"BuzzFeed: a story of success"
The great idea behind Jonah Paretti’s BuzzFeed platform has made him a successful entrepreneur. Paretti’s premise was to create content that would go viral and he found that key to virality through “emotional content”. What he meant by emotional content was something that did not seek deep logic or consciousness, but was rather light-hearted and filled with positive stories often in the form of lists, videos and funny quizzes.
Paretti’s perspective of content was different from other competitors, he understood the human instinct of sharing. In his interview Paretti said: “Content must resonate with people on an emotional level if they are to share it. Even seemingly trivial content has a deeper function that allows people to connect with one another and share their experiences, he claims.” (Bacon, 2014) BuzzFeed readers were able to react to the stories , classifying them as LOL, OMG, Fail etc. At the time BuzzFeed depended heavily on social network platforms and the reasons is that people usually did not visit the site directly, most of readers found the content on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
I haven’t personally heard about the BuzzFeed as a platform before, I used to come across their funny videos and lists on the Facebook feed when someone was sharing them. It has been noticed by the content creators, that many people shared the stories just to look smarter in front of their social media friends and that also made content go viral.
Furthermore, what made BuzzFeed successful was Paretti’s genius idea about Native Ads.
BuzzFeed allowed brands to create a sponsored content, stories and lists that imitated the format and design of the site and each post was represented by a headline or thumbnail that read “presented by” and indicated the name of the brand. Sponsored content had long been a feature of media industry, but in my opinion Paretti’s business model of Native Ads is a success story. People do not want to see a lot of ads popping on their screens every time they scroll down their feeds on social media. The website refuses to use banner or display advertising in favor of promoted posts — stories told on behalf of brand publishers. “Native advertising is not a press release — This is not an opportunity to rave about your products. Instead, talk about true stories or case studies where your product has somehow improved lives or contributed to the well-being of a community. Tide does this through their Loads of Hope program which provides laundry services to areas affected by disaster.” (Jacob, n.d.)
I believe that this business model has become successful one because it was trust worthy, on the first place in terms of advertisement, it tackled specific audience with their humorous content and at the end of the day it went viral because people wanted to share something that made them look smart or tell something that other people don’t know yet.
References
Bacon, J. (11 June 2014 г.). What brands must learn from BuzzFeed. Retrieved from marketing week : https://www.marketingweek.com/profile-interview-jonah-peretti-founder-buzzfeed/
Jacob, S. (n.d). Retrieved from https://neilpatel.com/blog/native-advertising/
