Buzzfeed.com Biography & Web Analysis

An American online media, news, and entertainment company with a concentration on digital media is called BuzzFeed, Inc. Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III, who are both from New York City, launched BuzzFeed in 2006 with the goal of concentrating on tracking popular material. Initially a co-founder and investor in BuzzFeed, Kenneth Lerer, co-founder and chairman of The Huffington Post, is now the executive chairman.

The company, which was formerly renowned for online quizzes, "listicles," and pop culture pieces, has developed into a global media and technology organization that covers a wide range of subjects, such as politics, DIY, animals, and business. Ben Smith, formerly of Politico, was hired by BuzzFeed as editor-in-chief in late 2011 to help the website branch out into long-form reporting. By 2021, BuzzFeed News had invested years into developing its investigative reporting, and it had won the National Magazine Award, the George Polk Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and been nominated for the Michael Kelly Award. By using native advertising, which increases the possibility that viewers will read the advertisement's content, BuzzFeed makes money.

Despite BuzzFeed's foray into serious journalism, a 2014 Pew Research Center survey indicated that most respondents in the United States, regardless of age or political affiliation, saw BuzzFeed as an unreliable source. The target market for the company has been characterized as "left-leaning." BuzzFeed News is no longer a subset of the main BuzzFeed website; it now has its own domain.

Peretti experimented with other viral media while serving as director of research and development and the OpenLab at Eyebeam, Johnson's art and technology organization in New York City, before starting BuzzFeed.

As a side project in 2006, Peretti and his former boss John Johnson founded BuzzFeed, which was then known as BuzzFeed Laboratories, while Peretti was employed at the Huffington Post. BuzzFeed began by using a "algorithm to harvest items from around the web that were displaying stirrings of virality" instead of writers or editors, and the site first introduced BuzzBot, an instant messaging client that gave users links to trending content. The messages were distributed based on algorithms that searched through the feeds of hundreds of blogs that were aggregating the links that were being fast shared[citation needed].

Later, the website started highlighting the most well-liked connections it had discovered. To assist in describing the popular online content, Peretti employed curators. Ben Smith from Politico, who had previously garnered considerable recognition as a political blogger, was hired by Peretti in 2011 to put together a journalism operation in addition to the numerous aggregated "listicles".

The BuzzFeed Entertainment Group, which also includes BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, and BuzzFeed News are the two official divisions of BuzzFeed's news and entertainment output that took effect in 2016. In addition to having foreign editions in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom as of 2016, BuzzFeed had journalists from 12 other nations. Around 1,700 people worked at BuzzFeed at the end of 2017, but the company revealed plans to fire about 100 people in the US, 45 in the UK, and 100 in France in June 2018 in November of that year.

The international, web content, and news departments of BuzzFeed were affected by a planned 15% decrease in personnel that was announced by memo to all workers on January 23, 2019. 200 employees would be impacted by the layoffs. BuzzFeed and Universal Television agreed to work together to create entertainment based on its stories in 2020.

In March 2022, three of BuzzFeed News' top editors announced their resignations and that the newsroom will be forced to make voluntary employment cuts or layoffs. According to CNBC, Peretti was urged to shut down BuzzFeed News entirely by investors, but he refused. This led to the downsizing.