BuzzFeed

Founder/s: John Johnson, Jonah Peretti
Key people: Jonah Peretti (Founder & Chief Executive Officer), John Johnson (Co-Founder), Greg Coleman (President), Mark Frackt (CFO), Ze Frank (President of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures) and Todd Levy (CTO)
Number of employees: 501 – 1k

BuzzFeed is the social news and entertainment company. BuzzFeed is redefining online advertising with its social, content-driven publishing technology. BuzzFeed provides the most shareable breaking news, original reporting, entertainment, and video across the social web to its global audience of more than 200M.

BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John Johnson. It is headquartered in New York, N.Y.

History

Origins

While working at the Huffington Post, Peretti started BuzzFeed as a side project, in 2006, in partnership with his former supervisor John Johnson. In the beginning, BuzzFeed employed no writers or editors, just an “algorithm to cull stories from around the web that were showing stirrings of virality.” Peretti’s first hire was Peggy Wang, whom he’d taught as a student at a private high school in New Orleans. The site initially launched an instant messaging client, BuzzBot, which messaged users a link to popular content. The messages were sent based on algorithms which examined the links that were being quickly disseminated, scouring through the feeds of hundreds of blogs that were aggregating them. Later, the site began spotlighting the most popular links that BuzzBot found. Peretti hired curators to help describe the content that was popular around the web. In 2011, Peretti hired Politico’s Ben Smith, who earlier had achieved much attention as a political blogger, to assemble a news operation in addition to the many aggregated listicles.

Funding

In August 2014, BuzzFeed raised $50 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, more than doubling previous rounds of funding. The site was reportedly valued at around $850 million by Andreessen Horowitz. BuzzFeed generates its advertising revenue through native advertising that matches its own editorial content, and does not rely on banner ads.Buzzfeed also uses its familiarity with social media to target conventional advertising through other channels, such as Facebook.

In December 2014, growth equity firm General Atlantic acquired $50M in secondary stock of the company.

In August 2015, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in Buzzfeed. Along with plans to hire more journalists to build a more prominent “investigative” unit, BuzzFeed is hiring journalists around the world and plans to open outposts in India, Germany, Mexico, and Japan.

In October 2016, BuzzFeed raised $200 million from Comcast’s TV and movie arm NBCUniversal, at a valuation of roughly $1.7 billion.

Acquisitions

BuzzFeed’s first acquisition was in 2012 when the company purchased Kingfish Labs, a startup founded by Rob Fishman, initially focused on optimizing Facebook ads.

On October 28, 2014, BuzzFeed announced its next acquisition, taking hold of Torando Labs. The Torando team was to become BuzzFeed’s first data engineering team.