In a post entitled ‘2014 Was Our Favourite Year Yet’, BuzzFeed brags about its metrics. It has every right to – they’re pretty impressive.
Just look at the numbers for yourself:
- People spent 58,655 years on BuzzFeed
- Traffic doubled from 100m to 200m monthly UVs
- BuzzFeed posts received over 16bn pageviews
- BuzzFeed social accounts reached 16.5m followers
- 1.1bn people saw BuzzFeed on TV
Yep. 58,655 years.
The rise of BuzzFeed seems unstoppable.
It launched four new bureaus in 2014 – in Berlin, Sydney, Mumbai and São Paulo – bringing the eight-year-old publication onto five continents. Its success shows us that this brand is here to stay as a driving force in how we consume information, and we should look at where it’s expanding to find out what’s going to be big in 2015.
Videos are only going to get bigger
Video journalism promises to be even bigger in 2015 – and BuzzFeed knows it.
Jon Bernstein has talked about how BuzzFeed’s video journalism masters brevity, focus and the ability to teach viewers something new – all key for successful video journalism.
The site’s already pretty successful when it comes to videos. People spent 5,766 years watching their videos in 2014. Their “If Disney Princes Were Real” video got 22m views in four months.
As we’ll see, BuzzFeed’s role in “serious journalism” is expanding – and perhaps this skill in video journalism will expand into creating more reporting and news-y playlists on its YouTube channel.
Expect more lifestyle “hack” listicles
And now for my favourite part of the breakdown of BuzzFeed’s metrics – its tells us how each of its different types of posts perform.
Quizzes – unsurprisingly – dominate. BuzzFeed published 7,350 of them in 2014, generating 1.2bn hits – they received an average of 163,265 views each. The most popular quiz? “What State Do You Actually Belong In?”
The site’s 453 “slidey thing posts” got 256,071 views each, while lifestyle “hack posts” each enjoyed an average of 287,804. It only posted 205 of these types of lifestyle post, but the fact they got more hits each than the other two mediums the publication tells us about shows that it’ll probably be looking to capitalise on this.
Serious investigations will have their place…
As the piece emphasises, BuzzFeed’s started to cover serious news – and we’ll no doubt see more of this. Aside from the 1,200 posts they published on dogs, the team produced exclusives such as its story on the New York Times‘ internal innovation report; and it ran undercover reports such as on how ISIS smuggles oil to make it the world’s richest terrorist organisation.
With the site picking up the Times‘ Heidi Blake, who has won awards for reporting the Qatar World Cup bid scoop, to head their UK investigative team, it’s clear they’re looking to “take on stories with global reach that everyone around the world will devour”.
…But cats and dogs still have their place, of course
And we can’t have BuzzFeed without its signature content.
It has come a long way from cat lists, as Jennifer Saba writes, but there will still be room on its site for the LOL, the OMG and the WTF. It’s what it’s known for, and what generates much of its profit-making metrics.
Digital innovation is the future
Just in case anyone was in any doubt, BuzzFeed and other viral media sites have shown that online media is where news publications need to invest.
BuzzFeed’s showing some of the traditional media outlets up in its continual development – its app went through 8 iOS and 12 Android versions as it continues to innovate the media.
The press wrote over 10,000 stories about BuzzFeed in 2014. It’s clear that the new media publication has got them rattled. Unsurprising, really, when 200m people are reading it every month.
BuzzFeed’s here to stay – and it’s going to continue doing new stuff and innovating the way we consume information online.
Digital Journalist