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BuzzFeed is a prominent American digital media company known for its viral listicles, interactive quizzes, investigative journalism, and short-form video content. It has built a broad audience through its mix of lifestyle, entertainment, and news-focused digital products.
Key moments
2006Founded in New York City by Jonah Peretti, John Johnson, and Kenneth Lerer
2011Launched BuzzFeed News, its dedicated investigative reporting division
2012Acquired Quizilla, a popular personality quiz and fan content platform
2017Unveiled Tasty, a viral food video franchise that gained global traction
2021Went public via a SPAC merger with 8VC Partners acquisition company
2023Privatized and acquired by Nexstar Media Group
Competitive Landscape for BuzzFeed
Direct digital media competitors: Vox Media, Upworthy, and Insider (previously Business Insider) produce similar viral, shareable content and news coverage, targeting the same young, online-focused audience.
Food video rivals: Tasty's short-form food content competes with TikTok creator accounts, YouTube food channels like Binging with Babish, and brand-owned food content platforms.
News and investigative competitors: BuzzFeed News faces competition from digital-first news outlets including Vox News, Axios, and local independent digital news platforms.
Social media platform competition: Short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels have diverted significant user attention and ad spend from traditional digital media brands like BuzzFeed, forcing the company to shift more resources to short-video content creation.
Vox Media, Upworthy, Insider are core direct content competitors
Tasty food franchise competes with TikTok/YouTube food creators
BuzzFeed News competes with digital news outlets like Vox News and Axios
Social media platforms have pressured BuzzFeed to adapt short-form content strategies
BuzzFeed is a leading American digital media brand that has built significant equity in the global online content landscape through its pioneering focus on shareable, culturally relevant digital content. From its origins as a viral content aggregator, it has expanded into a diversified media business with verticals spanning entertainment, food, news, and branded content, earning strong recognition among digital-native millennial and Gen Z audiences.
The brand benefits from early-mover advantage in defining the viral content format that now dominates social media, but faces intensifying competition from native short-form social platforms and rival digital media outlets that target the same young, online audience. Its Tasty food content vertical remains one of the most recognizable short-form food brands in digital media, supporting overall brand strength.
BuzzFeed’s ability to adapt to shifting content consumption trends, from listicles and interactive quizzes to short-form vertical video, has allowed it to retain a large, engaged audience despite significant industry disruption. However, ongoing industry headwinds and revenue pressures have impacted its ability to invest in rapid growth, creating a mixed profile of strengths and challenges for the brand.
Brand leadership
Score: 72/100
BuzzFeed was an early pioneer of viral digital content, creating the template for shareable listicles, interactive quizzes, and short-form vertical video that countless competitors have since adopted. It holds a leading position in the short-form food content segment through its Tasty brand, though it has ceded some market leadership to native social media platforms and newer digital rivals in recent years.
User engagement
Score: 78/100
BuzzFeed designs its content explicitly to drive social sharing and user interaction, with interactive quizzes that encourage users to share results and short-form videos that consistently generate high comment and share rates across major social platforms. It maintains strong, consistent engagement with its audience across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, leveraging emerging internet trends to keep interaction levels high.
Brand growth momentum
Score: 55/100
BuzzFeed has faced slowing growth and challenging market conditions in recent years, as competition from short-form social platforms has diverted both audience attention and advertising spend away from traditional digital media brands. While the brand has adapted by shifting more resources to short-form video and expanding its branded content services, it has not replicated the rapid growth it achieved in its early years, resulting in moderate momentum.
Brand stability
Score: 68/100
As a publicly traded company with over 19 years of operation, BuzzFeed has a well-established brand identity that is widely recognized by both consumers and advertisers. While it has undergone corporate restructuring and faced financial pressures amid broader digital media industry headwinds, its core brand equity remains intact, and it continues to serve a large global audience, supporting solid brand stability.
Brand tenure
Score: 70/100
Founded in 2006, BuzzFeed has nearly 20 years of brand history as of 2026, which is a substantial tenure in the fast-evolving digital media industry. Its long history has allowed it to build brand recognition and loyalty among multiple cohorts of internet users, contributing positively to its brand strength, though rapid industry shifts mean long tenure offers less advantage in digital media than in slower-changing sectors.
Industry reputation
Score: 80/100
BuzzFeed is one of the most high-profile digital-native media brands globally, with a strong reputation within the media and advertising industries for its innovative approach to content creation and distribution. It is widely studied as a pioneer of viral content strategy, and its vertical brands including Tasty have earned strong reputations within their respective segments, leading to a high industry profile.
Global brand reach
Score: 62/100
BuzzFeed has expanded beyond its U.S. home base to operate localized content editions in dozens of countries across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, reaching a global audience of hundreds of millions of monthly users. However, the majority of its audience and advertising revenue still originates from the North American market, and it has not achieved the same level of deep global penetration as larger international media groups, resulting in a moderate globalization score.
AI-driven analysis can support structured reasoning around a brand’s value based on public industry and market data, but all value estimates generated through this approach are illustrative and not independently audited. For a fully verified, audited calculation of BuzzFeed’s brand value, please contact World Brand Lab.
website
buzzfeed.com
former name
BuzzFeed Laboratories (2006–2016)
type
Public
traded as
nasdaq: BZFD (Class A)
isin
isin: US12430A1025
foundation
November 1, 2006
location city
New York City
location country
U.S.
key people
Jonah Peretti (CEO)
Dao Nguyen (publisher)
industry
Online media
products
Entertainment
News
subsid
HuffPost
BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internetmedia, news, and entertainment company with a focus on digital media.Based in New York City,[2] BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III to focus on tracking viral content.
Originally known for online quizzes, "listicles," and pop culture articles, the company has grown into a global media and technology company, providing coverage on a variety of topics including politics, DIY, animals, and business.[3][4] BuzzFeed generates revenue through native advertising, a strategy that helps increase the likelihood of viewers reading through the content of advertisements.[5]
In late 2011, BuzzFeed hired Ben Smith of Politico as editor-in-chief, to expand the site into long-form journalism and reportage under the BuzzFeed News banner.[6] After years of investment in investigative journalism, by 2021 BuzzFeed News had won the National Magazine Award, the George Polk Award,[7] and the Pulitzer Prize,[8] and was nominated for the Michael Kelly Award.BuzzFeed News later moved to its own domain rather than existing as a section of the main BuzzFeed website.[9] On April 20, 2023, Peretti announced that BuzzFeed would be shuttering BuzzFeed News and focusing its news efforts into HuffPost, laying off about 180 workers.[10]
History
Prior to establishing BuzzFeed, Peretti was director of research and development and the OpenLab at Eyebeam, Johnson's New York City-based art and technology nonprofit organization, where he experimented with other viral media.[11][12]
In 2006, while working at the Huffington Post, Peretti started BuzzFeed (originally called BuzzFeed Laboratories)[13] as a side project, in partnership with his former supervisor John Johnson.In the beginning, BuzzFeed employed no writers or editors, just an "algorithm to cull stories from around the web that were showing stirrings of virality."[14] The site initially launched an instant messaging client, BuzzBot, which sent users a link to popular content. The messages were sent based on algorithms which examined the links that were being quickly disseminated, scouring through the feeds of hundreds of blogs that were aggregating them. Later, the site began spotlighting the most popular links that BuzzBot found. Peretti hired curators to help describe the content that was popular around the web. In 2011, Peretti hired Politico's Ben Smith, who earlier had achieved much attention as a political blogger, to assemble a news operation in addition to the many aggregated "listicles".
Film
In 2014, BuzzFeed launched a motion picture division, initially led by Ze Frank.[78]Pulp Fiction producer Michael Shamberg and comedian-director Jordan Peele joined in advisory roles.[79] In 2016, Jim Parsons was cast as BuzzFeed reporter Matt Stopera in what was to be BuzzFeed's first narrative film, Brother Orange.The movie, based on a viral BuzzFeed article, was eventually released as a documentary in 2025.[80] BuzzFeed Motion Picture Group, later renamed BuzzFeed Studios, releases BuzzFeed's films.In 2024, Richard Alan Reid became president of BuzzFeed Studios.[81]
Narrative Films
Documentary Films
Content
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. The style of such content inspired the parody website ClickHole.[3][83] While BuzzFeed initially was 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.[84] 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.[85]
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.[86]
Notable stories
"The dress"
In February 2015, a post resulting in 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.[127] Holderness had shown the picture to other members of the site's social media team, who immediately began arguing about the dress 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 telephone, 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 reached 673,000 at its peak.[126][128]
Watermelon stunt
Criticism
Plagiarism
BuzzFeed has been accused of plagiarizing original content from competitors from the online and offline press. In June 2012, Gawker's Adrian Chen observed that one of BuzzFeed's most popular writers—Matt Stopera—frequently copied and pasted "chunks of text into lists without attribution."[130] In March 2013, The Atlantic Wire also reported several "listicles" had apparently been copied from Reddit and other websites.[131] In July 2014, BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson was accused of multiple instances of plagiarism.[132] 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.[133]
Awards and recognition
In 2017, BuzzFeed won Webby Awards for Best News App and Best Interview/Talk Show (for Another Round),[185] and president Greg Coleman was named Publishing Executive of the Year by Digiday.[186]
In 2018, staff of BuzzFeed news was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in their international reporting category for their article that "proved that operatives with apparent ties to Vladimir Putin have engaged in a targeted killing campaign against his perceived enemies on British and American soil".[187] BuzzFeed later won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 in the international reporting category for an investigative series about the Xinjiang internment camps.[8]
In 2016, BuzzFeed formally separated its news and entertainment content into BuzzFeed News and the newly formed BuzzFeed Entertainment Group, which also includes BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.[16][17] As of 2016, BuzzFeed had correspondents from 12 countries,[18] and foreign editions in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom.[19] By the end of 2017, BuzzFeed employed around 1,700 employees worldwide, although it announced plans in November of that year to lay off around 100 employees in the US, 45 in the UK,[20][21][22] and 100 in France in June 2018.[23]
On January 23, 2019, BuzzFeed notified all employees via memo that there would be an upcoming 15% reduction in workforce affecting the international, web content, and news divisions of the company. The layoffs would affect approximately 200 employees.[24] In 2020, BuzzFeed signed a deal with Universal Television to produce content based on its stories.[25]
Three top BuzzFeed News editors in March 2022 announced that they would be resigning and the newsroom would face voluntary layoffs or job cuts.[26] The cuts came after BuzzFeed investors encouraged Peretti to shut down all of BuzzFeed News, but he refused, CNBC reported.[27] In January 2023, Peretti announced that BuzzFeed would be making a "hard pivot" to AI generated content such as custom quizzes.In May 2023, Peretti announced that AI content would “replace the majority of static content” on the BuzzFeed website.[28]
In March 2026, BuzzFeed revealed that it is still burdened by legacy commitments and it has engaged in “strategic conversations” about relieving its liquidity issues.[29]
Funding
Despite reaching annual revenues in the hundreds of million of dollars at its peak, BuzzFeed has been consistently loss-making since its inception.
BuzzFeed raised $3.5 million in 2008 through Hearst Ventures and SoftBank.[30] In 2011, BuzzFeed ran more than 100 social media campaigns, resulting in their revenue tripling compared to 2010.[30] In January 2012, BuzzFeed announced that it had earned $15.5 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, Lerer Ventures, Hearst Interactive Media, SoftBank, and RRE Capital to expand the site's content.[31] Later, in October 2012, BuzzFeed ran sponsored content for the Obama administration leading to an increase in ad revenue.[32] By January 2013, BuzzFeed announced that New Enterprise Associates had raised $19.3 million.[33] The company was reported to be profitable in 2013.[34]
In 2014, it was reported that BuzzFeed had passed $100 million in revenue.[35][36] In August 2014, BuzzFeed raised $50 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, more than doubling previous rounds of funding.[37][38] The site was reportedly valued at around $850 million by Andreessen Horowitz.[37] BuzzFeed generates its advertising revenue through native advertising that matches its editorial content, and does not rely on banner ads.[39] BuzzFeed also uses its familiarity with social media to target conventional advertising through other channels, such as Facebook.In December 2014, growth equity firm General Atlantic acquired $50 million in secondary stock of the company.[40]
In August 2015, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in BuzzFeed.[41] Along with plans to hire more journalists to build a more prominent "investigative" unit, BuzzFeed planned on hiring journalists around the world and plans to open outposts in India, Germany, Mexico, and Japan.[42] It planned on hiring staff for its UK bureau, its rapidly-expanding motion picture unit and its food-themed business, Tasty.[43][44] NBCUniversal invested an additional $200 million in 2016 after the two companies had collaborated on many projects, namely the Rio Olympics.[36] The companies planned to work together to market themselves to advertisers.[36] Together, Comcast and its NBCUniversal subsidiary own about a third of BuzzFeed.BuzzFeed has said that it intends to stay independent.[45]
After laying off 100 employees in 2017, BuzzFeed laid off 200 of its employees in 2019 to help facilitate growth despite raising revenue by 15% from 2017 to 2018.[46]Facebook began funding two BuzzFeed News shows in 2019 for Watch.[46] Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, on March 25, 2020, BuzzFeed announced in an internal memo that it would cut employee salaries on a sliding scale of 5% (lowest income bracket) up to 25% (highest income bracket). Peretti said he would not be taking a salary until the end of the pandemic. Many staffers expressed relief at this announcement as there were no layoffs.[47] On May 13, 2020, the company shut down its divisions in the UK and Australia, furloughing 10 news staff in the UK as well as four in its Australian outpost.[48][49]
According to a news from June 24, 2021 on Variety, BuzzFeed, valued at $1.5 billion through a SPAC deal, is to go public and acquire Complex Networks for $300 million.[50][51][52]
BuzzFeed raised $16.2M in its latest funding round, which was Post IPO round held on Dec 03, 2021.[53]
In 2025, BuzzFeed had a net loss of $57.3 million, noting that it did not have enough resources to fund its cash obligations for 2026,[54] stating that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”[28]
Acquisitions and stock listing
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.[55]
In October 2014, BuzzFeed announced its next acquisition, Torando Labs, which would become BuzzFeed's first data-engineering team.[56]
On November 19, 2020, BuzzFeed announced that they would acquire HuffPost in a stock deal that made Verizon Media minority shareholder in BuzzFeed.[57][58][59]
In June 2021, BuzzFeed announced its plans to go public via a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and planned to acquire
Divestitures
In February 2024, BuzzFeed announced the sale of Complex to NTWRK, a livestream shopping platform, even as it would retain some popular franchises. At the same time, it reportedly considered selling Tasty, a social media food brand. The moves marked a retreat for the company after its December 2021 public listing done to finance acquisitions and came during a difficult period for media companies. It also announced layoffs.[66][67][68][69] In July 2024, the company sold travel-brand Bring Me!to media publisher LOST iN.[70] In December 2024, BuzzFeed sold First We Feast, which produces the show Hot Ones, for $82.5 million to a consortium of Investors.[71] According to Reuters, in early 2024 British media group
Vivek Ramaswamy investment
In May 2024, activist investor Vivek Ramaswamy acquired a 7.7% stake in BuzzFeed, making him the fourth-largest shareholder,[73] which he later increased to 8.37%.[74] Ramaswamy said that he thought the company was undervalued,[75] and that he wanted to shift the company's political leanings[74] such as by hiring right-wing media personalities.[76] Elizabeth Lopatto, writing in The Verge, called his effort futile, as voting power in BuzzFeed is primarily in Class B shares, which have 50 times the voting power of the common Class A shares Ramaswamy had purchased.90% of Class B shares are held by founder Peretti and close associates, meaning that Ramaswamy has little voting power despite his large shareholding.[77]
News
BuzzFeed's news division began in December 2011 with the appointment of Ben Smith as editor-in-chief. In 2013, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs of ProPublica was hired as head of investigative reporting.[87] By 2016, BuzzFeed had 20 investigative journalists.[88] Chief executive Jonah Peretti announced the BuzzFeed News division would close on April 20, 2023.[89][90]
Video
BuzzFeed Video, BuzzFeed Motion Picture's flagship YouTube channel,[91] produces original content. Its production studio and team are based in Los Angeles. Since hiring Ze Frank in 2012, BuzzFeed Video has produced several video series, including "The Try Guys".In August 2014, the company announced a new division, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, which may produce feature-length films.[84] As of September 1, 2021, BuzzFeed Video's YouTube channel had garnered more than 17.4 billion views and more than 20.3 million subscribers.[92] BuzzFeed later announced that YouTube signed on for two feature-length series to be created by BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, entitled Broke and Squad Wars.[93]
Podcasts
BuzzFeed started an in-house podcasting team in 2015, through which the podcasts Another Round and Internet Explorer were developed and launched.[94] In September 2018, BuzzFeed shut down its podcast department and laid off the staff due to a lack of desired ad revenue.It cancelled most of its podcasts, including See Something, Say Something.[95][96] In late January 2019, they fired 200 staff across the company and cancelled the remaining podcast, Thirst Aid Kit.[95]
Former podcasts
Another Round
Internet Explorer
The News
See Something, Say Something
Community
On July 17, 2012, humor website McSweeney's Internet Tendency published a satirical piece entitled "Suggested BuzzFeed Articles",[97] prompting BuzzFeed to create many of the suggestions.[98][99][100][101] BuzzFeed listed McSweeney's as a "Community Contributor".[98] The post subsequently received more than 350,000 page views,[99] prompted BuzzFeed to ask for user submissions,[98]
Technology and social media
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.[108] The site continues to test and track their custom content with an in-house team of data scientists and an 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 many different ideas, which maximizes distribution.[109] 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.[39][84]
Tasty
BuzzFeed's video series on comfort food, Tasty, is made for Facebook, where it has 100 million followers as of December 2019.[110] The channel has substantially more views than BuzzFeed's dedicated food site.[111] The channel included five spinoff segments: "Tasty Junior"—which eventually spun off into its own page,[112] "Tasty Happy Hour" (alcoholic beverages), "Tasty Fresh", "Tasty Vegetarian", and "Tasty Story"—which has celebrities making and discussing their own recipes.Tasty has also released a cookbook.[113]
The company also operates international versions of Tasty.[114] Tasty has also released its own kitchenware, which includes several products such as spatulas, cooking sheets, and mixing bowls.These products are sold in collaboration with Walmart.[115]
Worth It
Since 2016, Tasty also sponsors a show named Worth It starring Steven Lim, Andrew Ilnyckyj, and Adam Bianchi.[118] In each episode, the trio visit three different food places with three drastically different price points in one food category. Steven Lim also stars in BuzzFeed Blue's "Worth It – Lifestyle" videos. The series is similar, in that three items or experiences are valued from different companies, each at their different price point, but focus on material items and experiences, such as plane seats, hotel rooms, and haircuts. Lim left BuzzFeed in 2019 to start his own production company Watcher.[119][120]
BuzzFeed Unsolved
BuzzFeed Unsolved was the most successful web series on BuzzFeed's BuzzFeed Multiplayer.The show was created by Ryan Bergara and features both him and Shane Madej (who replaced original co-host Brent Bennett).The show covers some of history's most famous unsolved mysteries, presenting them and the theories that surround them in a comedic manner. In some episodes, they visit the places involved with the mystery. Many of these episodes focus on the supernatural or paranormal and often include the pair ghost hunting during the investigations.In late 2019, Bergara and Madej started their own digital production company, Watcher Entertainment, with Worth It's Steven Lim; however, the two continued collaborating with BuzzFeed to produce BuzzFeed Unsolved until November 2021. The spiritual successor to BuzzFeed Unsolved is Ghost Files, a documentary entertainment web series by Watcher Entertainment that was first released on September 23, 2022.
The Try Guys
The Try Guys are a trio of friends (Eugene Lee Yang, Zach Kornfeld, Keith Habersberger, and formerly Ned Fulmer) who put themselves in different, and at times, compromising situations and record the results.[121] In June 2018, the four left BuzzFeed and created their own independent channel, also titled "The Try Guys".[122]
Night In/Night Out
Night In/Night Out was a series run by Ned and Ariel Fulmer. This show features the couple on two different dates, one at home featuring a homemade meal (using a BuzzFeed Tasty Recipe) and one at a restaurant in the Los Angeles area. Each episode focuses on one particular meal, such as baked salmon or hamburgers. At the end of each episode, Ned and Ariel would decide whether they preferred the home-cooked meal (and the accompanying ambiance and price tag) or the meal at the restaurant. However, the couple left BuzzFeed with the Try Guys in 2018, and the series was subsequently canceled.[123]
Short-form animation
Around 2017, BuzzFeed launched Animation Lab with a focus on short-form animation content that is posted on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and later YouTube and Twitter.The studio has launched 30 projects during its existence, 4 of which have since been focused on due to finding success (Weird Helga, The Good Advice Cupcake, The Land of Boggs, and Chikn Nuggit), which as of 2021 had a combined total of over 17 million followers.[124][125]
In January 2024, a lot of the Animation Lab team were laid off (including Loryn Brantz), leading to the cancellations of Weird Helga and The Good Advice Cupcake.
On April 8, 2016, two BuzzFeed interns created a live stream on Facebook, during which rubber bands were wrapped one by one around a watermelon until the pressure caused it to explode.The Daily Dot compared it to something from America's Funniest Home Videos or by the comedian Gallagher, and "just as stupid-funny, but with incredible immediacy and zero production costs".The video is seen as part of Facebook's strategy to shift to live video, Facebook Live, to counter the rise of Snapchat and Periscope among a younger audience.[129]
BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith initially defended Johnson, calling him a "deeply original writer".
Days later, Smith acknowledged that Johnson had plagiarized the work of others 40 times and announced that Johnson had been fired, apologizing 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."[134] In total, 41 instances of plagiarism were found and corrected.[135] In 2016, claims surfaced of the YouTube channel BuzzFeedVideo stealing ideas and content from other creators.[136]
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,[137] and another for nine celebrity photographs from a single photography company.[138]
In June 2020, BuzzFeed News senior reporter Ryan Broderick was fired after it was revealed he had "plagiarized or misattributed information in at least 11 of his articles."[139]
Reputation as a news site
In October 2014, a Pew Research Center survey[140] found that in the United States, BuzzFeed was viewed as an unreliable source by the majority of people, regardless of political affiliation.[141][142]Adweek noted that most respondents had not heard of BuzzFeed, and many users do not consider BuzzFeed a news site.[143] In a subsequent Pew report based on 2014 surveys,[144] BuzzFeed was among the least trusted sources by millennials.[145][146] A 2016 study by the Columbia Journalism Review found readers less likely to trust a story (originally published in Mother Jones) that appeared to originate on BuzzFeed than the same article on The New Yorker website.[147] In a 2017 survey among US readers, BuzzFeed was voted the second least trustworthy source among American readers, with Occupy Democrats being lower-ranked.[148]
In January 2017, BuzzFeed again faced widespread criticism from many journalists and media officials, along with then-President elect Donald Trump, for publishing 35 pages of unverified memos in full, known as the Steele dossier.[149][150][151][152] In a highly publicized press conference following the publication of the memos, Trump referred to BuzzFeed as a "failing pile of garbage".[153] Among the unverified claims in the memos was one that stated Trump's attorney Michael Cohen had met in August 2016 with Russian officials in Prague, Czech Republic, a claim that Cohen has vehemently denied.[150][154]
On January 18, 2019, Robert Mueller's office disputed a BuzzFeed report stating that Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.A spokesman for Mueller's office characterized the BuzzFeed report as "not accurate".[155]
Unpaid contributors
Matthew Perpetua, BuzzFeed's director of quizzes, published a blog post in January 2019 after being laid off, revealing that many of the site's most popular quizzes were created by unpaid contributors.[156] Perpetua identified one college student in Michigan in particular as "the second-highest traffic driver worldwide."[157] The student, Rachel McMahon, said that until she saw Perpetua's blog post, she never knew that her quizzes were so significant for BuzzFeed's traffic.The quizzes made an estimated $3.8 million for the media company.[158] According to the Detroit Free Press, she had never asked BuzzFeed about getting paid and the only material goods she received from them were four $30 Amazon gift certificates, a BuzzFeed sweatshirt and T-shirt and several water bottles.[159][160]
Advertiser influence on editorial
In April 2015, BuzzFeed drew scrutiny after Gawker observed the publication had deleted two posts that criticized advertisers.[161] One of the posts criticized Dove soap (manufactured by Unilever), while another criticized Hasbro.[162] Both companies advertise with BuzzFeed.Ben Smith apologized in a memo to staff for his actions: "I blew it. 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".[163] Days later, Arabelle Sicardi, one of the authors of the deleted posts, resigned.[164] An internal review by the company found three additional posts deleted for being critical of products or advertisements (by Microsoft, Pepsi, and Unilever).[165]
In 2016, the Advertising Standards Authority of the United Kingdom ruled that BuzzFeed broke the UK advertising rules for failing to make it clear that an article on "14 Laundry Fails We've All Experienced" that promoted Dylon was an online advertorial paid for by the brand.[166][167] Although the ASA agreed with BuzzFeed's defense that links to the piece from its homepage and search results clearly labelled the article as "sponsored content", this failed to take into account that individuals might link to the story directly, ruling that the labeling "was not sufficient to make clear that the main content of the web page was an advertorial and that editorial content was therefore retained by the advertiser".[167][168]
Hiring practices
In February 2016, Scaachi Koul, a Senior Writer for BuzzFeed Canada, tweeted a request for pitches stating that BuzzFeed was "...looking for mostly non-white non-men" followed by "If you are a white man upset that we are looking mostly for non-white non-men I don't care about you go write for Maclean's." When confronted, she followed with the tweet "White men are still permitted to pitch, I will read it, I will consider it. I'm just less interested because, ugh, men." In response to the tweets that were deemed racist and sexist, Koul began receiving a barrage of hate comments and threats of violence.[169][170] Sarmishta Subramanian, a former colleague of Koul's, writing for Maclean's, condemned the reaction to the tweets, and stated that Koul's request for diversity was appropriate.Subramanian said that her provocative approach raised concerns of tokenism that might hamper BuzzFeed's stated goals.[171] In January 2019, BuzzFeed announced that it would cut its workforce by 15%.[172] In July 2019 BuzzFeed announced that it would voluntarily recognize an employee union.[173]
Ideology
BuzzFeed states in its editorial guide that "we firmly believe that for a number of issues, including civil rights, women's rights, anti-racism, and LGBT equality, there are not two sides."[174]The Week's correspondent Ryan Cooper and American Enterprise Institute's senior fellow Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner raised questions about whether BuzzFeed undermines its credibility by taking sides on political issues.[175][176] In June 2015, BuzzFeed and websites like the Huffington Post and Mashable temporarily changed the theme of their social media avatars to rainbow colors to celebrate same-sex marriage being ruled constitutional in the United States.[177]
In June 2016, the left-leaning media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that in 100 BuzzFeed stories about Barack Obama, 65 were positive, 34 were neutral, and one was critical.The report called BuzzFeed's coverage of Obama "creepy" and "almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic."[178] BuzzFeed has partnered with Obama on a get-out-the-vote campaign.[179] During the same month, BuzzFeed cancelled an advertising agreement with the Republican National Committee over what BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti called "offensive remarks" made by Donald Trump.Peretti said: "We certainly don't like to turn away revenue that funds all the important work we do across the company. However, in some cases we must make business exceptions: we don't run cigarette ads because they are hazardous to our health, and we won't accept Trump ads for the exact same reason."[180]
In January 2017, BuzzFeed released what became known as the "Steele dossier", an uncorroborated private intelligence report that alleges several salacious accusations of Trump.Margaret Sullivan at The Washington Post wrote of the release: "It's a bad idea, and always has been, to publish unverified smears."[181] David Graham at The Atlantic called it "an abdication of the basic responsibility of journalism."[182]NBC's Chuck Todd called the release of the document "fake news".[183] Ben Smith defended the decision to release the document from accusations that it was done out of partisanship, arguing that the dossier is of "obvious central public importance."[184]
The Atlantic, April 15, 2015, retrieved January 1, 2018
149.Tatiana Harkiolakis. BuzzFeed publishing the unverified Steele dossier: a brief case study International Journal of Teaching and Case Studies, 2020^
By January 2024, the stock price of the company had declined 98% since its initial listing, with the entire company now only worth around $37 million, and the company was significantly burdened with debt.
Subsequently, the website launched the "Community" section in May 2013 to enable users to submit content.
Users initially are limited to publishing only one post per day, but may increase their submission capacity by raising their "Cat Power",[104] 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.[105]
In January 2017, BuzzFeed's user-generated community content accumulated 100 million views.[106]
In February 2019, BuzzFeed News voted to unionize, following major layoffs. A dispute between BuzzFeed's upper executives and the union began when the executives failed to show up to a meeting.[107]
Tasty also sells their "One Top", which is a smart induction cooktop,
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, "Tasty" streamed the Saturday Night Seder, an online Passover Seder that featured many celebrities and benefited the CDC Foundation.
