Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, explains how mobile has shifted from stopping content going viral to being a key driver for sharing content
Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, is committed to building a media company for the social age. As a social publisher, BuzzFeed has grown to 40m monthly unique visitors almost entirely through their readers sharing content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and increasingly on mobile devices – almost half of their traffic is from mobile.
The Media Network spoke to Jonah Peretti before his Changing Media Summit talk to discuss the appeal of social sharing, the role of mobile and how advertising is changing.
How do you explain the rise of social sharing?
It's a natural human impulse to share ideas, jokes and content with other people. But there hasn't been an architecture to do it online. If you remember, 10-12 years ago there was something called email forward. Back then, people would forward emails to their entire address book, just because they thought something was funny or politically engaging, or interesting. I actually created one of the first email forwards with a conversation that I had had with Nike.
But it was a really broken way to share. The same person would receive the email 27 times and someone else wouldn't get it at all. The emails would clog your inbox. With things like Facebook and Twitter emerging, however, sharing became organised. I can share stuff that I think is interesting and then Facebook has technology to filter that, so that the people who are most likely to be excited to receive that piece of shared content will see it on their Facebook wall. Sharing has become organised and that means we can share more freely, more openly and without some of the problems that used to exist.
How important is mobile to BuzzFeed?
I used to hate mobile because it would stop things from going viral. In the early days, you couldn't even text someone if they were on a different carrier. More recently, you would send someone content or a post and they would be on a BlackBerry and couldn't display the video or the images. So things would die when they hit mobile. Now it has completely shifted with mobile and social converging. A huge percentage of people use Facebook on their mobile device. They will see a BuzzFeed story that they will click through and they are on the mobile web. If they cannot easily read and share that story from their smartphone, there's no chance of that story ever going viral. So mobile went from the thing that stopped things from spreading to being the key driver of sharing. And the penetration of smartphones now means everyone can view compelling content on their mobile device.
How do you see advertising strategies for media companies developing this year?
We have a strong church and state separation; our creative team work on ads and our editors never touch the advertising. Our advertising strategy is that there is a shared platform that everyone in the company uses whether they are on the edit side or advertising side, which is the BuzzFeed CMS, the BuzzFeed stats, the publishing platform that we use to distribute and publish content. So our advertisers are held to a much higher standard where they are creating interesting, engaging content with a higher bar, which is that people should see it and say this is interesting enough to share. That really falls into two types of camps. One is making engaging creative ads so, for example, Toyota Prius has the 20 coolest hybrid animals as a fun way to speak the language of the web and showcasing other cool hybrids beyond the hybrid car. A brand like Virgin Mobile which will do that sometimes and at other times will publish interesting and engaging content under the Virgin Mobile brand on our platform. The brand is thinking like a publisher and thinking, "how do I make things that consumers will be happy to share?"
What is your view on the trend of brands becoming publishers?
I've never liked banner ads. People ignore them and so they create push-downs, take-overs and pop-under and all these other things to ensure they are not ignored. Our goal is that advertising is no longer a necessary evil, but something that actually adds to the site, which generates revenue but is more interesting, more engaging and less disruptive. When you look at how the Super Bowl has become a place for great advertising, an event where people think, "how do I make really entertaining and engaging content that is also an advertisement?" I think there is an opportunity to do that on the social web and bring back a golden era of advertising. When you think about the Mad Men era of advertising, people were really focused on telling a story and that is hard to do with a little banner. On BuzzFeed, they have a much bigger canvas to tell their story.
Do you think there will be a time when we won't share content?
I think it will keep evolving. I do think there is this natural impulse to share and connect with other people. Sharing a laugh, an idea, or a story is a pretty fundamental human activity. The question will be: how will different platforms tap into that. I think people sometimes focus too much on the specific platform and they say, "oh there has been this change in Facebook", or "this little tweak to Twitter", or "Pinterest is doing this". They don't spend enough time thinking about the underlying psychology and human dynamics at play. Those are the things that persist, all the features and tweaks to the web services are more ephemeral.
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