Inside Buzzfeed With Jonah Peretti - Business Insider

Daniel Goodman / Business Insider BuzzFeed's office. The company has 175 employees.

Jonah Peretti stretches out casually in his chair, sneaker over knee, in his downtown New York office.

The office is encased in glass, a transparent layer barely separating him from his newsroom of editors. They're staring at glass screens, too?and connecting with millions of readers who gaze at their creations through similar panes.

I met the curly-haired, 38-year-old CEO at the end of the work day, on a day when his site had run a post about the world's cutest corgi and an eight-minute video about Hillary Clinton. That eclectic mix spread far and wide across the Internet.

The six-year-old BuzzFeed is now read by 30 million visitors a month, according to its internal statistics. And most don't come in through its homepage or Google searches. They come because a friend, colleague, or celebrity recommended an article to them?bouncing from glass screen to glass screen, a network of human connections overlaid on digital ones.

That network has long fascinated Peretti, the Web's king of viral content. While his site encourages readers to laugh out loud at its stories, he made no jokes as he discussed the history of his company, the future of media, and his plans to make his funny site be taken seriously by the world.

In the 45-minute discussion, Peretti revealed:

• How BuzzFeed began as a bot but grew to find human editors indispensable

• How he handled parallel entrepreneurship, running both BuzzFeed and HuffPo at once

• Why BuzzFeed doesn't care about Google or search traffic numbers

• How BuzzFeed is generating millions of dollars a year without running a single banner ad

• How Peretti really feels about his site's cat-loving reputation

• How BuzzFeed is working on becoming a global brand

To share or not to share?that's Peretti's life mission

One question has always nagged at Jonah Peretti: "What makes ideas spread?"

He first wondered this in college, when he ordered a customized pair of Nike shoes with the word "sweatshop" written on them. Nike refused to fulfill the order, and Peretti sent the email chain with customer service to twelve friends. Those friends forwarded it on and, eventually, it reached millions of people. Peretti's email exchange with Nike was covered in the Wall Street Journal and prime-time news.

The desire to learn why people share things has dictated Peretti's career. He later started The Huffington Post with Ken Lerer and Arianna Huffington. In its early days, it was chiefly known as a political blog, with Huffington as the big personality at its core?but Peretti's quiet focus on content that would spread formed an equally valuable part of the site's DNA.

While there, Peretti began a side project to experiment with viral content.

"BuzzFeed started as a lab with a small team where we would play with ideas," he said.

It was funded by John Johnson, who started a nonprofit Peretti worked for, and Ken Lerer, Peretti's Huffington Post cofounder.

Peretti's first hire was Peggy Wang, whom he'd taught as a student at a private high school in New Orleans. (She's still working at BuzzFeed as a senior editor today.) Next he hired a Huffington Post contractor followed by a product person.

One of the first products BuzzFeed Labs built was an instant messaging client, BuzzBot, that would message users a link to the hottest thing on the Web that day. Its IMs were based on algorithms that examined the acceleration of links; BuzzBot grabbed feeds from hundreds of blogs and searched for new links?that were spreading to other sites quickly.

"It was this awesome thing, but we couldn't scale it," Peretti said.

The next idea BuzzFeed Labs tried was a site that highlighted some of the popular links that BuzzBot found.

Peretti began recruiting human editors to manage the daily links.

"We found that using the detector worked well, but having the detector plus a person to frame the link was good," he said.

The first product BuzzFeed's website launched with was just five or six links per day. Half were from the trend detector, and half were links Wang found across the web.

Peretti was still working for The Huffington Post, splitting time between the two offices. His daily routine involved picking up 15 sandwiches at a Vietnamese shop between the two and feeding editors at each place.

It wasn't long before the link-based site started to attract visitors. Bloggers frequently used it as a resource to find stories. He decided to raise a round of financing when the site had about 600,000 monthly uniques.

Union Square Ventures almost invests?

Union Square Ventures, the famous backer of Twitter and Tumblr,?almost invested in BuzzFeed. The firm liked Peretti, but it wasn't sure it liked all the humans he wanted to hire.

"They didn't like that we had editors," Peretti explained. "A lot of people [not just USV] were pro-tech, anti-human."

Peretti ended up taking an investment from SoftBank instead. Eric Hippeau, who was a partner there, offered him a chance to stay involved in both The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed at the same time.

"We think Jonah is a great entrepreneur and that he has built a great business," Union Square Ventures partner Brad Burnham told us. USV's Burnham and Fred Wilson looked at the BuzzFeed deal together. "We miss great companies all the time.... Luckily in the venture business you do not [always] have to be right."

For a long time, Peretti did two full-time jobs. "I did parallel entrepreneurship, which was very hard to do," he said. "It was hard to keep your head straight, and know which ideas were with which company. A lot of the stuff BuzzFeed figured out, HuffPo was able to benefit from."

As the company grew, it needed a more active leader. Fortunately for Peretti, an opportunity to make a clean break from The Huffington Post presented itself.?AOL purchased The Huffington Post for $315 million in February 2011.

"It was so liberating to just do one company, and to be able to focus entirely on what my first love was, which was figuring out why people share things, and how ideas spread," he said.

2011 was also a good time for a social media brand to be created. When BuzzFeed was founded in 2006, Facebook was only two years old. Twitter would launch that March?and went years before people took it seriously. The Web had changed a lot, and it was finally ready for Peretti's grand vision.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/buzzfeed-jonah-peretti-interview-2012-12

breaking news whitney houston carmen whitney houston last performance cpac straw poll i will always love you whitney cummings maine caucus