7/6/2023 0 Comments Bet the encore![]() ![]() Even at the time, social traffic was no more legitimate and was in some ways materially less valuable than readers who found you by, say, going to your site directly or being sent there by a search engine. Today, from an internet where social platforms systematically demote links to outside websites, and where content recommendations are made by machines instead of by friends, it sounds naïve. It was a contrarian but intuitive enough view. It was color coded in the stats attached to every post and scored as a metric called viral lift: Social traffic was good traffic, created and validated by readers choosing to share it the rest of the traffic, from searchers and portals and the “dead” but ever-growing front page of the site, might as well have been fake. There was, early on at BuzzFeed, a thin but novel ideology at work on top of the usual folk wisdom about traffic and audiences and news and scoops. He seemed to regard our coverage as right-headed but wronghearted, fixated on the profound strangeness of the moment rather than the opportunity it presented so clearly for him. Jonah was interested, too, and would not-so-subtly suggest that friends at the company (including, occasionally, “Mark”) were providing him with insights about how the internet was going to be, and vice versa. In part because it made sense to us, but also because it was the prevailing wisdom and mood of the place, we covered Facebook and Twitter (and Instagram and Pinterest and Snapchat) like they were the most important companies in the world.īen, who was running a newsroom funded by this belief, was intensely interested in what we were seeing and doing and had us send our posts about small updates to Facebook’s news feed for consideration by Matt Drudge. ![]() BuzzFeed was riding a wave created by the social-media companies I was charged with covering. My time at BuzzFeed was ultimately inconsequential, but my perspective was privileged. Aside from a decision not to sell to Disney for $650 million, which would have killed BuzzFeed’s news division in its own way, there are notably few examples of paths not taken or strategic mistakes that would have made a difference.īen hired me at BuzzFeed in 2012 to help build the company’s tech-news vertical. It’s rich in detail but struggles to suspend a broad narrative about online news, and the internet, between BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and Gawker’s Nick Denton, and can’t quite report itself out of the simplicity of what actually happened and why. In his new book Traffic, which was finished before BuzzFeed’s announcement but which publishes next week, Ben Smith, the site’s former editor-in-chief, makes an attempt at a first draft. The newsroom quickly multiplied in size, broke countless stories, and shaped other publishers’ coverage and business plans later, its parent company diminished, BuzzFeed News would unionize, win a Pulitzer, then get dragged, with the rest of the company, through a disastrous last-ditch SPAC offering, followed by brutal layoffs.īuzzFeed News’ closure - alongside a spate of other layoffs at media companies - marks the end of an era so recent that it doesn’t quite feel like history. ![]() In 2012, the small “web buzz” start-up started hiring reporters. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photo: Getty ImagesīuzzFeed, the archetypal new media company of the 2010s, announced last week that it was shutting down its news division. ![]()
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