9 years ago 2006 11 01 headquarters new york city new york u.s. key people jonah peretti ceo revenue us 167 million 2015 1 2 owner buzzfeed inc. employees 770 october 2014 3 slogan s the media company for the social age website www.buzzfeed.com alexa rank 145 september 2016 4 type of site news and entertainment advertising native registration optional available in english french spanish german portuguese japanese current status active buzzfeed is an american private internet media company based in new york city . the firm describes itself as a social news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media and digital technology in order to provide the most shareable breaking news original reporting entertainment and video . 5 buzzfeed was founded in 2006 as a viral lab focusing on tracking viral content by jonah peretti and john s. johnson iii . 6 kenneth lerer co founder and chairman of the huffington post started as a co founder and investor in buzzfeed and is now the executive chairman as well . 6 prior to establishing buzzfeed peretti experimented with other contagious media as director of research and development and the openlab at eyebeam johnson s new york city based art and technology non profit . 7 8 the company has grown into a global 9 media and technology company providing coverage on a variety of topics including politics diy animals and business . in late 2011 ben smith of politico was hired as editor in chief to expand the site into serious journalism long form journalism and reportage . 10 contents 1 history 1.1 funding 1.2 acquisitions 2 content 2.1 the dress 2.2 video 2.2.1 watermelon stunt 2.3 community 3 technology and social media 4 criticism and controversy 5 see also 6 references 7 external links history edit jonah peretti founded buzzfeed in november 2006 . funding edit in august 2014 buzzfeed raised 50 million from the venture capital firm andreessen horowitz more than doubling previous rounds of funding . 11 the site was reportedly valued at around 850 million by andreessen horowitz . 11 buzzfeed generates its advertising revenue through native advertising that matches its own editorial content and does not rely on banner ads . 12 buzzfeed also uses its familiarity with social media to target conventional advertising through other channels like facebook . 13 in august 2015 nbcuniversal made a 200 million equity investment in buzzfeed . 14 along with plans to hire more journalists to build a more prominent investigative unit buzzfeed is hiring journalists around the world and plans to open outposts in india germany mexico and japan . 15 in december 2014 growth equity firm general atlantic acquired 50m in secondary stock of the company . 16 acquisitions edit buzzfeed s first acquisition was in 2012 when the company purchased kingfish labs a startup founded by rob fishman initially focused on optimizing facebook ads . 17 on october 28 2014 buzzfeed announced its next acquisition taking hold of torando labs . the torando team was to become buzzfeed s first data engineering team . 18 content edit buzzfeed produces daily content in which the work of staff reporters contributors syndicated cartoon artists and its community are featured . popular formats on the website include lists videos and quizzes . while buzzfeed was initially focused exclusively on such viral content according to the new york times it added more traditional content building a track record for delivering breaking news and deeply reported articles in the years up to 2014 . 19 in that year buzzfeed deleted over 4000 early posts apparently because as time passed they looked stupider and stupider as observed by the new yorker . 20 buzzfeed consistently ranked at the top of newswhip s facebook publisher rankings from december 2013 to april 2014 until the huffington post entered the position . 21 22 23 24 25 the dress edit main article the dress viral phenomenon the most interesting thing to me is that it traveled . it went from new york media circle jerk twitter to international . and you could see it in my twitter notifications because people started having conversations in like spanish and portuguese and then japanese and chinese and thai and arabic . it was amazing to watch this move from a local thing to like a massive international phenomenon . 26 cates holderness a post about a debate over the color of an item of clothing from buzzfeed s tumblr editor cates holderness garnered more than 28 million views in one day setting a record for most concurrent visitors to a buzzfeed post . 27 holderness had showed the picture to other members of the site s social media team who immediately began arguing about the dress s colors among themselves . after creating a simple poll for users of the site she left work and took the subway back to her brooklyn home . when she got off the train and checked her phone it was overwhelmed by the messages on various sites . i couldn t open twitter because it kept crashing . i thought somebody had died maybe . i didn t know what was going on . later in the evening the page set a new record at buzzfeed for concurrent visitors which would reach 673 000 at its peak . 26 28 video edit buzzfeed video buzzfeed motion picture s flagship channel 29 produces original content and its production studio and team is based in los angeles . since hiring ze frank in 2012 buzzfeed video has produced several video series including the creep series the try guys and fun facts . in august 2014 the company announced a new division buzzfeed motion pictures which may produce feature length films . 19 as of december 13 2015 buzzfeed video s youtube had garnered over 6.3 billion views and more than 9.3 million subscribers . 30 it was recently announced that youtube has signed on for two feature length series to be created by buzzfeed motion pictures titled broke and squad wars . 31 watermelon stunt edit main article exploding watermelon stunt on april 8 2016 buzzfeed created a live stream on facebook during which two staffers wrapped rubber bands around a watermelon until the pressure of the rubber bands caused it to explode . the stunt was notable for drawing a very large online audience . 32 community edit on july 17 2012 humor website mcsweeney s internet tendency published a satirical piece entitled suggested buzzfeed articles 33 prompting buzzfeed to create many of the suggestions . 34 35 36 37 buzzfeed listed mcsweeney s as a community contributor . 34 the post subsequently received more than 350 000 page views 35 prompted buzzfeed to ask for user submissions 34 38 and received media attention . 35 36 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 subsequently the website launched the community section in may 2013 to enable users to submit content . users are initially limited to publishing only one post per day but can increase their submission capacity by raising their cat power 46 described on the buzzfeed website as an official measure of your rank in buzzfeed s community . a user s cat power increases as they achieve greater prominence on the site . 47 technology and social media edit buzzfeed receives the majority of its traffic by creating content that is shared on social media websites . buzzfeed works by judging their content on how viral it will become . operating in a continuous feedback loop where all of its articles and videos are used as input for its sophisticated data operation . 13 the site continues to test and track their custom content with an in house team of data scientists and external facing social dashboard . using an algorithm dubbed viral rank created by jonah peretti and duncan watts the company uses this formula to let editors users and advertisers try lots of different ideas which maximizes distribution . 48 staff writers are ranked by views on an internal leaderboard . in 2014 buzzfeed received 75 % of its views from links on social media outlets such as pinterest twitter and facebook . 12 19 buzzfeed s video series on comfort food tasty was tailor made for facebook where it had over thirty million followers as of january 2016 . the channel has substantially more views than buzzfeed s dedicated food site . the company also runs proper tasty about british food . 49 criticism and controversy edit benny johnson was fired from buzzfeed in july 2014 for plagiarism . buzzfeed has been accused of plagiarizing original content from competitors throughout the online and offline press . on june 28 2012 gawker s adrian chen posted a story titled buzzfeed and the plagiarism problem . in the article chen observed that one of buzzfeed s most popular writers matt stopera had frequently copied and pasted chunks of text into lists without attribution . 50 on march 8 2013 the atlantic wire also published an article concerning buzzfeed and plagiarism . 51 buzzfeed has been the subject of multiple copyright infringement lawsuits for both using content it had no rights to and encouraging its proliferation without attributing its sources one for an individual photographer s photograph 52 and another for nine celebrity photographs from a single photography company . 53 in july 2014 buzzfeed writer benny johnson was accused of multiple instances of plagiarism . 54 two anonymous twitter users chronicled johnson attributing work that was not his own but directly lift ed from other reporters wikipedia and yahoo answers all without credit . 55 buzzfeed editor ben smith initially defended johnson calling him a deeply original writer . 56 days later smith acknowledged that johnson had plagiarized others work 40 times announced that johnson had been fired and apologized to buzzfeed readers . plagiarism much less copying unchecked facts from wikipedia or other sources is an act of disrespect to the reader smith said . we are deeply embarrassed and sorry to have misled you . 56 in total 41 instances of plagiarism were found and corrected . 57 johnson who had previously worked for the mitt romney 2008 presidential campaign was subsequently hired by the conservative magazine national review as their social media editor . 58 in october 2014 it was noted by the pew research center that in the united states buzzfeed was viewed as an unreliable source by the majority of people regardless of political affiliation . other news outlets deemed more untrustworthy than trustworthy in the survey were the rush limbaugh show the glenn beck program al jazeera america and the sean hannity show . 59 60 61 in april 2015 buzzfeed drew scrutiny after gawker observed the publication had deleted two posts that criticized advertisers . 62 one of the posts criticized dove soap manufactured by unilever while another criticized hasbro . 63 both companies advertise with buzzfeed . ben smith apologized in a memo to staff for his actions . i blew it smith wrote . twice in the past couple of months i ve asked editors over their better judgment and without any respect to our standards or process to delete recently published posts from the site . both involved the same thing my overreaction to questions we ve been wrestling with about the place of personal opinion pieces on our site . i reacted impulsively when i saw the posts and i was wrong to do that . we ve reinstated both with a brief note . 64 days later one of the authors of the deleted posts arabelle sicardi resigned . 65 an internal review by the company found three additional posts deleted for being critical of products or advertisements by microsoft pepsi and unilever . 66 in september 2015 the christian post wrote that a video by buzzfeed titled i m christian but i m not ... was getting criticism from conservative christians