BuzzFeed Was A Perfect Accident
It felt like that place was making promises just by existing.
The best story I heard about BuzzFeed was that it was kicked off with an accident.
Story goes like this: at some point in the early stages of BuzzFeed’s development, when the real play was to grab a bunch of young people in a small room in Chinatown and get them to make content, things went bad.
BuzzFeed has always been a traffic game - like all of the 2010s digital media players - and this meant a somewhat unapologetic early involvement in the Everything Is Content wars. Around this time, the holy and moral leaders of the pack, TMZ, had made a name for themselves publishing just about every small piece of information about celebrities they could find. Or thereabouts. Truthfulness was not always paramount. I suppose it still isn’t.
BuzzFeed tried its hand at this, too, in its own way. And I must say: this is well before my time and the six years I poured into that endeavour. Details May Be Hazy. But I can only say what I was told, and why would anyone lie? Not in America, and certainly not in the publishing business.
At a certain point, Search and Google and probably most importantly, Advertisers, found this sort of content somewhat abhorrent. And so the folks at Alphabet turned off the taps and black-listed anyone still trying to get them running. This was especially true for that most embarrassing form of content that seemed to erupt in 2000s tabloids, which was the coverage of Celebrity Sex Tapes and Nude Leaks as if they were weekly updates in a sports season and not completely immoral and aggressive pursuits of desperate attention by the media. You could say Paris Hilton staring into a night-vision lens was the SuperBowl of all this. And BuzzFeed had its fair share, just like anyone else. Suddenly, the red lights were flashing. Something needed to give.
And so the decision to pour desperate attention into the social media funnel was made for them. Google was not interested – at least not then – and a billionaire boy genius who had turned his Hot Or Not clone into a social media empire wanted to connect the world. It all made sense. They jumped in. And it was very, very successful – until it wasn’t anymore.
I don’t mean to say that’s all there is to it. There was planning, sure. But it does speak to a higher feeling I have about the place.
There are many great things about BuzzFeed and only a fool would argue against its influence. Who do you think you are? Every grifter on the internet has BuzzFeed to thank for building the blueprint. And so does everyone else. Imagine the ripples Alison Roman would have fractured through space and time if she had made her Shallot Pasta for Tasty™. I don’t blame her for saving that one.
But none of this ever felt planned from the inside, and, if I’m honest, it was the accidents that built the empire. The strategy and carefully planned projects rarely had the same impact. This was a place built on guesswork and, often, those guesses worked out very well. It’s nice to think that could be scalable. Let me know if you figure it out.
Often, Jonah would say it outright: get some young, talented people in a room, and tell them to do whatever they want. You will get results.
Whether or not you can monetise those results. Well… that’s on you, kid. I hold no anger or anything, despite these decisions costing me my job. I had fun and hindsight is painful. That’s the whole point.
And now we are back in the news: BuzzFeed is hot again. Unfortunately for my vested stock options, there is far more interest in What BuzzFeed Was than What It Needs To Be. The next evolution of Why I Left BuzzFeed videos – where the answers were often just you made the wrong guesses, kid – will be feature length documentaries made by the people who feel the most spurned. And who can blame them? It felt like that place was making promises just by existing. We told ourselves it was working; that the fun paid for the news. And it was a beautiful idea. The world would be better off if it had been true. There’s plenty of trauma there.
I look forward to watching the next round of coverage. I’m sure it will all be entertaining. But I doubt it will capture the reality of it: thousands of accidents, all happening at once. Enough typewriters in a room to keep hammering, and another 20-somethings willing to press the keys.
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