There’s a great scene in the classic comic book Watchmen in which a brainiac superhero gazes at a floor-to-ceiling bank of television sets — each broadcasting a different channel — so that he may occasionally spurt out uncannily oracular predictions about imminent trends in world events. In a way, this scenario is the story of BuzzFeed writ large (and minus the tights): by filtering a myriad of incoming data through a few well-trained and intuitive minds, the site’s crack staff has an almost unsettling ability to tap into the proverbial pulse of the cyberverse.
But things weren’t always like this. A few years before BuzzFeed became the viral cyclone of culture-crunching quizzes a la “Which Putin are You?,” the whole affair was ready to silently fade into the ether. However, things took a big turnaround at about the same time the site signed up Politico writer Ben Smith as editor-in-chief and Spin ’magazine’s Steve Kandell in 2012. The BuzzFeed crew already had solid culture credentials — CEO Jonah Peretti was a co-founder of the Huffington Post — but the addition of Smith and Kandell seemed to have created a tipping point.
How?
There was the team’s move to stir more serious issues and longform formatting into the mix, a decision made when Smith noticed that even the deep stuff was now proliferating via feeds. The staff’s ability to make advertisers happy with BuzzFeed’s seamless fusion of branded content didn’t hurt either. But it was really when BuzzFeed started leaning on the intuitive flashes of its people to go beyond algorithms that the site began regularly producing feeds with shares into the millions. You can feed all the Big Data into a computer you like, but it appears it still takes a spark of human insight to know the world is craving pictures of cats playing with Syrian terrorists.
There are always naysayers of course, and more than a few pundits have chalked up some of BuzzFeed’s buzziness to plain and simple plagiarism in the manner of Peretti’s HuffPost. But it’s still clear that the guys at BuzzFeed are onto something.
Questions remain, however. Will the site’s template evolve into more sophisticated channels of information, or descend into an ocean of silly meme generators? And will more powerful algorithms catch up with approximating the human factor, or will success always depend on the ghost in the machine?
This is a guest post by Camille McClane. Camille is a writer and researcher who enjoys creating content on a range of topics, including tech, social media, marketing and video production. She hopes you enjoy this article, and is honored to be among such great contributors here at IABC St. Louis!