'cause iPhones and quesalupas got nothin on ~media innovation~
There will come a day when we gather our grandchildren around in our Martian homes and tell them about the olden times when BuzzFeed was just this website we scrolled through during college lectures, because good cat videos were rare back then, and our hoverboard-strapped offspring will look at us with their wide cyborg eyes and be like, “omg Grandma, so were you there when God published that 10 commandments listicle on BuzzFeed, too?”
It’s a fate we should resign ourselves to now, especially with Fast Company naming BuzzFeed as #1 today on its “Most Innovative Companies” list (so, yea, like, ahead of Google, Apple and freakin’ Taco Bell). As such, you for sure should read their profile on the BuzzFeed and CEO/viral godmother Jonah Peretti, which is adoringly titled: “How BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti is building a 100-year media company.”
The piece is a meaty read that gets into the rather un-cute details of things like social metrics and data science, but if you’ve been wanting to learn more (and be able to talk semi-lucidly) about the secret BuzzFeed sauce for a while, this is for you. Bonus points if you manage to work a casual reference to Jonah, Ze or Dao into conversation at, say, a job interview or work happy hour.
“Yea I just like, really agree with Jonah’s vision.”
Tl:dr; BuzzFeed is spitting major game for three reasons:
It knows how to work the platforms. When everyone else in the media was/is still shovelling versions of homepage content onto everything else, BuzzFeed figured out super early on how to tailor and grow everything to the platforms themselves.
It’s invested in some serious fucking tech. Bonus bonus points if you name-drop their proprietary tools, Pound and Hive, in a convo today. Any convo.
It’s thinking globally but not in a lazy way. International expansion ain’t just about translating, yo. Although, yes, we can all agree with Peretti in that Nicki Minaj is always a good idea.
Now go forth and impress some media peeps today! Let's regroup on this in Year 3000.