Buzzfeed, the popular social news site behind many virals and ‘top 10’ lists, has started to turn a profit four years after its launch, revealing its traffic numbers in the US are now bigger than both AOL and Craigslist. The news was announced by Jonah Peretti, founder of Buzzfeed, declaring that the publisher is going […]
Buzzfeed, the popular social news site behind many virals and ‘top 10’ lists, has started to turn a profit four years after its launch, revealing its traffic numbers in the US are now bigger than both AOL and Craigslist.
The news was announced by Jonah Peretti, founder of Buzzfeed, declaring that the publisher is going to be one of the “biggest sites on the web” in a year’s time.
In a memo to his staff, Peretti has spelt out his vision of a future in which his creation will be “leading news source for the social, media, mobile world.
In the memo, which itself comprises a list of the company’s plans, he revealed that Buzzfeed had record traffic of 85 million unique visitors in August, triple what it was 12 months ago and eight times the traffic it had two years previously.
The site has grown three times bigger than it was one year ago, eight times bigger than two years ago, and has served more web pages in 2013 than in the previous five years combined.
For contrast, Twitter gets some 91 million US users per month and Amazon gets 77 million US users, according to Quantcast. Based on US users alone, BuzzFeed has 41 million users, bigger than Craigslist or AOL.
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed’s YouTube channel has 2 million subscribers and 50 million monthly views, and the company will more than double its content advertisingprograms this year (from 265 programs last year to 600-700).
“We don’t have the trust the traditional news brands have won over the past 100 years, but we are working hard to earn it, and it won’t take us 100 years to get there,” said Peretti. “By this time next year, we should be one of the biggest sites on the web,” he said.
“We also booked record profit in August. We’ve gone from zero revenue four years ago to a profitable company with over 300 employees.”
Commenting on ads, Peretti said: “We will stay away from anything that requires adopting a legacy business model, even a lucrative one like cable syndication fees or primetime TV ads”.
“We are lucky that 100% of our advertising is social content marketing … and we are lucky that our audience is young and embraced mobile content sooner than the general public”.
Read Peretti’s Memo on LinkedIn here
