How BuzzFeed Built a 60 Billion Video View Powerhouse

According to Tubular data, BuzzFeed topped the 2017 Video Aces chart as the number one media and entertainment company in 2017, garnering over 57 billion video views on Facebook and over 7 billion views on YouTube. The Secret to BuzzFeed’s Success We interviewed Darris Lee, Head of Data Analytics at BuzzFeed, to dig into how they have been able to successfully grow their audiences across multiple platforms. Full disclosure, I have a no-BuzzFeed rule at work because I would otherwise spend hours in their incredibly engaging rabbit-hole of content. New rule, from now on I will only partake in the top 3 stories, which generally delivers a healthy balance of news and pleasure (read #RealArtistsTryPancakeArt). We’ve created competitive landscape reports for each of our franchises and brands, and we use data like the average number of views per video that our BuzzFeed brands can get compared to the competitive set in that market. We also look at the share of voice for that market, and use that data to demonstrate why our clients should be advertising with BuzzFeed. We look at our franchises to understand what content they are putting out there that’s successful and how that compares to the content that their competitors are creating. But we are also using that data to compare our success in terms of performance for views and engagement to competitors to demonstrate to clients that we have the brands that are leading the markets that they’re looking to advertise in. I think brands work with BuzzFeed because we do a really good job of creating content that our audience identifies with. I predict long-form content will be valuable in 2018.