photo from: Pixgood.com
As the most popular online news media company, BuzzFeed
got the investment of 50 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz in August and
announced that the company would expand their business in every way. Besides
segmenting their content into three types and expanding the video division by
adding various forms from GIF to films, BuzzFeed would also enter into broader
international market with strong ambition. Then comes the question： in the age when people, especially the younger ones
have little interests in reading news, how has BuzzFeed made a successful
example for online news media?
Make
people share it
Attention is based on good content, and attention is
monetizable. The phrase ‘content is king’ has been mentioned so frequently that
it has to some extent become a cliché, however, it is still hard to say what is
the quintessential
of good content. While traditional news producers insist on doing long and
in-depth reports, BuzzFeed has gone to another extreme. They comes up with
their only but most crucial philosophy for online news, that is: make people share
rather than searching for it!
Social media is like an
engine, and BuzzFeed is obviously good at taking advantage of the earned media.
As the company reports , 50% of the website’s traffic is mobile and 75% of it
comes from social media such as Facebook and Twitter. At the same time, with
more than 9 million subscribers, BuzzFeed achieves 500 million video views from
YouTube monthly, 50% of which is also mobile. It is true that nowadays, mobile
platform has become the main battlefield for people’s attention, and the key
for winning the game is to create something that can spread like virus.
By building up a viral news
lab, BuzzFeed has also come up with the answer for success, which is to dig
deeper into the flood of information, make things as interesting and relaxing
as possible, and then put everything in the lists. Looking at the front page of
the website, you will find countless titles like ‘ 44 thoughts everyone has
during the Victoria’s Secret fashion show’ and ’14 times Joe Biden had the
perfect reaction to 2014’. While the traditional and serious media may accuse
BuzzFeed for degrading the readers by providing such kind of content, the truth
is that in social media, where people’s attention span is extremely short, the
BuzzFeed lists of numbers and pictures will promote people to click and share.
Is that content? No, it is advertisement!
While BuzzFeed’s credo is
‘everything is about sharing’, they have also used it in making money. Since
everybody hates advertisement columns, it seems a big challenge to make people
interested in them, let alone sharing them with friends. What BuzzFeed has done
is not to make creative and delicate advertisements as 4A companies do, but to embed
the messages into content as well as make it up in BuzzFeed style, so that
people do not feel like it is an advertisement.
It is true that native
advertising is not new, but compared with displayed advertising, it seems like
native advertising indicates a brighter future. The custom social posts and
story units made by BuzzFeed are proved to achieve 10 times click-through rates
more than banner ads. In one of the social units for Mini Cooper, BuzzFeed
succeeds in promoting the products’ slogan ‘ not normal’ by creating a list
called ‘25 places that look normal, but are actually real’. As a result, it is
reported that the content draws in more than 1 million engagements, and for
this time two thirds of them are still from social sharing.
It is not exaggerative to say that
new media company like BuzzFeed is disrupting the traditional media industry including
news, entertainment and advertising by making a convergence of them. However,
it seems like in China we still lack such kind of online news media. While Weibo
and Wechat have the ability to spread viral news, these two platforms rely
heavily on UGC, most of which are not attractive enough to be shared to mass
audiences. On the other hand, the professional story-makers and native
advertising are called ‘Duanzishou’ and ‘soft advertisements’ in social media,
to which people attach little importance. Therefore, the most crucial thing may
be to think about how to inspire people to share. After all, BuzzFeed has
proven that sharing means everything.
References:
1. Forbes. (2014). Here’s how Buzzfeed and Hffpost
really stack up. Retrieved Dec 5, 2014 from
2. CNBC. (2014). How
BuzzFeed rode cute cat videos to $100 million. Retrieved Dec 5, 2014
from http://www.cnbc.com/id/101945391
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