Buzzfeed, Again?

 Remember talking to these folks, long ago.   As a means of gathering data about retail trends.  Never congealed.   A revisit of current activity.

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

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.   ... '