HuffPo Gave Birth to BuzzFeed;
Now, the Offspring Begins Devouring the Parent
How is it that, without a printing press or a broadcast pipe,
by sharing something with a few friends, I can reach millions of people?
— Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed
By Christopher B. Daly
Adapted from “Covering America”
A little over a decade ago, Arianna Huffington, founder of HuffPo, and Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed were the cool kids in the mediaverse — their sites were innovative, lean, and growing. Now, Peretti is behaving more or less like the established media: consolidating ownership, laying off journalists, listening to the digital footsteps of even newer rivals chasing the next big thing. No longer the youthful innovator, Peretti, who’s now 47, has emerged as a new-media mogul, with his takeover of HuffPo.
He doesn’t wear suits to work, but he is a mogul nonetheless. This week, he stepped into the bullseye of journalists’ indignation by laying off 49 reporters and editors from HuffPo, which had been losing money under its previous owner, Verizon Media. That news was followed by reports that he may be trying to take BuzzFeed public, which could result in a huge financial windfall for him personally. That turn of events raises the question: how did all this come to pass?
What follows is the origin story of two journalistic innovators and the world they created:
. . . Way back — that is, in late 2004 and early 2005 — Arianna Huffington convened a small group, including Andrew Breitbart, Jonah Peretti, and Kenny Lerer, to help in launching the Huffington Post. But Breitbart and Arianna were on opposite political trajectories — she moving left, he moving alt-right. He claimed later that he saw her idea for a website, one that would feature blogs by her liberal friends, as the perfect mechanism for getting people he considered unpatriotic on the record. Once their blogposts were online at HuffPo, Breitbart reasoned, their own words could be used against them as fodder to feed the rage on right-wing sites like Drudge and talk radio shows like Rush Limbaugh’s. During his time at HuffPo, Breitbart considered himself a culture warrior operating behind enemy lines. But his mission did not last long. A little more than a month after HuffPo went online, Breitbart departed and took his rage campaign to a new stage. . .
From its beginnings in 2005, the Huffington Post has offered a mix of material — some original reporting, lots of inexpensive commentary and analysis, combined with constantly updated feeds of hard news from traditional sources and regularly updated blogs commenting on all of the above. It was successful, at least by the lights of the on-line world.
Founded by Arianna Huffington in May 2005, the Huffington Post had within a few years achieved the top rating on the Web metrics site Technorati, the authority of on-line clout and popularity. By early 2010, “HuffPo” had achieved a traffic milestone of 13 million unique users a month, ranking it second behind the New York Times website.[1] Among professional journalists, Arianna Huffington became notorious for not paying (or underpaying) her contributors, but no one could argue with her success.
Part of the reason her site flourished was that its costs were a fraction of what a “legacy” news organization would face to produce the same kind of daily page. The general focus in the early days was on national politics and the general cultural zeitgeist. Although it had a small salaried staff who produced some original material, Huffington Post functioned primarily as a news aggregator, presenting on-line content created by others in an attractive package.
The package proved to be so attractive that AOL bought Huffington’s site in early 2010 for $315 million — an enormous return on her modest initial investment. The sale settled one question about digital journalism by proving that it could be lucrative, at least for owners. The big question that remained was whether online journalism could employ significant numbers of skilled reporters and pay them decent wages. Indeed, prompted by the thought of $315 million changing hands, HuffPo’s legions of bloggers and writers who contributed for free for the first six years suddenly began demanding compensation.
. . . Following the lead of pioneers like Arianna Huffington, more and more digital natives began creating new sites for journalism online. One of the most successful was Jonah Peretti — curious, restless, and young. Born in Oakland in 1974, Peretti applied himself to one of the central issues involved in putting journalism online: what kind of news do people want to share with their friends?
After graduating from the University of California–Santa Cruz in 1996, he taught school for a few years in New Orleans, then entered the celebrated graduate program at the MIT Media Lab, an institution devoted to disrupting old media. One day in 2001, while he was supposed to be working on his master’s thesis about learning and technology, he was surfing the internet and noticed a marketing campaign by Nike. The sportswear giant was conducting a promotion — called Nike iD — that invited customers to personalize a pair of shoes with a slogan of their own printed on them. Peretti, a self-described “smart-ass” seeking to mock the company for its third-world labor practices, tried to customize his Nike shoes with the word sweatshop. Nike balked and sent him an email of bureaucratic mush suggesting that his request was “inappropriate.” Peretti persisted.
Dear NIKE iD,
Thank you for your quick response to my inquiry about my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes. Although I commend you for your prompt customer service, I disagree with the claim that my personal iD was inappropriate slang. After consulting Webster’s Dictionary, I discovered that “sweatshop” is in fact part of standard English, and not slang. The word means: “a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions” and its origin dates from 1892. So my personal iD does meet the criteria detailed in your first email. Your web site advertises that the NIKE iD program is “about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are.” I share Nike’s love of freedom and personal expression. The site also says that “If you want it done right . . . build it yourself.” I was thrilled to be able to build my own shoes, and my personal iD was offered as a small token of appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realize my vision. I hope that you will value my freedom of expression and reconsider your decision to reject my order.
Thank you, Jonah Peretti
The email chain lengthened. Then Peretti sent the corporate emails from Nike to some friends. One of the friends posted the email chain on his website. People noticed.
Click.
Click. Share.
Click-share-click-share-
Clickshareclickshareclickshareclickclickclick . . .
Suddenly, Peretti was present at the creation of one of the first episodes of something “going viral” on the internet. Fascinated, he had found his life’s work.[2]
From MIT, Peretti went to New York City and joined a startup called the Eyebeam art and technology center. He devoted his attention to the phenomenon of “contagious media” — those things that people find online that they not only enjoy but also pass along to their own networks. Peretti wanted to master the new art of causing cascades through networks. He devoted his energy to something he called the “Bored at Work Network” — all those alienated office workers worldwide who had time to kill during the workday while staring at their desktop computers and trying to look busy. Based on his experience, Peretti distilled an emerging philosophy in a manifesto he called “Notes on Contagious Media.”[3] It consisted of twenty-three numbered paragraphs, each of which makes an assertion about the nature of viral content. Among them were these statements:
5 Contagious media is best understood from a social perspective. It does not matter if it is an email, a movie, or a game. What matters is how it diffuses virally through human-powered networks.
9 Contagious media is defined by its audience, not its author. The audience decides if a particular project is art, activism, or entertainment. The audience decides if the project reaches 10 people or 10 million people. The audience is the network and the critic.
13 To be successful, contagious media projects must be explainable in one sentence or less: “A phone line for rejecting unwanted suitors”; “A site to rate people based on if they are hot or not.” . . . If you need more than a sentence to describe a project, you should probably not bother.
Tall and thin, Peretti could usually be seen wearing “smart-looking” glasses and carrying himself with an air of ironic amusement. A casual but intentional dresser, he projected an image of curated dishevelment. He conveyed the sense that he was not just interacting with people but also simultaneously processing the metadata about the interaction. Indeed, he started to see people — especially people in networks — as objects of study. Even before there was a Facebook or a YouTube, Peretti was working on the networking — or social — dimension of the internet. “I started to just try to understand, how does this stuff work? How is it that, without a printing press or a broadcast pipe, by sharing something with a few friends, I can reach millions of people?”[4]
That question lay at the heart of the new challenges facing everyone involved in journalism. . .
* * *
While the legacy news media were struggling in the early 21st century, the digital natives were proliferating. They were adapted to their environment; they were a nimble new species in the media landscape. They had no printing presses that needed ink. They owned no fleets of delivery trucks that required diesel fuel. They did not need access to cable television. They owed nobody any pension benefits and often did not fund anybody’s health care, either. And they almost never had stockholders looking for regular and growing dividends. Thus, the digital news sites could survive on a comparative trickle of revenue. They had, in short, the right metabolism for the new ecology. They did not do “process” stories (BILL ADVANCES TO NEXT COMMITTEE) or stories “for the record” (THAI PRIME MINISTER ENDURES).
Especially during the Obama years, a second generation of digital natives not only succeeded in journalism but also thrived. Like Arianna Huffington, most of them did not come from a hard-news journalism background. Instead of boasting about the newspapers they used to work for, the digital natives talked about generating buzz, churning their metrics, and winning the internet. Huffington and the rest of the new generation brought a new sensibility to journalism — restless, irreverent, ferociously fast.
Their sites were buzzy and visual and, above all, social. They featured irresistible headlines — known as clickbait — that begged to be shared on social networks. In a war of all against all, they competed at the level of the individual story, slideshow, and headline to gain currency in the new “attention economy.”[5] That approach explained much of the growth of the Huffington Post, which expanded from a vanity project to a giant news-and-opinion source, as well as the rise of BuzzFeed, Breitbart, Mashable, Vice, Jezebel, the Undefeated, and many others.
While HuffPo was surging to the front, Peretti, was already losing interest. What he wanted to know was not what’s new but what’s viral. That question was more compelling to him than building the HuffPo brand. Despite the excitement of participating in Huffington’s widely watched startup in lower Manhattan, Peretti was soon bored at work himself, so in November 2006 he began devoting one day a week to a side project that he called BuzzFeed.[6]
Initially, he thought of it as a new internet popularity contest: the challenge was to see how many people he could reach and later how many of them he could connect to each other in a new, shifting network. In the old days of analog things, a newspaper entered a home or an apartment, and it was an inert object. One or several people read it, and they might comment to each other about an item or two. End of story. The newspaper’s customers were at the end of a one-way link to the central node but not to each other.
Same with radio and television. They all operated networks, but they were one-directional, sending information and images from a central node to isolated customers. In that one-to-many model, the audience could almost never send a message back to the central source. And audience members could almost never find each other — unless they met in a bar or some other public space and the talk happened to turn to the news.
In the early days at BuzzFeed, Peretti struggled to help the site evolve and adapt to the digital environment. It looked much easier in retrospect than it did as a startup. One issue was video. How could it be optimized for smartphones? How could videos be shared? Could a BuzzFeed video play directly on a platform like Facebook, or would a viewer always have to follow a link back to BuzzFeed’s home page?
Another issue was the problem of the ubiquitous (and annoying) banner ad. They were bad enough on a desktop or a laptop, but they did not translate well to the much smaller screens of mobile phones. Like everyone else, Peretti was stumped. Eventually, he turned away from banner ads altogether as artifacts of the print era. Since the days when Macy’s and Gimbel’s were buying full-page ads in the New York World, displaying text and images to sell things had gone unquestioned. Now, Peretti decided that they were so annoying to users that they were not worth the money.
All the while, he was devoting more and more time to BuzzFeed, shifting from one day a week to four. When HuffPo sold in 2011, he devoted his full time and energy to BuzzFeed.
Eventually, Peretti and the team at BuzzFeed began to see the possibilities in journalism. News was something that, under the right circumstances, people wanted to share on their own networks. When the team started noticing that people were posting more news articles on Facebook or linking more news stories on Twitter, they realized that journalism could be just as share-able as K-pop dance videos were.[7] At BuzzFeed, reporting was not an end in itself; it was useful so long as it advanced the company’s overarching goal — to get its content shared around the world and across platforms.
The goal, Peretti has said many times, was for BuzzFeed to be global, social, and mobile. That is, he wanted to get the most out of the inherent advantage of the internet — which is free, frictionless distribution. He wants to capitalize on social media, which enable users to distribute BuzzFeed content far beyond the reach it would have otherwise. Above all, he wants BuzzFeed content to be designed with mobile devices in mind so that it will load well and look good on the world’s billions of smartphones.
Another key to BuzzFeed’s success was a new attitude toward advertising. When Peretti turned his back on display ads, the question was how to replace them. One method could be subscriptions, but curtailing access to the site would undercut the goal of going viral and goading users to distribute BuzzFeed content as widely as possible.
The answer that Peretti and his team hit upon was a version of native advertising. Some legacy news organizations are also using native advertising, but they do so reluctantly, afraid that it represents a breach in the traditional wall separating “church and state” within news organizations. Peretti is something of an agnostic:
“I agree wholeheartedly that church and state is really important. The thing I don’t like about the church/state division, as someone who sits above the divide, is that it can lead to a two-tiered system where the journalists are seen as the whole purpose and greatness of everything, and that the people in advertising are seen as a necessary evil.”[8]
So he embraced native advertising, to the point where there was no separation between ads and stories. Many ads were simply transformed editorially into a quiz or a personality test that just happened to feature brand names: for instance, “Can You Shop at IKEA Without Blowing Your Budget?” or “How Well Do You Know Your Sephora Prices?”
Less visible than ads or content but perhaps more important was BuzzFeed’s use of data. Peretti and his top editors were equally concerned with incoming and outgoing data. Like everyone else in the news media, BuzzFeed has a home page, and many readers go there to find stories. Like some companies, BuzzFeed also has its own apps that facilitate finding its content on mobile devices. And like very few other companies, BuzzFeed takes advantage of social media to develop a distributed model in which many people encounter BuzzFeed content by finding a single story shared on their social network, even if they never visit the BuzzFeed homepage.
All the while, data flow back to BuzzFeed about who is sharing what and why. The goal is to learn something every time content is shared, which is not a priority (or even a possibility) at many legacy news media. Peretti is an evangelist for iterative thinking: try something and learn from it.
Ultimately, the point of buzz was to learn how to get better at generating buzz. In one case, the results were dramatic. In February 2015, a blogpost appeared on Tumblr showing a dress made of material in two colors. A BuzzFeed editor who monitors Tumblr noticed that there was a lot of traffic around the dress. Some people saw it as black and blue; others saw it as white and gold. BuzzFeed posted a simple poll on the evening of February 26, inviting readers to judge the colors for themselves.
The result was an episode in the madness of crowds. The number of concurrent visitors to the BuzzFeed site peaked at 673,000. Twitter exploded too. At its height, the hashtag “#TheDress” appeared in 11,000 tweets per minute, and it soon turned into a bona fide global phenomenon. The Washington Post called it “the drama that divided a planet.”[9] Was any of this journalism? Hard to say, but it seems likely that 19th century publishers Benjamin Day or Joseph Pulitzer would have appreciated it, even while most of the journalistic establishment either snickered or ignored it.
Buzzfeed has been described as an “insane morphing rocket ship” and as “the most important news organization in the world.”[10] It has also been condemned as “the single biggest threat to journalism ever created.”[11]
Buzzfeed was never intended to provide a one-stop comprehensive accounting of the world’s doings. In that sense, the company is not really in the big-time news business. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that Peretti is a zany and irresponsible imitator of a serious journalist. It is not the case that he is trying to make BuzzFeed into the New York Times and failing at it. Like Joseph Pulitzer, Henry Luce, and Ted Turner before him, he is trying to reimagine the definition of news and reinvent the mechanism for delivering it.
On his own terms, he is a raging success. In one recent period, BuzzFeed had 7 billion monthly global views of its content, more than 200 million monthly visitors to its website, more than 90 million unique monthly visitors from outside the United States, about 1,500 employees worldwide (mostly in New York and Los Angeles), and a growing number of bureaus around the world.
BuzzFeed does not serve any particular locality or try to keep any state or local government honest. Instead, its goal has been long-term sustainability. After losing money for many years running, it began turning a profit in 2013. It is not a publicly traded company (yet), so details are not easy to come by.
According to one estimate, the company’s annual ad revenue was about $100 million, which is not much by the standards of big media. Nevertheless, its growth trajectory made it attractive to investors. In the summer of 2015, the old-media company Comcast bought a stake in BuzzFeed that lifted its estimated value to $1.5 billion.[12] That should make Peretti’s company sustainable for a while. . .
[1] The rankings were based on findings by Nielsen Online, which measures “users” — that is, readers or viewers — in terms of the number of different human beings who visit a given Web site in a given period. The data are vital not only for measuring the reach of a particular Web site but also (in most cases) for determining advertising rates. Associated Press, April 26, 2010.
[2] Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants. (New York: Knopf, 2016). An excerpt can be found at “How the Media Came to Embrace Clickbait: An Internet History,” KQED Science, May 12, 2017, https://ww2.kqed.org. Also see the journalist Felix Salmon’s extensive 2014 interview with Jonah Peretti, “BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Goes Long.” https://medium.com.
[3] This artifact of the digital age is harder to find than it should be, but it is included in an online book: Joe Karaganis, ed., Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007), http://www.ssrc.org.
[4] Many of Peretti’s thoughts and comments appear in his interview with Martin Nizenholtz as part of the Digital Riptide project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. Peretti’s comments appear in an undated oral history titled “Jonah Peretti.” http://www.digitalriptide.org.
[5] The pathbreaking work in this field was Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy (Boston, Harvard Business Review Press, 2001). Many of the same issues are addressed in the latter half of Wu’s The Attention Merchants.
[6] The title BuzzFeed reflects the tech world’s fascination with names that consist of two or more words mashed together, as they would be in an email address or a URL.
[7] Alyson Shontell, “How BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti took an instant messaging bot and turned it into a $1.5 billion media empire,” Business Insider, June 1, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com.
[8] Peretti interview, Riptide.
[9] Terence McCoy. “The inside story of the ‘white dress, blue dress’ drama that divided a planet,” The Washington Post, February 27, 2015.
[10] Ben Thompson, “Why BuzzFeed is the most important news organization in the world,” Stratechery, March 3, 2015. https://stratechery.com.
[11] Ben Cohen, “Jonah Peretti Can Laugh at ‘The Wolf of Buzzfeed’ Because He is Worth $200 Million,” Daily Banter, https://thedailybanter.com.
[12] Wu, “How the Media Came to Embrace Clickbait.”
