Now that BuzzFeed has a few successful campaigns under its belt, like Schick's Shave The World "Razorbombing" campaign, which generated about 19 million views on BuzzFeed alone, the sales job is getting easier. It looks for advertisers and agencies with open minds. Peretti says his ad team, run by BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg, starts conversations with brands' chief marketing officers, not junior buyers. One of BuzzFeed's first viral posts was a meme it created called "Disaster Girl." It was a picture of a girl standing in front of a house that was burning down, and she had a sly look on her face, like she set the house on fire.īuzzFeed recently hired former ad-agency executive and Facebook veteran Jeff Greenspan as its chief creative officer, with the mission of boosting so-called "native" advertising-ads that fit into and play off of BuzzFeed's content, rather than just sitting on the same page like a banner ad.īut it's difficult to guarantee viral hits, or to convince 22-year-old media buyers to do a lot of extra work buying ad placements that can't be easily filled out on a spreadsheet or purchased through a trading desk. We're focused on the long term of having really healthy metrics and having people really love the site." Killing the cats every way possible There are things we could do to juice our uniques that we don't do, and there are things we can do to juice our pageviews that we don't do. I think about unique visitors as a proxy for, if people are sharing our content, then that should grow our uniques. I care a lot about whether we're consistently creating content that people think is worth sharing. "I care about if we're moving the conversation, and does our reporting move the conversation? I care about telling the public new information and breaking a story. "I care a lot about the quality of the content we create," says Peretti. But for Peretti, the fact that people are sharing content with their friends is a key indicator of its quality. Some people turn up their noses at popular content. Facebook is a more powerful traffic driver than direct visits, says Peretti, and social accounts for "well over 50%" of BuzzFeed's total visitors. So while Peretti says he cares about direct traffic to BuzzFeed-people who type into their browsers and make it a regular stop-he'd rather have readers tweet out an article than actually click on it. Now we're faced with a different environment where you're thinking about these networks of people who are sharing with other people in their lives, and that changes how you think about your front page." And Google is just a search box and you, and that's all you personally need. At The Huffington Post, we thought of the front page as a one-stop shop for everything you'd need in news. "They want to see content that someone else in their life that they care about will like, even if they don't like it very much. "That means we can't have an algorithm that is targeting content only a reader will like," Peretti explained. They wanted to find things for family members, friends, and Twitter followers. Peretti realized people weren't visiting his site just to entertain themselves. "We've spent two years not looking at Google search numbers," Peretti said. "A sort of 'aha' moment for me was when I got a few emails from people saying, 'I didn't find anything good to share on BuzzFeed today, I'm upset.'" That's because sharing became more important than searching as a way for people to find BuzzFeed content. While his site encourages readers to laugh out loud at its stories, he made no jokes as he discussed the history of his company, the future of media, and his plans to make his funny site be taken seriously by the world. That network has long fascinated Peretti, the Web's king of viral content. They come because a friend, colleague, or celebrity recommended an article to them-bouncing from glass screen to glass screen, a network of human connections overlaid on digital ones. And most don't come in through its homepage or Google searches. The six-year-old BuzzFeed is now read by 30 million visitors a month, according to its internal statistics. That eclectic mix spread far and wide across the Internet. I met the curly-haired, 38-year-old CEO at the end of the work day, on a day when his site had run a post about the world's cutest corgi and an eight-minute video about Hillary Clinton. They're staring at glass screens, too-and connecting with millions of readers who gaze at their creations through similar panes. The office is encased in glass, a transparent layer barely separating him from his newsroom of editors.
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