Chris Dixon is sharing some insider information.
BuzzFeed’s strategy
BuzzFeed. We passed 30M unique visitors last month, our revenue is on pace to be more than 3 times what we did in 2011, we have grown from 26 full-timers at the start of last year to 117 today ..... Nobody has built a truly great publishing company for the social age and we have a good shot to be the ones who do it. ..... we don’t publish slideshows. Instead we publish scrollable lists so readers don’t have to click a million times and can easily scroll through a post...... we don’t show crappy display ads and we make all our revenue from social advertising that users love and share. ...... we focus on publishing content our readers love so much they think it is worth sharing ...... We manage our own servers, we built our CMS from scratch, we created our own realtime stats system, we have our own data science team, we invented own ad products and our own post formats, and all these products are brought to life by our own editorial team and our own creative services team. We are what you call a “vertically integrated product” which is rare in web publishing. We take responsibility for the technology, the advertising, and the content and that allows us to make a much better product where everything works together. ........ skill is 63% luck. ..... “social advertising will be the biggest media business since cable television.” ...... we are equally obsessed with 1) entertaining content, 2) substantive content, and 3) social advertising. The teams that focus on each of these areas are equally important which is a key part of our success. We want our cute animals, humor, and animated gifs to be the best of their kind on the web – they aren’t just a cheap way to generate traffic. We want our reporters to have the best scoops, the smartest analysis, and the most talked about items – they aren’t just a hood ornament to lend the site prestige. And we want our advertising to be innovative, inspiring, and lead the shift to social – and not just be a necessary evil that pays the bills. ....... We love the silly, we love the substantive, and we love making advertising that is actually compelling
