It’s no longer fair to reduce
BuzzFeed to a circus site of cat videos and listicles—and it hasn’t been
for a while now. The Internet’s viral-content darling has been
publishing hard-hitting reported news for years now, having built up an
editorial team of over 200 journalists. What was the motivation behind
this expansion? While it’s easy to say BuzzFeed wanted to grow its
audience and boost its cred with more “serious” content (which it surely
did), there was also a more lucrative light at the end of the tunnel:
native advertising, the publication’s primary revenue source.
BuzzFeed’s executive vice president of business operations, Eric Harris, told the American Press Institute just that in a recent interview.
“Some brands that were reluctant to work with
us in the past because they saw us solely as a humorous pop culture
site, now take us more seriously and allocate bigger budgets to their
partnerships with BuzzFeed,” Harris said, pointing to successful
partnerships with major companies, such as GE, Geico, and P&G.
...“On mobile, which is now more than 50 percent of our traffic and
growing, I think native advertising is really the only monetization
strategy that’s working right now,” Harris said..
...Meanwhile, BuzzFeed’s partnership with Friskies for their “Dear Kitten” commercial has earned over 15 million views on YouTube and is one of the most successful brand videos to date.
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