One of the biggest Internet media companies in America is located in New York City. The company focuses on entertainment, social news, and digital media.
Foundation of the Company
BuzzFeed was founded by John S. Johnson III and Jonah Peretti in 2006. Kenneth Lerer is its executive chairman who started as a co-founder and investor in the company. Peretti was the director of research and development and also the OpenLab at Eyebeam before establishing BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed was started as a side project by Jonah while he was still working for the Huffington Post.
Jonah’s partner in the company was John Johnson. At the start, BuzzFeed just used an algorithm to cull stories from the internet that were showing stirrings of virality as they did not hire any editors or writers at the time. Users get the link of popular contents by the message sent to them by an instant messaging client, BuzzBot, which was initially launched by the site. Later they started highlighting the most popular links found by BuzzBot. Now curators were hired by Peretti to describe popular web contents.
Ben Smith was hired from Politico by Peretti, who is rated highly as a political blogger. He started many new operations for the benefit of the company
Different Ventures
The daily content is produced in BuzzFeed which contain the work of their staff reporters, syndicated cartoon artists, contributors, and its community. Popular formats like quizzes and videos can be found on the website too. But the main Focus of BuzzFeed is to get viral contents. According to The New York Times, the content of BuzzFeed are a lot traditional, and according to The New Yorker, the contents are very stupid.
BuzzFeed Motion Picture’s flagship channel is BuzzFeed Video, which always produces original content to the people. Los Angeles is the centre of their video production. One of their most fan-favourite series is ‘The Try Guys.’ Their YouTube Channel has more than 12.6 million subscribers, with more than 10.2 billion views.
The majority of work done by BuzzFeed is sharing content on social media websites. They have an in-house team of data scientists who test all their contents. 75% of views that BuzzFeed gets are from Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Net Worth of BuzzFeed
According to Re/Code’s Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka, NBCUniversal is investing $250 million in BuzzFeed. Last summer BuzzFeed, led by Andreessen Horwitz’s Chris Dixon, raised $50 million Series E round. The company revenue in 2014 is more than $100 million. Reportedly various other companies are also interested in investing in BuzzFeed. As of April 2024, the estimated net worth of BuzzFeed is around $1.5 billion.
Tasty is sponsoring a show with the name ‘Worth It’ from 2016. The stars of the show are Andrew Ilnyckyj, Steven Lim, and Adam Bianchi. They visit different places to taste the food of various categories in various price. BuzzFeed Blue’s “Worth It – Lifestyle” videos also have Steven Lim as a star. They share their experiences too like hotel rooms, plane seats, and haircuts.