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Apparently, when it comes to ideas, all we have left is recycling, so — along with the cover story on psychodelic drugs namechecking Timothy Leary — NYMag channels Jerry Della Femina to celebrate the new! improved! genius of this year’s Advertising It Kid:
… Perhaps the best way to understand BuzzFeed, though, is as the culmination of a wager its puckish founder, Jonah Peretti, made twelve years ago as a graduate student at MIT. Like a lot of tales of discovery on the Internet, this one begins in a moment of procrastination. In 2001, Peretti, then 27, was supposed to be writing his master’s thesis but instead diverted himself by goofing off online. Nike was promoting a new customizable sneaker; Peretti ordered a pair imprinted with the word sweatshop, prompting an amusing exchange of e-mails with a customer-service representative. Peretti forwarded the chain to ten friends. It went forth and multiplied, taking on irresistible momentum as it was forwarded from in-box to in-box. Six weeks later, Peretti found himself on the Today show, debating a Nike spokesman about its labor practices.
The rush of creating something viral was vertiginous, intoxicating. Throughout the experience, Peretti related his amazement to a friend, a fellow student named Cameron Marlow. “I challenged him to do it again,” Marlow recalls. Marlow was preparing to write his Ph.D. on viral phenomena; he believed they were impossible to engineer, that the universe of human relations is just too complex to predict what people would share. Peretti set out to prove him wrong. He lost interest in his thesis subject (an earnest study of new teaching software) and immersed himself in network theory….
Peretti wanted to fabricate memes, and after years of experimentation, he built BuzzFeed as a shop to do so. He didn’t do it for the news, or the movie gossip, or the cute pictures of pandas. Beneath BuzzFeed’s cheery gloss lies a data-driven apparatus designed to figure out what makes you click. Peretti is aware that if he really has divined that secret—if he can reliably manufacture, at mass scale, content you will want to share—he will have developed an asset of immense value…
BuzzFeed’s model, known in the industry as “native advertising,” has caused some trepidation among traditional ad agencies, which see its potential to cut out their intermediary role. It’s also the sort of intermingling of editorial content and business—“church and state”—that used to be considered heretical at any respectable journalism institution. But times change, revenue streams dry up, and now other publishers are watching with desperate interest. Prestigious publications like The Atlantic and the Washington Post are playing with strategies similar to BuzzFeed’s. Like a joyful scourge, Peretti is simultaneously fanning the flames that are disrupting the old media business model and promising that he has constructed a new, lucrative one…
Peretti started BuzzFeed as a side project, in 2006, in partnership with his old boss John Johnson. But long before the Huffington Post was sold, he had shifted his attention to the newer project. Originally, BuzzFeed employed no writers or editors, just an algorithm to cull stories from around the web that were showing stirrings of virality. In return for functioning as a sort of early-warning system, BuzzFeed persuaded partner sites to install programming code that allowed the company to monitor their traffic. (The network now encompasses some 200 sites that serve 355 million users.) This analytical capacity, which the company doesn’t talk about much, has given BuzzFeed an enormous trove of data about what information people are reading and how they are sharing it. This is why one prominent New York digital-media executive described BuzzFeed to me as “a super-big ad tech company with a journalism veneer.”…
arguingwithsignposts
Buzzfeed was started by one of the originators of the Huffandpuff Post. The model of tits-ass-and-cats and questionable
IP theftaggregation practices, and then spend some money on some “serious journalism” to get some cred with the village is about the same. Neither site gives a shit about quality journalism or democracy, except as it advances their brand and allows them to generate more ad revenue and get spots at Davos, Aspen and TED.ThatLeftTurnInABQ
To borrow from the old Wall St saying about suckers: In today’s media, if you look around the
roominternet and don’t know who is being trolled, the answer is: it’s you.arguingwithsignposts
Also, this follows not long after the tongue-bath Ben Smith got in the pages of the New York Times. I swear the New York Media Scene is as much of a village as DC, but without the ability to fuck up the government.
ranchandsyrup
Particularly wretched from Buzzfeed today: buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/margret-thatchers-19-most-badass-moments
arguingwithsignposts
@ranchandsyrup: Thanks, but not gonna click. Just the URL at least gave me the heads-up, plus, I try never to encourage them.
aimai
I know I’m going to sound impossibly confused but was Buzzfeed what I was reading, very early on in the Bush years. I seem to remember reading a site that had “Buzz” in the title quite regularly. It aggregated political stories from all over the net and from regular journals and places like the NYT and the Globe and you came to a white page with an internally written headline like “Bush fucks us all over again” but when you clicked the link you got the actual story from the NYT. I loved that site. Is this it? Because I don’t read it anymore and at the time I was reading it it had no kitty pictures or fluff or advertising.
aimai
I think the site I’m thinking of was called Buzzflash. Was it an early avatar of this site?
ranchandsyrup
@arguingwithsignposts: Yeah, poor form by me. 19 of the most Bad-Ass things Thatcher did. Ex: “Meryl Streep played her in a movie!!” “She rode on a tank!!”
Gin & Tonic
I guess I qualify as an Old. I have been using the Internet for over a quarter-century, and I have never once voluntarily visited Buzzfeed, nor ever had the thought “Hm, I wonder what’s up over there.”
Comrade Mary
I’d like — no, maybe “like” isn’t the word — to see what would happen if BuzzFeed worked with the math geeks at OKCupid. Find someone to date based on what parts of BF you visited? Use BF algorithms to make sad, lonely OKC profiles go viral?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@aimai: are you maybe thinking of Buzzflash?
Bill Arnold
This is fascinating, if a little depressing. Seems like he’s managed to automate the launching and nurturing of availability cascades. (I’ve recently read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” so it came to mind.) Does anyone here know of any good (and short) technical treatments of viral marketing?
sharl
@aimai: I’ve been confused by that as well, so just poked around a bit. BuzzFlash, BuzzFeed, and BuzzMachine are all different.
BuzzFlash is what you are thinking of – it is now owned by the Truthout.com folks, so it remains in relatively good hands (for the moment). I couldn’t find its earlier (pre-Truthout) history, but it was active during much of the GWB years.
BuzzFeed is pretty new, and was started by one of the HuffPo bigwigs. It has no relationship to BuzzFlash, neither with respect to ownership nor content. A bit on them here.
BuzzMachine is Jeff Jarvis’ thing; I get that one mixed up with the others as well.
Redshirt
I love Buzzfeed, alas!
19 Kittens hugging Otters! Oh!
dance around in your bones
“puckish founder” “vertiginous, intoxicating”
{{{cough}}} blow job {{{cough}}}
Xecky Gilchrist
Buzzflash was a regular stop of mine in the horrorful depths of the Bush years. Those headlines were balm to a despairing leftie’s soul.
Keith G
While we are on a tech-ish topic:
A conflict between Audible and iTunes on my laptop has led me to have to do a complete reinstall of iTunes which has led to other complications and a major time suck.
So, the only graves I could take pleasure in dancing on would belong to a certain software design team who lately turn out little but crud.
And has I typed that last sentence, I see hangup has popped up.
Seanly
People connected to advertising (aka journalists) are predisposed to thinking that some new way to annoy the fugg out of you with ads is the latest & greatest thing. It then follows that they would genuflect greatly before the new advertising overlord.
Here’s a big hint to advertisers – WE ALL HATE ADS. I DVR almost every show I watch so I don’t hve to sit through your stupid ads. Even when I am interested in learning about a new product, I still hate the ads.
WereBear
The problem with ads is that they work. Like the male enhancement spam; if fools didn’t click on it, it would disappear.
But fools are gonna click on it.