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Because we associate BuzzFeed with bullshit clickbait spam. It makes it difficult for an article to reach the right audience when you have such a large amount o

by meritt 12y ago

Because we associate BuzzFeed with bullshit clickbait spam. It makes it difficult for an article to reach the right audience when you have such a large amount of negative association with a particular brand. It'd be like if the supermarket tabloids starting include well-written and legitimate content. It's going to take a substantial amount of work to win over the millions of people who view them exclusively as a tabloid, which is exactly how we view BuzzFeed today.

bshimmin 12y ago
Exactly. I don't even know how you'd find this article on Buzzfeed - the homepage is so obnoxiously cluttered with vapidness ("21 Hashtags All Curvy Girls Really Need") I only lasted about five seconds. It's like a parody of everything that's awful, only it's real.
- mcintyre1994 12y ago
  If you want a parody of the parody then clickhole.com is awesome - it's the sibling site to The Onion.
- zo1 12y ago
  Just an FYI: Currently, this article is on the front page of buzzfeed. Perhaps, for a brief time, we've made a genuinely good and interesting article bubble up their internal rankings?
prawn 12y ago
There are countless efforts to reach people with this sort of information. Official medical sources, highbrow papers, trashy sites. What's to say that this isn't the best option to reach a certain segment and that, as a bonus, it reached beyond that? Buzzfeed may well be a Trojan to get better content to those typically reading vapid junk? Or, more likely, a way of building a financially-secure publication from trashy beginnings.
- bshimmin 12y ago
  Do you really believe this? If Buzzfeed can achieve financial security by creating an audience who enjoy feeble drivel ("54 Things You Probably Didn't Know About 'Gossip Girl'"), surely if they then start replacing that material with long-form, well-written, thought-provoking content (like this article), they run the risk of losing that audience? It seems to me that the people who want to see 27 pictures of Beyoncé with staccato-sentenced captions - and haven't grown sick of this type of content yet - probably don't ever want to read a long article about something more important than Paris Kardashian.
  - prawn 12y ago
    Yes, I really believe what I said: That rather than just vapid trash, I'd prefer seeing something occasionally informative in there for that market. That monetising first through listicles in order to fundraise for more serious efforts could well be a valid strategy. If you're Buzzfeed, and you're offering a bit of both, you can't really lose. You have the daily visitors reading their listicles and occasionally stumbling across something premium, and you have other markets who don't enter via the front page, but follow viral links from aggregators like HN or Reddit. Unless a front page is saturated with "ugh boring!!1" content, I don't know that there'd be a risk with their existing market. One side of the fence gets slightly more educational content. The other gets more quality content, propped up by tabloid junk.

by meritt 12y ago

bshimmin 12y ago

Exactly. I don't even know how you'd find this article on Buzzfeed - the homepage is so obnoxiously cluttered with vapidness ("21 Hashtags All Curvy Girls Really Need") I only lasted about five seconds. It's like a parody of everything that's awful, only it's real.

mcintyre1994 12y ago
If you want a parody of the parody then clickhole.com is awesome - it's the sibling site to The Onion.
zo1 12y ago
Just an FYI: Currently, this article is on the front page of buzzfeed. Perhaps, for a brief time, we've made a genuinely good and interesting article bubble up their internal rankings?

prawn 12y ago

There are countless efforts to reach people with this sort of information. Official medical sources, highbrow papers, trashy sites. What's to say that this isn't the best option to reach a certain segment and that, as a bonus, it reached beyond that? Buzzfeed may well be a Trojan to get better content to those typically reading vapid junk? Or, more likely, a way of building a financially-secure publication from trashy beginnings.

bshimmin 12y ago
Do you really believe this? If Buzzfeed can achieve financial security by creating an audience who enjoy feeble drivel ("54 Things You Probably Didn't Know About 'Gossip Girl'"), surely if they then start replacing that material with long-form, well-written, thought-provoking content (like this article), they run the risk of losing that audience? It seems to me that the people who want to see 27 pictures of Beyoncé with staccato-sentenced captions - and haven't grown sick of this type of content yet - probably don't ever want to read a long article about something more important than Paris Kardashian.
- prawn 12y ago
  Yes, I really believe what I said: That rather than just vapid trash, I'd prefer seeing something occasionally informative in there for that market. That monetising first through listicles in order to fundraise for more serious efforts could well be a valid strategy. If you're Buzzfeed, and you're offering a bit of both, you can't really lose. You have the daily visitors reading their listicles and occasionally stumbling across something premium, and you have other markets who don't enter via the front page, but follow viral links from aggregators like HN or Reddit. Unless a front page is saturated with "ugh boring!!1" content, I don't know that there'd be a risk with their existing market. One side of the fence gets slightly more educational content. The other gets more quality content, propped up by tabloid junk.