How does BuzzFeed, the American version of Toutiao, achieve viral communication?

At the beginning of the year, Bytedance's XX Toutiao announced that it had reached a content licensing agreement with the American news aggregation platform BuzzFeed. In the future, it will release BuzzFeed's video content to domestic users on platforms such as the XX Toutiao App, including the food column Tasty and the travel channel Bring Me. Friends who are familiar with American entertainment culture should know the content startup internet celebrity BuzzFeed. So today we are going to discuss the originator of social content, the disruptor of the media industry and the creator of viral communication.

1. The beginnings of viral communication

Nowadays, mobile Internet has become the main channel for information dissemination, and the information acquisition method based mainly on social media has obvious advantages. From what I've seen, one of the most noteworthy information aggregation platforms is BuzzFeed. Maybe you don’t know much about it yet, but you must know that the “Dress: Blue, Black, or White and Gold” that went viral on the Internet three years ago came from BuzzFeed.

"Crazy Skirt"

BuzzFeed was founded in 2006, but the company’s story begins with the “ Nike incident” in 2001. After BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti asked Nike to print the word "sweatshop" on his shoes but was rejected, he emailed his conversation with Nike to twelve friends, who then forwarded it to others. One person told a hundred, a hundred told a thousand, and finally it was read by millions of people across the United States. This far exceeded Jonah Peretti's expectations. Through this event, a seed of sharing and virality was planted in his brain.

BuzzBot instant messaging client is the first product developed by BuzzFeed Labs. It algorithmically checks hundreds of blogs and sends users links to the most popular event information of the day. However, as the number of users increased, BuzzBot felt "tired" because it was too tiring to push the hottest events to each user every day. So BuzzFeed turned to building a website and posting links to the information that BuzzBot discovered every day.

According to Jonah Peretti, he thinks BuzzBot does a good job, but it would be better if it had a human to help it build the link framework.

Soon, the first editor, Peggy Wang, arrived. She is now BuzzFeed's editorial director, helping manage BuzzBot's daily links. At first, BuzzFeed would publish five or six links a day, some of which were from BuzzBot and some from Peggy Wang.

BuzzBot

In the early days of BuzzFeed, most of the sharing was between friends. As the website slowly attracted users, bloggers began to look for the resources they wanted from BuzzFeed. By April 2008, BuzzFeed's monthly revenue reached $600,000, and its posts were frequently cited by well-known bloggers. Meanwhile, the native advertising initiative raised $3.5 million. This will be covered later.

BuzzFeed’s native advertising funding slide deck

2. Create popular content and topics

From Jonah Peretti's emails with Nike factories to BuzzBot to the latest version of BuzzFeed. Jonah Peretti is always searching for the "secret" to going viral .

The first BuzzFeed post to go viral was called “Disaster Girl.” In front of a house destroyed by fire, a little girl gave a strange smile. In addition, the editors took pictures of the girl and placed her at other crime scenes. The girl's weird smile did not look out of place in the different scenes. In this case, BuzzFeed not only looks for the most popular topics, but also helps create them.

Disaster Girl original picture

PS photo of girl in disaster

Later, BuzzFeed discovered another Internet trend killer - cute pets.

It turns out that we can't resist the cuteness of cats and dogs. Photos of these furry little guys are perfect for sharing with friends and family.

I wonder if anyone has noticed that in order to cater to users, BuzzFeed's software engineers have inserted cats into the games they recommend in the App or in offline mode.

In the early days of social networks , people were talking about humorous jokes, cute animals, and positive energy . These posts were something you couldn't resist sharing, and this is what BuzzFeed started with.

BuzzCat

Over time, BuzzFeed also found their specialty - inventory . On the website, 65% of viral articles are of a review nature. Readers can quickly skim this type of article, which is highly shareable.

They have an operations team of over 300 people, who produce 400 topics suitable for all ages every day, such as "Is the skirt blue and black or white and gold?", "The top ten most popular cute pets?", "Six people who claim to have mated with aliens" and so on.

BuzzFeed has created viral content time and time again with its easy-to-understand content and simple and crude " clickbait headlines " . Just like the "crazy skirt" incident, suddenly one day everyone in the world was discussing the color of the skirt. The debate went viral, and BuzzFeed was overwhelmed by the traffic for a short time.

In short, viral articles have the following characteristics: being short and concise, easy to understand, having catchy headlines , reviewing articles, and having a large number of pictures.

19 Cute Ways BuzzFeed Can Ruin Your Day

From "Girl in Disaster" to "Cute Pets" to "Crazy Dresses," BuzzFeed is constantly searching for its own viral article.

3. Create social content that readers like

In recent years, XX headlines can be regarded as a model of domestic mobile media, but the amount of traffic of its articles depends on how high the platform gives it. The weight of BuzzFeed articles is more determined by user attention. Therefore, the core of BuzzFeed’s growth strategy is to focus on content worth sharing . Since article traffic comes from social sharing rather than search, BuzzFeed editors don't have to be slaves to SEO .

Here are the "golden rules of sharing" that BuzzFeed editors follow:

1. Don’t be clever. Readers don’t like being tricked.

2. Be yourself, and the content should show your own characteristics.

3. You should be more willing to share your own content than your readers.

4. Keep experimenting to find better content.

In its early days, BuzzFeed was also too focused on Google search numbers. Until several users mentioned in an email to Jonah Peretti: I am very sad today and can't find any good content to share on BuzzFeed.

At this point, Peretti discovered his aha moment - instead of using complex algorithms to find articles that users might like, it is better to repeatedly review the homepage to retain users.

This aha moment taught him the importance of the human element for hit content. BuzzFeed then adopted a completely new business model . If other media live on their own homepages, BuzzFeed lives on the information feeds of all social networks. To put it more exaggeratedly: other media only optimize the order of article display, while BuzzFeed optimizes people's hearts.

BuzzFeed Homepage

4. Let content become the best advertisement

Native advertising is a new concept proposed in 2012. No one can give a clear definition of native advertising. There are many different opinions. Jon Steinberg, president of BuzzFeed, said:

"When you take content and brand it with the platform's version, it's a native ad, so in Twitter it's a tweet, in Facebook it's a status update, in the Buzz feed it's a story."

"20 Things You Didn't Know Were Illegal" (Discovery Channel ad)

Douyin's native video ads make the communication between brands and users more and more interesting and imaginative. Airbnb, one of the video advertisers, has greatly increased users' favorability towards Airbnb through TikTok-style transitions and editing, cool visual effects and music interaction. BuzzFeed has always been a master of "native advertising".

Native advertising on Tik Tok (Chevrolet, Airbnb, and Harbin Beer)

For BuzzFeed, the birth of native advertising is a major reform in online advertising. In BuzzFeed's native ads, even though they are marked as brands, it is still difficult to tell whether they are native ads or regular articles. Only after we read the entire article will we gradually realize that this is an advertisement. Advertisers are excited about the prospect of a breath of fresh air amid increasingly expensive advertising competition and an increasing number of ineffective ad impressions.

In BuzzFeed, their ads are not only displayed to users, but also shared by users . At the same time, BuzzFeed's promotion relies more on word of mouth, and good reputation depends on regular users and high-quality content. If your content in BuzzFeed is good enough, shared widely enough, and captures enough fans , then the content itself is the best advertisement, and you don’t have to spend a penny on promotion. Because BuzzFeed has created an advanced model for advertising dissemination.

5. Technological media companies

BuzzFeed is a news media company, but it is more like a Silicon Valley technology company, placing greater emphasis on “letting data and technology speak.” Just as BuzzBot tracks and analyzes what content spreads the fastest, Jonah Peretti and his staff are also carefully measuring and analyzing what happens on the site.

Crazy Skirt POUND Analysis Chart

BuzzFeed has its own core technology and a team of nearly 200 software engineers dedicated to data analysis . They track and measure data shared on social platforms, use data and tools to optimize titles, and test the effects of different combinations of titles and images . Editors can iterate to find the most effective combinations, and monitoring early traffic and social activity can help editors target the most popular content types.

Currently, BuzzFeed has tens of millions of people sharing its content and over 200 million unique visitors. Behind this, a technology called POUND plays a strong supporting role.

POUND is the abbreviation of Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffsion. It is a new patented technology that captures how content spreads on social networks. It can analyze the content dissemination methods and paths, thereby better helping BuzzFeed determine content delivery. It can effectively track the dissemination of different sharers through social networks or even peer-to-peer sharing (Email or Gchat).

The big data processed by Pound contains rich information, and fully mining it can help BuzzFeed better understand data, users and social networks . BuzzFeed has strong technical support, deeply combining technology and content, tracking every piece of information published, and promptly correcting content with poor search results and few shares, providing users with the highest quality and most popular article types, and creating high-quality content in a targeted manner.

BuzzFeed’s POUND Technology

6. Final Thoughts

Perhaps this reflection from the Atlantic sums it up best as we look toward the future of BuzzFeed:

What does it mean to be a large news organization in 2015? The key is money? Is it human? Is it the number of articles? Is it growth potential? Or cultural concern? MTV, Time magazine, and USA Today have all achieved varying forms of market dominance.

USA Today has proven its influence in the newspaper industry, but its reach is limited by the constraints of print media itself. MTV had lost its influence, transformed by its own financial success and losing its early vision. Time magazine has completely transformed itself - it has been hugely profitable and influential for decades, but it is now actively adapting to the online society. In this day and age, BuzzFeed is the website that many websites are emulating .

Of course, BuzzFeed's success depends in part on what it does, or doesn't do. Technology is changing, and somewhere around the corner there might be another small team, another set of ideas, and another new approach emerging.

Source: Yuanwai He (ID: Yuanwai-HE)