March 31, 2015

The Future of Distributed Media by BuzzFeed

Jennifer Roebuck, Non-executive Director at 7thingsmedia, attended this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in the US. Here, she tells Figaro Digital what she learnt about BuzzFeed and their unusual (but highly successful) engagement model

Let’s face it, those of us in the digital media industry are fascinated by BuzzFeed. What seemed like an overnight sensation in the media world was actually a carefully curated and measured media business built over six years. We had the opportunity to see Summer Burton, BFF Editorial Director speak at SXSW. Summer shared her thoughts on what makes BuzzFeed tick and the future of distributed media.

At the time of the presentation (14 March 2015), 75 per cent of all traffic to BuzzFeed was from social media, with 50 per cent from mobile and less than 5 per cent of all video views happening on buzzfeed.com. Those are interesting statistics in a world where many businesses are looking to measure success by website visits, blog views and other brand owned metrics. BuzzFeed doesn’t mind this distributed audience—they see the value in having content and engagement elsewhere to further strengthen their brand and help develop valuable native advertising programmes for their clients.

While some people might struggle with this engagement model, BuzzFeed feels that content creation will be a compelling future revenue stream. After all, social networks need engaged audiences to further boost their own advertising rate cards and statistics, even though few are good at creating that content. So what makes BuzzFeed different? For a start, they have a flat management structure. Everyone is encouraged to create, to move away from their computer screens and out into the real world, and to develop their signature videos and social posts. How do they test these ideas? Burton says, “We sit in a room and review all ideas. If all four of us don’t laugh, the idea does not get produced”.

In addition to their mad way of developing content, BuzzFeed has learned to curate and understand all social channels to enhance their own brand. Be timely; relate to personal relationships; be visually striking; be heartfelt; have a sense of humour and make it sharable. Those are the rules BuzzFeed live by to produce their addictive content day in day out.

BuzzFeed sees the future as distributed with a new business model of content creation to help other social networks keep their engaged audiences. I think a brand can also adopt some of these rules (and some have). It looks like we are back to a time were quality is stronger than quantity—social should be used as intelligently as other channels.