credit to aggregation posts over the years, including using Reddit’s
embed features in articles.

“I think there’s sort of a generous misunderstanding of who is extracting value
from this content people are posting for free on the platform,” Probus says.
“But it’s not the publishers who are curating it, it’s the platforms. And I
absolutely understand that that does feel like a complete imbalance of value.”

Reddit itself has responded to the editorial repurposing of its users’ content
in a number of ways. Its press kit, for example, includes a 21-page document of
media guidelines, which explicitly encourage journalists to ask Reddit users for
permission before including their posts in stories. Reddit also has internal
teams that work with press to educate outlets on the “best practices” of
sourcing from subreddits, Roxy Young, chief marketing officer at Reddit, told
The Verge in an email.

Users might feel one way about it, but Reddit, Inc. isn’t hostile to BuzzFeed.
Aggregators like BuzzFeed ultimately benefit the platform, says Young. If
someone sees a viral BuzzFeed post about a Reddit thread, they might become a
new Reddit user.

“Many will come to the platform looking for one thing and then fall into a
Reddit rabbit hole of endless knowledge on a given topic — from there, it’s a
quick jump to becoming a Reddit regular,” she says.

Illustration by Daniel Jurman for The Verge

As time went on, the demand for a constant stream of viral hits took its toll on
BuzzFeed’s staff. Staff started out without hard quotas or benchmarks;
eventually, metrics-based goals were “firmly” pushed onto editorial, Holderness
says, and gaming the algorithms on distribution platforms became central to
output.

“There were a lot of folks who were, I think, under a lot of pressure to
continuously drive big, steady traffic,” she says. “When you’re asked to do
however many posts each week to get however much traffic each week, sometimes
you’re just trying to hit a quota.”

Maybe the real problem for BuzzFeed was that they cracked the formula too well.
Anyone can repackage Reddit content. Take, for example, Twitter accounts that
post screenshots and polls straight from the more ridiculous r/AmItheAsshole and
r/relationship_advice Reddit threads — these have more than a million followers
combined and regularly go viral. TikTok accounts garner millions of views on
videos that consist of screenshots of Reddit posts being “read” aloud by AI
text-to-speech software.

BuzzFeed’s homepage looks almost frozen in time: “LOL” and “WIN” section buttons
are prominently displayed at the top in yellow and black. An “Internet Finds”
page lists trending posts from YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and other social media
sites, filtered through a talky writing style, with pictures and GIFs crammed
between sentences — the equivalent of having eyes nowhere and everywhere on the
internet at once.

On whether BuzzFeed is still relevant, Probus disagrees with the premise of the
question.

BuzzFeed still connects with young people, she says, but the bigger problem is
that brands generally have lost the trust of their audience. To counter the
shifting power from institutions to individuals, BuzzFeed’s plan is to make
writers, curators, and other “creators” a more central part of its structure and
mission. It’s a tactic that should sound familiar to anyone who followed
BuzzFeed years ago because it was BuzzFeed employees and talent that created a
loyal following. One by one, they left or were laid off.

As a former staffer who worked on the business side of the company put it: the
BuzzFeed brand just isn’t cool anymore.

“I just feel wistful for early BuzzFeed days. It was a very specific time on the
internet and a very specific vibe on the internet,” Holderness says. As we talk,
she points to the hoodie draped over the chair she’s sitting on: a branded relic
from her time at BuzzFeed.

“It was really fun.”

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