60 newyork| november25–december8, 2019
people, for example, that are now getting
covered more by real, serious journalists,
and that’s because of the internet and the
connection with the audience.
Do you think the media screwed up the
2016 election in its coverage?
Yes. I mean, part of being the media is
screwing up. You know the rough-draft-of-
history cliché. You’re doing things without
knowing what the future holds, and when
you look back, it’s really easy to criticize.
The front page of the New York Times, with
all of the Hillary email stuff on it, definitely
feels, in retrospect, like it was blown out of
proportion. That may have beensexism,
that may have been both sides–ism. It may
have been people underestimatingTrump’s
chances of winning.
Why was Trump’s victory missed so
badly? It sounds as if you were seeing data
demonstrating that Trump wasdriving
way more engagement than Clinton. Why
wasn’t that an indication that he’d win?
Thinking back to that Digg example,
Obama won the presidency probably
because the internet had started tobecome
a thing and these social-media dynamics
favored him over his main primary chal-
lenger, and that may have cost Hillary the
presidential election as well withTrump.
That’s something I don’t even think is fully
on the radar of the traditional media. But if
you’re trying to figure out who’s going to
have a chance at beating the odds or out-
performing, understanding these internet
dynamics is so important.
There was still a general beliefthat the
mass media and the party systemand the
voters are going to reject someone who
seems so out of line with the norms. But
now that he’s won, I think everyone is
much more aware that a broader range of
possible candidates can win. And if they
can light up the algorithms and have a fan
base behind them and speak in a way that
appeals to voters who are not necessarily
closely following every politicaldebate,
they can win.
How do you feel about Facebook these
days?
I think the biggest challenge Facebook
and YouTube and some of these other plat-
forms have is that the main way consumers
interact with their product is through the
content, but they don’t actually control any
of the content. So there’s these giant compa-
nies that make tons of money that have huge
cultural impact, but the experience of using
them is being defined by a bunch of much
smaller companies that are all trying to get
scrappy and figure out how to make content
on the internet in a way that’s sustainable.
It felt to me like there was a point when
Facebook turned on, and then turned off,
a traffic fire hose. Somewhere around
2014, 2015, traffic stopped going off-site
to articles and stayed on-site for video.
Did you experience it like that?
We knew Facebook wanted to do video;
they said they wanted to do more video.
And we also knew that Facebook’s users
didn’t like video—and they hated it
because they were using Facebook for, you
know, two-minute check-ins when they
had a little break in their day to see what
was going on in the world and with their
friends, and text is more scannable. So
we saw, Oh, wow, this is an opportunity
because video is something that the com-
pany is really prioritizing and it isn’t
working. We needed to figure out what for-
mat could work.^7 We tried a lot of experi-
ments and a whole bunch of different
areas, and Tasty^8 really emerged out of
those experiments—some with food, some
not with food—to make video where you
didn’t need to have sound on that immedi-
ately attracts your attention.^9
So what comes after video?
The big wild card in the next ten years
of media is: Will there be a new hardware
of some kind? Hardware cycles take lon-
ger, but they transform media. When
BuzzFeed started, the iPhone didn’t exist.
Our peak-traffic time was during the mid-
dle of the day. I used to call it the “bored
at work” network. But the cycle for hard-
ware innovation has basicallystalled.
There was a Google Glass attempt, and
that didn’t really go anywhere.There’s
Oculus and VR, which is feeling more like
it could be PlayStation or Xbox, where it’s
a big business and popular but not a dom-
inant thing that changes media. So isthere going to be some big thing in the
next ten years where you’re getting your
media in your glasses or in your eye or
directly in your brain or something like
that? That’s a harder one to predict, and
when it breaks through, it has massive
implications for many different things.
I’m interested in the question of VC
investment. It’s been such a huge part of
the story of media in the past ten years.
BuzzFeed is obviously a successful
venture-backed company. What do you
think the effect of venture capital on
these companies has been?
VC funding has allowed certaincompa-
nies to grow a lot faster and take advan-
tage of the rise of these big platforms and
build companies that are symbiotic or, at
least, getting some benefit fromthem. I
think VC is not a reliable funder of media.
They dip in and out of it, and they’re not
really investing that much right now. They
prefer pure tech-driven companies, and
VCs in general don’t like having too many
people involved. I think, in the long run,
VCs are not the ones really shaping the
media industry.
I want to ask about Benny Johnson, the
conservative viral writer who was fired
from BuzzFeed in 2014. What do you feel
you learned from that experience?
I don’t know if I learned any big things
from that, just that Benny Johnson is a
plagiarist.
One reason I ask is that he went on to
have a very successful career as acreator
of social-media agitprop for places like
the Daily Caller. And, as you say, Breitbart
and Bannon maybe picked up on some of
the insights BuzzFeed had. Is there some
sense that you’ve learned all this stuff
about communication but the people who
seem to be putting it to best use, from a
political point of view, are people like
Johnson or Bannon?
I’ve always thought it’s a kindof arro-
gance to think that your company or what-
ever you’re building by default makes the
world a better place. Anything we figure
out, anything any company figures out,
other people will look at it and study it and
try to use it for their own ends. ■More than 800,000
viewers watched two
BuzzFeed employees
slowly stretch
rubber bands
around the melon,
anxious for the
moment when the
pressure would
eventually become
too much.Throughout 2015,
BuzzFeed’s food editors
were perfecting the
formula that became the
Tasty video: An overhead,
fast-motion clip shows
disembodied hands
re enticing—and
onally disgusting—
going from raw
ingredients to finished
product in about a minute.The Try Guys were^89
once BuzzFeed’s
preeminent
personalities—and
probably the
biggest successes in
BuzzFeed’s pivot to
vi
tr eir
fi try
on women’s
un d e r we ar.7