BuzzFeed

Location
New York City
Politics
Liberal left-leaning, or whatever is appealing to Millennials.

Money Matters

BuzzFeed is owned by its founder and CEO Jonah Peretti. In August 2015, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in the company. In 2014, it received a $50 million venture capital investment led by Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund.

According to financial statements obtained by Gawker, BuzzFeed’s revenue increased dramatically from $4,127,935 in 2011 to $64,095,207 in 2013. Its revenue for the first six months of 2014 was $46,159,098. BuzzFeed’s editorial budget grew from less than a million in 2011 to over $10 million in 2013.

Essentials

BuzzFeed pulls in 200 million readers a month with social content that spans from its notorious lists, quizzes and cat videos to hard-news pieces by its 250 editors and reporters. It is at the forefront of ‘native’ advertising, which raises questions about editorial independence.

In 2014 it unveiled a new, 20-staff division called BuzzFeed Distributed, the goal of which is to "make original content solely for platforms like Tumblr, Imgur, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and messaging apps," or distribute content not meant for BuzzFeed’s own site.

"Our goal is to really be agnostic about it... in an ideal world, we would be indifferent to where our content is consumed and we would want to do whatever is best for the consumer," Peretti told Re/code in March 2015.

Key People

Jonah
Peretti

Peretti is a co-founder of both The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In 2001, while a grad student at the MIT Media Lab, he first gained notoriety for pushing Nike to use its own customized shoe service to print the word "sweatshop" on a pair of sneakers. In what would become an email chain forwarded far and wide, Nike responded with a refusal, "saying it was inappropriate slang and they wouldn’t put it on the shoes," Peretti said.

He said this episode, in part, helped guide him along the path to answering the question: "Why are there some things that seem awesome that don’t go anywhere and other things that seem silly or trivial that get spread to millions of people?"



Through his work as technologist, he met media businessman Kenneth Lerer. The pair — along with Arianna Huffington and Andrew Breitbart — created The Huffington Post in 2005. Peretti eventually left HuffPo to focus full-time on BuzzFeed, which he first created in 2006.

"BuzzFeed started where the social web was, which was fun, sharable content," Peretti has said. "Internet memes and humor and cute animals. We built an audience. We built a business and we built a new model for advertising. And that is what allowed us to hire Ben Smith. That is what allowed Ben Smith to hire all these talented reporters."

 

Ben
Smith

Smith began as editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed in early 2012. He made his name as one of the first top reporters for venerable Washington political news site Politico from 2007 to 2011, helping Politico craft a reputation as the kings of Beltway insider gossip. He is credited with starting "New York’s first political blog," the Politicker, for the New York Observer. He’s also worked for the New York Sun, the New York Daily News and the Baltic Times in Latvia.

In 2007, Smith erroneously reported for Politico that 2008 Democratic presidential nomination candidate John Edwards was set to drop out of the race. The report set off a media frenzy when, in fact, Edwards would announce shortly after Smith’s story ran that his wife’s cancer had reemerged. Smith apologized for the thinly-sourced report.

Under Smith, BuzzFeed hired a number of talented reporters and the outlet expanded its coverage to more serious topics.

There is an urban dictionary term BenSmithing, which is defined as "a political tactic that disguises itself as journalism in order to protect Democrats."



Invented by the Republicans, the term is reportedly used by BuzzFeed staff to refer to a wide variety of things done under Smith.

Controversies

Koch money

In 2013, BuzzFeed took heat for taking sponsorship to the site’s Politics section from Charles Koch, who, along with his brother David, is the embodiment of American plutocracy. The site’s customized promotion of the Charles Koch Institute preceded BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith hosting a right-wing Koch immigration summit.



At the time, NSFW Corp’s Yasha Levine wrote that Smith has a history of supporting the Koch brothers amid their myriad cash-flush moves in the political arena.

"Every time the Koch cartel comes under serious criticism, every time someone tries to expose another layer of their toxic influence and political corruption, every time a news item threatens their well-guarded racket, Ben Smith is there, calmly and coolly redirecting traffic and reassuring people that everything is okay. His tactic is simple: downplay the importance of the news and deflect attention."

Erroneous reports

In November 2013, BuzzFeed had to amend a story written by reporter Rosie Gray in which — writing about journalist Max Blumenthal, with whom she had feuded before — she erroneously charged that Blumenthal’s father Sidney Blumenthal, a top Hillary Clinton supporter, was responsible for leaking a racist photo of President Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. Blumenthal criticized Buzzfeed for its attacks of Glenn Greenwald at the height of the Edward Snowden affair, questioning who may be behind editorial attacks of whistleblowers.



"This is not Gray’s first foray into hacky reporting," wrote Firedoglake’s Dan Wright. "She wrote an extremely speculative article accusing one of the Boston Bombers of being involved in a triple murder with little to no evidence. She also wrote a hit piece on Mint Press News that heavily suggested the publication was an Iranian front organization, little to no evidence again. Rosie Gray is, at the least, a less than diligent reporter."

BuzzFeed has been accused by both Gawker and Atlantic Media of plagiarism in 2013, as was former staff writer Benny Johnson, who allegedly plagiarized dozens of works while writing for BuzzFeed.



Deleting Content

In 2014, BuzzFeed was caught in a mass purge of pre-2012 content on the site, which, Smith told Poynter, was part of the effort to eliminate broken content and "inside jokes" — present before BuzzFeed wrote more respectable news — that "didn’t age well."



In April 2015 Smith had to admit that he "blew it," when he ordered to take down two articles — one about the board game Monopoly and the other criticizing an ad by Dove — sparking allegations that the posts were deleted because of their negative tone towards BuzzFeed advertisers. Smith maintained that it had been done because of his consideration of "the place of personal opinion pieces," although many didn’t buy this explanation.



Native advertising

BuzzFeed is a native advertising virtuoso and, with its own staff, creates ad content for the likes of Starbucks, Pepsi, and even fellow media competitor CNN. Native advertising is commercial content designed to fit in neatly with regular content.

"Already, most of BuzzFeed’s revenue is derived from BuzzFeed Creative, the company’s 75-person unit dedicated to creating for brands custom video and list-style advertising content that looks similar to its own editorial content," the New York Times wrote in August 2014.

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