On February 26, 2015, a photo of a short skirt that was not very good suddenly became popular on global social platforms.
The photo of this short skirt was first circulated on the American short blog social platform Tumblr, and users were enthusiastically arguing whether the skirt was platinum or blue and black. Within one day, the original post on Tumblr received 5,000 retweets, likes and replies; during peak hours, there were 14,000 views in one second. In the end, the post received 73 million views and 483,000 interactions.
blue, black and white gold skirt, picture source Tumblr
Soon this photo was forwarded to Twitter. That night, Twitter's system crashed due to huge traffic. Twitter users spontaneously established topics of #white and gold, #blue and black, and both sides of the debate held their own opinions and argued endlessly. At that time, there were 11,000 new posts on the related topics in one minute.
At that time, the social media team of the American online media BuzzFeed, which focuses on entertainment news, also saw the post, and then the team began to argue whether the skirt was platinum or blue-black. The editor simply created a vote on BuzzFeed: "White and Gold" vs. "Blue and Black". That night, the number of visits to the BuzzFeed website reached a new high, with 673,000 users visiting the website at the peak.
Whether the skirt is platinum or blue-black is naturally insignificant, and even the inexplicable phenomenon of this photo is full of various unsolvable aspects of low-probability events. However, this incident was like a harbinger that tightened the nerves of global content industry and media managers. The user mentality and behavioral habits under the Internet digital wave have gradually exceeded the understanding framework of traditional media. Whether and how to win the attention of this huge group has become the core problem of a group of forward-looking people and forward-looking people at that time.
As a participant in making trouble, this incident undoubtedly touched BuzzFeed’s team. In the view of Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed co-founder, in today's social media era, users are not only consuming content, but also sharing content. Compared with the network established by enterprises alone, the user distribution network is more efficient and powerful. Peretti quickly clarified BuzzFeed’s exclusive content management system as BuzzFeed’s core competitiveness, and continued to redesign, manage and upgrade to encourage readers to share on social networks.
Just like the popular spread of "blue, black, white and gold skirts", BuzzFeed's success is extremely controversial for traditional media. It now seems that the gameplay and mode of BuzzFeed actually changed the media standards to a certain extent and had a profound impact on the current media form. For example, the topic of "no shocking" is endless, various photos that aim to sow public emotions, and various means to attract traffic have a great impact on the media behind, and even the forms of content platforms such as Facebook.
Since its inception in 2006, the principle of the news aggregation website BuzzFeed is to "never stick to the rules."
From the initial laboratory for researching popular topics on the Internet, to now becoming a global media and technology company, the valuation of 1.5 billion US dollars when it was listed on Nasdaq ; from a "news website dedicated to office workers' boring entertainment" at the beginning, to providing political, economic, commercial and financial content, it had 200 million users at its peak, with more than 5 billion views per month; from a "news porter" who pays attention to content pushing by data algorithms, to a global news team with a scale of 1,200 people, covering video production studios, cutting-edge data computing centers and internal creative advertising agencies, and content production and distribution teams.
How did
BuzzFeed once became the "nightmare" of , the mainstream media in in the world, and how did it influence and shape the content ecosystem of today's media and social platforms? How did this commercial media, which adheres to the concept of "sharing is more important than search" come to this day? After various twists and turns successfully listed, what is the prospect of this company in the capital market? Faced with the distinctive and critical Generation Z, how should BuzzFeed seize the development trend and fulfill its development vision of becoming a "strong digital media integrated listed company"?
Optimization of "viral expansion method"
Traditional media usually focus on political, economic and social topics. Their journalists are all from professional schools and graduated from prestigious universities. The articles are often thousands of words, and they pay attention to rigorous, objective and neutrality. By contrast, the digital media BuzzFeed, founded by Peretti in 2006, is more like an entertainment website.
BuzzFeed's main focus on film, television, music, and celebrity gossip topics are the favorites of the general public, and the topics of Internet hot memes, sex, and parenting. Each article on the website usually has more pictures than words, and various emoticons are emerging one after another. However, these "untuned" content are particularly popular among young people, and are precisely their favorite posts to browse and interact on social media. As a result, the BuzzFeed model spreads like a virus on various social media, and even gradually "assimilates" social media such as Facebook.
BuzzFeed Film Festival, image source BuzzFeed
In the early days of BuzzFeed, most of the content of the website was published through specific algorithm decisions. The software run by BuzzFeed scans data from 100 partner websites every day, including the U.S. news aggregation website "Huffington Post " and the U.S. news portal AOL. BuzzFeed's algorithm mainly judges the potential popularity of the article based on the number of times readers share the article, and then selects the articles that have the most potential to become a "hot product". What are the most popular and "unliked" contents of the
BuzzFeed algorithm summarized over the years? Textured pictures, cute and cute cats and dogs, netizens’ absurd reactions to global events on Twitter, various inexplicable "ranking lists" and major disasters are all very safe content; while celebrity identity photos, drug abuse stories and protest slogans are not very popular with readers.
Even after gradually increasing the scale, BuzzFeed’s content began to move towards originality, multi-content branding, and short videos, and the content quality has also improved. However, the media prefers viral expansion on social platforms such as Facebook through topics that are not shocking, various photos aimed at sowing public sentiment, and various means to attract traffic. This is completely different from the idea that traditional media prefers to attract traffic to their main positions - websites and APPs.
The idea of traditional media being more willing to divert traffic to their main positions is completely different. Compared with direct access to the website, the social platform is BuzzFeed's more powerful traffic driver. According to statistics, 75% of the traffic of the BuzzFeed website and more than 50% of the users come from external social platforms, including Pinteresttml4, Twitter and Facebook. BuzzFeed is good at quickly gaining a large amount of traffic and fans in a short period of time. With the help of sharing as the core growth momentum, it quickly left many well-known mainstream media behind in terms of traffic influence and even commercialization capabilities.
is also a borrowing channel to distribute information. Why is most traditional media’s current discourse power declining and the media form gradually blurred while firmly dependent on the platform, but BuzzFeed can still find a path for influence and commercial growth? After all, it is still the solution proposed by BuzzFeed to pay attention to the behavioral habits of Internet users and the response.
In the process of content production and dissemination, BuzzFeed fully utilizes the power of new technologies. For example, using machine learning models to guide content publishing strategies on multiple platforms, and professional data analysis teams use Pound technology to analyze the communication paths and methods of content on major social media, thereby helping operators lock in communication hotspots and continuously optimize content direction.
More importantly, the essence of cross-platform content release is that it cannot be unchanged. BuzzFeed will tailor the content form based on the characteristics and audience attributes of social media. For example: A stewed chicken recipe on BuzzFeed will be made into a 46-second Facebook video, then converted into a 15-second Instagram short film, the cooking points are posted in the comments section, and finally a Pinterest post with two images and a link to the Facebook video. If you want Snapchat, it will also be converted to portrait mode. Although the format has changed countless times, the recipe is still the same.
BuzzFeed's above practices have had a certain impact on the subsequent digital transformation of operations in the entire media industry. Media around the world seeking digital transformation have set up their own professional social media departments and are conducting experiments in various content forms on different social media platforms.
Rugged Original Road to Content
As the business gradually grows and grows, BuzzFeed, which even surpasses " New York Times ", has begun to make a strategic transformation to the original content side. It not only adds more traditional reports, but also builds a bridge between entertainment content, breaking news and investigative news. It has even won awards from multiple news industries including Pulitzer Prize .
However, like most traditional media that are born with original content, there are many difficulties in the transformation of new media, BuzzFeed's original transformation path has been twists and turns.
In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president under great controversy. Rumors in American public opinion that "Russia interfered in 2016 US presidential election and helped Trump win the election" are rampant. In January of the following year when all parties were nervous, BuzzFeed rashly exposed the 35-page "Steel Files" investigating Trump's ordinary Russian allegations on his website, causing great controversy.
At that time, Christopher Steele, a British intelligence officer who worked for MI6 (MI6 ), was commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign to investigate the relationship between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. BuzzFeed obtained the first draft that Steele is writing from an anonymous source and released it on the website without Steele's knowledge.
Because the means of obtaining information sources and the timing of release are inappropriate, BuzzFeed's move has been severely criticized by media peers, Democratic Party, Republican Party, parties. The Republicans criticized the file for being maliciously slandered against Trump, and was not based on factual intelligence information; the Democrats accused BuzzFeed of its early leaks that made Hillary's team was wasted a crucial bullet.
The development of the original content business not only did not gain the recognition of the industry, but the huge costs it brought were also eyed by shareholders after BuzzFeed went public.
Before founding BuzzFeed, Peretti also co-founded the online media Huffington Post. Peretti, who has always attached great importance to original content, acquired the Huffington Post from Verizon Media, hoping to strengthen the promotion of content sharing and influence resonance effects between the two media brands, with the goal of ultimately achieving profitability in the content business. However, the Huffington Post suffered losses for two consecutive years after its acquisition, and Peretti had to cut 70 Huffington Post editors. Since then, Peretti said that the group chose to reorganize the Huffington Post to manage costs and ensure that BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post can develop in the long run, and the Huffington Post aims to break even in 2022.
However, several major shareholders of BuzzFeed pressured Peretti to close all of the group’s news media business. It is reported that BuzzFeed media business has dismissed more than 30 employees and settled their compensation in one lump sum. These employees mainly include editorial journalists in the fields of investigative news, social inequality news, political news and scientific news.
Under various negative signals, Ben Smith, the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, Mark Schoofs, his successor news business, Tom Namako, deputy editor-in-chief, and Ariel Kaminer, executive editor of investigative news, left the company one after another.
Although the attempt at the original news media business line is not successful, fortunately BuzzFeed, which uses social media as its long-term plan, did not miss the trend of videos. Faced with the distinctive and critical Generation Z, BuzzFeed turned its attention to the short video field and began to launch vertical short video programs on social platforms and video platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, and develop into the digital video field.
Backed by strong Internet genes, BuzzFeed has made two key moves to enter the short video field. First, we specialize in cultivating young ambassadors to produce content that meets the needs of young users for video programs, and then reach business cooperation with short video platform TikTok after ensuring content and traffic.
In the early stages of starting a short video business, BuzzFeed News recruited teenagers aged 16 to 19 and trained them to teach them how to make short videos on social hot topics on TikTok or Instagram. BuzzFeed's video programs span multiple channels, such as food "Tasty", game "Multiplayers", fashion beauty "As/Is", supernatural "Unsolved", and life skills "Nifty", with a total monthly view count of more than 5 billion.
In order to better obtain traffic and commercial support, BuzzFeed signed a one-year agreement with TikTok. BuzzFeed premiered multiple live video series on TikTok, leveraging its brand recognition, advertising creativity and author resources, while TikTok is responsible for the platform, traffic support, and winning sponsors for these programs. The two parties have reached cooperation intentions with their respective resources and shared the commercial benefits together.
Explore the business model of media + e-commerce
At present, BuzzFeed's revenue mainly comes from business operations, and its main revenue business is divided into three parts: hard advertising (Advertising), native content (Content) and e-commerce traffic diversion (Commerce).
hard advertising refers to the income obtained by directly displaying sponsor advertisements on the BuzzFeed website and on the BuzzFeed social media pages, and jumping to the sponsor website.
Native content refers to the income obtained by sponsors and BuzzFeed content team creating articles that are in line with BuzzFeed's style, published on the BuzzFeed website, recommending sponsor's single items, and earnings.
E-commerce traffic diversion refers to the income obtained by the BuzzFeed team carefully selected, wrote recommendation words, and made them into a special collection. The embedded links are directly diverted to e-commerce websites such as Amazon, and the income obtained. The BuzzFeed website even specializes in shopping to run commercial content in this area.
Under the combination of the above three businesses, BuzzFeed’s customers’ purpose is not only to spread business content through its channels, but also to obtain “viral transmission” of BuzzFeed news. Unlike media media that sets up "banner-style" advertisements on their media ports, BuzzFeed has been praised by advertisers by placing advertisements on articles with millions of views and using methods such as jumping to e-commerce to eventually generate direct conversions, which has been praised by advertisers.
As the action of "promoting other people's products" gradually matures, BuzzFeed has made a big move into the e-commerce field and has begun to use its own media brand influence and super content diversion capabilities to "sell goods". BuzzFeed users have long developed the consumption habit of buying things on their platform and have recognized the products sold on the platform.
The business related to e-commerce conversion has gradually made BuzzFeed's business model clearer. As long as the user clicks on the product link in the news report, BuzzFeed can obtain a certain proportion of the profit. At present, when the content of the BuzzFeed platform is diverted to third-party e-commerce, the average commission per order is 10%. Financial report data shows that BuzzFeed's total revenue related to e-commerce product sales reached US$300 million in 2021, gradually becoming an important revenue component for the company.
In 2021, BuzzFeed's revenue was US$398 million, an increase of 24% over last year; net profit was US$26 million. Among them, hard advertising revenue was US$62 million, an increase of 19% over last year. Native content revenue was US$130 million, up 9% from last year.E-commerce traffic diversion revenue was US$206 million, an increase of 37% from last year.
BuzzFeed Revenue composition in 2021, image source 36Kr Marketing Department
In December 2021, BuzzFeed completed its listing through the merger of SPAC under various adverse factors such as the epidemic, raising US$288 million. However, after its listing, BuzzFeed was questioned by investors due to labor disputes, revenue and other issues. The stock price plummeted 39% in the first week of listing, and there has been no sign of improvement so far.
analysts believe that since BuzzFeed's overall revenue has long relied on advertising and marketing, it is relatively single, and it is still in the exploration stage of finding the second growth curve. Therefore, BuzzFeed has not found a lightweight, standardized and replicable business model. On the one hand, the advantages in e-commerce business have brought growth to BuzzFeed, but on the other hand, it has deepened the risk of strong dependence on third-party platforms. Whether to expand business diversity or return to the original and become bigger and stronger in the advantageous areas, BuzzFeed's future commercialization path is still full of variables.
