Last modified on January 13th, 2017 at 10:00 am

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BuzzFeed, a Company Here to Stay for a Long Time

Jonah Peretti is building a historic media company that serves 200+ million monthly visitors

BuzzFeed, A historic media company Jonah Peretti

Last updated on January 13th, 2017 at 10:00 am

The media and entertainment industry is a very highly profitable business which is why everyone wants a piece of the pie and more and more companies are getting into the business .

In the eighties, Ted Tuner a creative and innovative person launched the 24 hours news cable channel CNN which revolutionized the media industry.

CNN was what the world wanted with its brilliant and precise reporting and coverage of every major event in the world especially the 1986 challenger Disaster and the 1991 coverage of Operation Desert Storm.

CNN has become a household name but sadly television is also becoming obsolete and the Net is the craze of the hour.

This is why there are more media related sites coming in the Portal world.

One such company is BuzzFeed based in one of the greatest cities of the world, New York City.

BuzzFeed is a social news and entertainment with a strong focus on digital media and digital technology.

The company’s aim is to provide shareable breaking news, original reporting, entertainment, and video.

Founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S Johnson, it was initially a viral lab tracking down viral content.

Before establishing BuzzFeed, Peretti who has vast experience in the field experimented with other contagious media as director of research and development and the OpenLab at EveBeam, Johnson’s New York City-based art and technology non-profit. The company has grown into a global media and technology company providing coverage on a variety of topics including politics, DIY, animals and business.

The company it seems is drawing attention to itself as once being known as’ bored at work’ network it is now a digital media powerhouse.

Peretti has attributed the company’s success to three companies that greatly influenced him historically. the first being Paramount Pictures that started more than 100 years ago, Paramount Pictures, which owned a film production studio, its own cast of talent, and its own distribution channel in the form of theaters. “That allowed them to adapt and change as the market changed,” says Peretti.

Peretti’s second fascination is with CNN and its founder Ted Turner as mentioned earlier who launched the 24-hour news operation at a fraction of the cost of what the networks spent, due in part to the prescient use of satellite and cable technology.

And then there’s Jay-Z. The rapper and his music. Peretti, who grew up in Oakland, California, attended public school in the 1990s where, he says, “The only music was black music.” Later in life when Peretti, now 42, made friends with people who loved indie rock bands, he noticed “this weird thing where it’s like, the band that they love, they go to all their shows, but as soon as they have a record deal, ‘I don’t like them anymore.’ ” There was a similar attitude among bloggers, he says, who had a “deeply tortured relationship with popularity. The mainstream media is somehow evil, bad, or selling out.” Peretti didn’t share this angst. “With BuzzFeed, I always felt like, let’s have as big an impact as we can. Let’s grow this into something giant.”

BuzzFeed has built its success, like Paramount a century ago, by owning all the elements of a modern media business: a global news team, its own video pro­duction studio, a sophisticated data operation, and an in-house creative ad agency. Just as Ted Turner embraced cable before cable was cool, Peretti has pushed BuzzFeed to tailor its content to each emerging social channel, from Snapchat to Pinterest. And BuzzFeed is expanding globally, from the U.K. to Brazil, India to Mexico, Germany to Australia.

BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen, Motion Pictures president Ze Frank, and CEO Jonah Peretti keep BuzzFeed weird—and powerful—by never getting too comfortable.

BuzzFeed has become the envy of the media world. Peretti is reputed to be one of most astute observers of Internet behavior. BuzzFeed’s success is also attributed because it is rooted in a dynamic learning-driven culture.

Everyone who’s ever shared a BuzzFeed post on Facebook thinks they understand the company.

Peretti likes BuzzFeed’s secret to a fleet of self-driving cars: Each car learns from every other autonomous vehicle on the road, so eventually they’re all thousands of times smarter.

The other secret to BuzzFeed’s success is a culture that embraces constant change yet remains devoted to data-driven metrics. That’s a tricky combination, but essential for any company hoping to thrive in today’s tumultuous business climate.

BuzzFeed Motion Pictures which is part of the portal publishes about 65 original videos every week—for YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, as well as for brands. It has 52,000-square-foot production studio on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Los Angeles. There’s a soundstage, a test kitchen, a prop room as large as a vintage store, two bungalows with rooms that serve as reusable indoor sets, and a clear view of the Hollywood sign from the roof. In short, the new digs have everything one would expect in a traditional movie studio.

Ze Frank Buzzfeed
Ze Frank is the head of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.

BuzzFeed’s video plans also include a partnership with Comcast’s NBCUniversal which invested a huge sum of 200million around the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. While NBC works on it’s traditional (and arguably calcified) “up close and personal” TV segments on prospective American Olympians, BuzzFeed was invited to film its own interviews. They asked the athletes goofy questions, such as, “Have you ever seen a live turkey?”—and then unleashed a turkey on set to capture athletes’ reactions. The result is “a video that they think is going to go mega-vi,” says NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke. That’s shorthand for “mega-viral” by the way—and no, Burke had never heard the term before either.

Creativity, innovation, thinking out of the box is what has made BuzzFeed so successful. Peretti is a digital genius and he applies his craft to its fullest

Peretti’s vision is shaped by his restless curiosity . In high school, he saved his money from doing yard work to buy a Macintosh computer. He discovered the Netscape browser as a sophomore in college, and upon graduation from the University of California, Santa Cruz, interviewed at a tech startup but decided that a $24,000-per-year job teaching computers at a private school in New Orleans was more interesting.

Peretti is also co-founder of the Huffington Post also which was his introduction to start-ups and business. His zest for experimenting made him go off and HuFFo’s investors gave him seed money.

He has what can be described as an insatiable appetite for more creativity and despite the fact that BuzzFeed currently employs approximately 1,200 people and is valued at $1.5 billion, Peretti still largely thinks of it as his teaching workshop.

Dao Nguyen is the publisher at BuzzFeed named by Peretti in 2014 while Ben Smith is the Editor-in-chief whose job is to handle the journalists.

Dao is not responsible for all the content but she is entrusted d with figuring out how articles and videos travel across all the platforms where BuzzFeed plays.

BuzzFeed’s makes money by achieving viral lift for its customers. It houses a branded studio that produces lists, quizzes, and (increasingly) customized video for clients such as HBO, Taco Bell, and Ford .Copywriters have access to the same data insights as everyone else at the company. BuzzFeed places native ads—which are designed to look like the content where they appear—not only on its own site but everywhere it distributes its editorial. What’s more, many brands value BuzzFeed’s social wizardry so much that they hire the company simply to distribute their traditional ads to a targeted audience, primarily on Facebook. (This helps explain why BuzzFeed appears to spend so much money there.)

The business model is inspired in part by Google, which “built a search engine where you put in a keyword and you get relevant results, and you also get relevant sponsor results,” Peretti explains. “It’s the same engine that’s powering recommendations to queries. When they get better at doing that core thing for consumers, they also make more money.”

Selling ads at BuzzFeed fall primarily to Greg Coleman, a former HuffPo colleague of Peretti’s who joined as president in the summer of 2014, and CMO Frank Cooper, who came over from Pepsi­Co a year later. Their task is to make BuzzFeed a core part of marketers’ advertising budget, despite its unorthodox approach. “I can’t do, ‘Oh, look at my cool BuzzFeed way,’, ” Coleman says. “I have to hold BuzzFeed to the same standards for efficiency, research, and proof points, use down-and-dirty syndicated research, things that they know.”

“Brands have to figure out how not just to be sponsors, they need to become creators,” says CMO Frank Cooper. “That’s what we’re trying to teach them.”

It seems that in a few years BuzzFeed will rank as the biggest , most creative news media company for Peretti is a visionary who understands, experiments, test and ensure the complete and absolute success of the company. Yes, BuzzFeed is the portal to access for all.

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Written by Syed Anwer Ali



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