Tuesday, September 16, 2014

BuzzFeed: These 2 Trends Are the Future of Branded Content


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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