There are times – archetypal digital times – when too much hype and PR tripe gets in the way. Consider, for instance, last week's excited headlines over the fact that American venture capitalists had invested $50m in Buzzfeed, the wunderkind of website growth (currently claimed at 75% a year). Factor in the usual Wall Street multiples and that, supposedly, makes BuzzFeed worth $850m – as against the $250m Jeff Bezos from Amazon paid last year for the Washington Post. What? BuzzFeed worth over three times more than the mighty Post? Or nearly half as much as the New York Times? Trim the tripe and pass the vinegar …

Nothing, of course, diminishes the fact that BuzzFeed is an internet phenomenon – and an increasingly ominous media contender whenever publishers gather. Even the editor of the Sun told a Guardian interviewer the other day that now "we understand that our competitive set is Google, Facebook and BuzzFeed … as much as the Mail". You can hear the editor-in-chief at the Telegraph sing much the same song every day, confirming that the Feed's trademark "listicles" are moving from innovation to cliche as his travel team invites readers to ponder "the 27 most annoying things about flying".

All around us, newspapers, magazines and websites are suddenly playing the same game. They list things here, they list things there: they dismember normal articles into instantly digestible points everywhere. There are allegedly umpteen ways to attract the young readers advertisers love in Buzz world.

Thus, over eight spectacular years, BuzzFeed has grown from a gleam in its founder's eye to employing 550 staff in New York, London, Paris and Sydney. It stands at number 12 on Quantcast's monthly US top 100 unique visitors table: far ahead of the New York Times (59) or the Guardian (97); and 13 million uniques a month in the UK make it a potent force to be reckoned with here too.

American journalist Beverly Deepe talks to women in Vietnam in 1962. She spent seven years in the country, becoming the longest-serving western journalist to cover the war. Photograph: AP

Now last week's cash injection from Andreessen Horowitz – a notably successful investor in new media – will help to fuel more rapid expansion round the globe (offices in Berlin, Mexico City, Tokyo, Mumbai) plus BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, a new unit based in Los Angeles planning to produce everything from short videos to full-length feature films (perhaps remakes of Twelve Angry Men and 100 Spartans?).

Meanwhile, Chris Dixon from Andreessen is joining the BuzzFeed board, lauding the way that "internet native formats like lists, tweets, pins, animated gifs etc are treated as equals to older formats like photos, videos and long form essays – BuzzFeed takes the internet and computer science seriously". Dixon, "a small, early investor in the project" himself, duly hails Jonah Peretti and his founding team. "BuzzFeed now reaches 105 million people a month, is consistently profitable and will generate triple digit millions in revenues this year." Which is the natural moment to reach for that bottle of best balsamic.

The buzz is, indeed, terrific. The ambition involved stands as tall as the headlines. But $100m – those fabled triple digits – means only £59.5m at prevailing rates. Dixon's venture capital punt comes in under £30m. Consistent profitability, without hard numbers attached, has been claimed only since 2013. As for "competitive set" newspaper figures, the New York Times took $1,577,230,000 in total revenues last year, a profusion of digits, with online ads alone – at $163m, a 10.3% slice of the whole – leaving BuzzFeed far behind. On what sensible basis, pray, is BuzzFeed worth nearly 50% of the great grey Times? And how can we take an "early investor's" word for it? Is this yet what Dixon can truly call an emerging "pre-eminent media company"?

It's a question of both balance and overall ambition. Founder Peretti remembers the moment "when we went from being a tech company experimenting with content to being a company that took editorial seriously". He hired Ben Smith, a seasoned professional from the Politico site, as editor-in-chief. He moved to embrace "not just serious editorial, but to take entertaining editorial seriously, and news content seriously, and to have a more ambitious editorial mission". "Seriously" is the buzz word of the moment. BuzzFeed wants to move away – or, rather, broaden away – from its stock, parodied image as the monarch of glib listings. From "16 Awesome Six-toed cats Who Live In Ernest Hemingway's Old House", through "17 Hacks That Will Make Your BBQ Awesome", to "15 Harrowing Pictures Of Iraq's Yazidi Fleeing The Advance of Isis".

But those three postings, and many more like them, sat together on the site last week. The barbecue list is sponsored by Hellman's. Other adjacent lists come courtesy of Volvo and Asda. For the way BuzzFeed makes its money hinges on native advertising, aka sponsored lists of goodies that plug a product but fit seamlessly with the look and style of the site so that they're instantly able to roam the wide open spaces of Facebook at the click of a mobile button: another cash-coining device being copied far and print wide, another "serious" contribution to modern media survival.

The last time I wrote about BuzzFeed in the Observer (in April), Ben Smith came steaming back. He cited the hiring of Miriam Elder and Paul Hamilos from the Guardian, Max Seddon's reports from Ukraine, Mike Giglio's coverage of Syria, Pulitzer Prize-winning Chris Hamby's new investigation team … and much, much more: "You'll find that we are doing both deep reporting and original entertainment, and some formal experimentation – but we are not looking for some lame hybrid of the two, but to hit as hard as possible wherever we play."

And there's the rub. The whole point of such aspirational net operation is that it does need to be comprehensive. Newspapers, after all, have to provide a bit of everything: news, weather, TV programmes, finance, sport, crosswords, the lot. You need "to play" everywhere. This is what makes any transition to the web, and a rolling out around the globe, so hard and costly.

But BuzzFeed – like the Huffington Post, where Peretti started his digital career – doesn't compete across the piste. Its sports section doesn't acknowledge Europe, let alone Great Britain. (Try "61 Thoughts People Who Don't Work Out Have At The Gym" instead). Its UK politics spread is better than that – "Watch This Half-Naked Scottish Nationalist Deliver A Passionate Poem for Independence" – but still not remotely up-to-the-minute or comprehensive enough. Why should it be when BBC.com can throw many times the resources at it?

No: BuzzFeed, just like Vice, Vox and other new stars in the same online firmament, is basically an eclectic agglomeration of news and entertainment, essentially a magazine: part the Tit-Bits that George Newnes started in 1881, part the Answers that set Lord Northcliffe on his path to glory, part Economist and Sunday Times colour mag. Young readers are supposed to put in a thumb and pull out a plum, with or without a squirt of Hellman's.

There is no overall news vision. Anyone who wants to understand what's going on around them will need to scan a conventional paper or tune into proper TV or radio bulletins first. The Feed is extra. The Buzz is a blend of algorithms and gloriously mixed messages. Look at the top trending items and you won't find gritty seriousness making much of a show.

You can make sense of all this if BuzzFeed is seen as the launching pad for millions of social messages, a referral resource rather than a coherent product.

Does it matter if tweets and Facebook pages pass on quite separate stories (or lists) and make money in the process? Who cares if disguised mayo ads and Syrian bloodshed lie side by side in Buzz world?

"The most interesting tech companies aren't trying to sell software to other companies," Dixon says. "They are trying to reshape industries from top to bottom. BuzzFeed has technology at its core. Its 100-plus tech team has created world-class systems for analytics, advertising and content management. Engineers are first-class citizens."

In one sense, you can admire a lot of that. You can admire the Feed's technical skill, its innovative way of finding an audience.

But there's a second problem lurking behind; what is it finding it for? And how can it keep adding staff and costs without seeing those "consistent profits" slide away? There's more than hype here. But no one, amid so much febrile buzz, can tell how much – or prefer a proper accounting of pros and cons, the ultimate, pre-eminent list of survival.