BuzzFeed: Mastering The Art of Writing Headlines & Beyond
A Brief Introduction
BuzzFeed, a company that was started in 2006 by Jonah Pretti, is considered to be the world’s leading independent digital media company, which leverages data and innovation to reach hundreds of millions of people globally (www.buzzfeed.com). Buzzfeed focused on publishing entertaining and shareable content known for its virality. Their content consisted of graphic content which contains images, memes, GIFs, listicles and videos. In 2016, Buzzfeed was ranked the 47th most popular website in the U.S. with 7 billion monthly views from 200 million unique visitors (Brantner, 2016).
The Reason Behind The Success
While analyzing BuzzFeed’s listicles to understand the science behind their content going viral, what I came to notice is the below:
- Easy digestible content — the content can be easily consumed by the readers who are entertained while going through the content.
- Catchy headlines — click bait style content, making the user want to click on the article to avoid missing out on it (FOMO).
- Short article length — the average article is less than 200 words making it easy to read within 2 to 3 minutes by young and adult readers.
Helping Brands Connect With Real Audiences
The way BuzzFeed monetizes is by allowing brands to create sponsored content, stories and lists that mimicked the format and tone of the site. The content came across as editorial content where brands’ messages were embedded subtly within the articles, quizzes, etc. to make it look organic and of interest to the users (Oberholzer-Gee, 2014).
Today, Buzzfeed has a global audience of over 500 million who view the content more than 3 billion times monthly (www.advertise.buzzfeed.com). They’ve realized that with this audience they can further expand revenues, and therefore, they’ve made adjustments to their all-native advertising strategy in 2017 and included programmatic and display ads as parts of their products to advertisers, where they charge advertisers on a CPM model. Summeranne Burton, Executive Creative Producer at BuzzFeed, mentioned in an interview with Native Insider that BuzzFeed wants to take the advertising model about what a brand looks for, then take the BuzzFeed model of what their readers love, and find a sweet-spot to integrate those two things together (Elkin, 2016).
Enhancing BuzzFeed’s Monetization Strategy
In my humble opinion, diversifying the advertising products to include more products such as programmatic and display ads is a great move from BuzzFeed. This will allow them to capitalize on their 500 million+ audiences and ensure more dollars are flowing into the business, aside from the existing native advertising which they were doing great at, in a move to ensure the business remains sustainable as the competition from large entertainment sites continues to grow.
References:
Brantner, Eric. “The Science Behind Buzzfeed’s Viral Content.” Social Media Today, 7 Sept. 2016, www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/science-behind-buzzfeeds-viral-content.
BuzzFeed Advertise, www.advertise.buzzfeed.com
Elkin, Tobi. “BuzzFeed’s Native Ad Leader: Create Content That’s Fun And Doesn’t Trick Readers.” BuzzFeed’s Native Ad Leader: Create Content That’s Fun And Doesn’t Trick Readers 06/01/2016, 1 June 2016, www.mediapost.com/publications/article/277057/buzzfeeds-native-ad-leader-create-content-that.html.
Oberholzer-Gee, Felix. BuzzFeed — The Promise Of Native Advertising, 15 Aug. 2014, pp. 1–24.
Patel, Sahil. “For BuzzFeed’s Business, Revenue Growth but More Competition and Pressure to Diversify.” Digiday, 1 Feb. 2019, www.digiday.com/media/buzzfeed-has-moved-beyond-native-ads-ad-buyers-have-followed-suit/.