Memo To The BuzzFeed Team (opens in new tab)

Are these astounding traffic numbers for real? Every time I go to BuzzFeed (every few months or so) I feel like Gertrude Stein visiting Oakland. I then retreat in disgust lamenting the few minutes I've wasted there.

In some sense, they must get a lot of bot traffic who only scrape the site to see what's "hot" because BuzzFeed itself is a highly optimized version of Yahoo Popular News. And BuzzFeed probably has little incentive to police these bots because that would drive their pageview numbers lower. At the end of the day, they probably have low value traffic and their ads sell cheap. But the BuzzFeed is probably not too concern about CPM because when the do sell they will try to frame the valuation around pageviews and not revenues.

>>> "This is why BuzzFeed has a major role to play in the coming years producing great journalism and compelling entertainment[...] There is a huge opportunity to be the leading news source for the social, mobile world."

The comment by danso in this thread highlights the problem with this dream pretty well:

>>> "I kind of wish that HN would remove its blanket ban of the Buzzfeed domain. Their longform section has as great of HN-likable original content as any other legit site"

They have a strong brand perception they will need to overcome if they truly want to become a trusted news source. They've been very successful at becoming an ubiquitous and constant presence across my Facebook news feed, but I've never seen anything beyond the standard lists.

I read a lot of longform content, but I never considered BuzzFeed as a source due to its reputation as a pusher of repurposed Reddit threads and "viral" content. I probably owe it a second look

This is an aside from Buzzfeed, but I listen to a ridiculous podcast hosted by comedian Chelsea Peretti who happens to be Jonah Peretti's sister. He visited the show one time, so if you want a respite from the usual tech podcast schedule give this a listen: http://feralaudio.com/32-the-case-of-the-three-gramas/

You'll also discover they had a viral hit with blackpeopleloveus.com from back in the day, if you didn't know that already. So Jonah's viral chops pre-date HuffPo.

Those traffic numbers are really impressive...aside from their popularity, I think Buzzfeed is probably the content site that actually gets the value of an efficient CMS. It's easy to dismiss them as being nothing but listicles, but lots of sites have tried to do that and don't come close to the well-thought out finesse of Buzzfeed.

On a related note, I kind of wish that HN would remove its blanket ban of the Buzzfeed domain. Their longform section has as great of HN-likable original content as any other legit site: http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform

Users should still exercise the right to flag the Buzzfeed list crap off of HN...but let's face it, with the numbers at Buzzfeed claims, the HN bump would merely be a blip for them.

Funny... The whole time I was reading this I couldn't help compare it to Ballmer's last re-org call-to-arms letter. I only understood maybe 5% of Ballmer's memo... This one actually got me excited for the future of Buzzfeed.