What is Pound?

Pound is a new, proprietary technology that captures how BuzzFeed stories spread on the social web. It follows propagations from one sharer to another, through all the downstream visits, even across social networks and one-to-one sharing platforms like Gchat and email.

Pound is the Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion.

Pound does not store usernames or any personally identifiable information (PII) with the share events. Each node in the sharing graph is anonymous. We are not able to figure out who a user is by looking at the graph data. Pound data is collected based on an oscillating, anonymous hash in a sharer's URL as a UTM code.

Gathering and storing this kind of network diffusion data was a hefty engineering challenge. Pound, under a typical load, is capable of handling well over 10,000 web requests per second before scaling. As a result, we now store more Pound data in a single month than all the other data we have previously collected for content optimization since the inception of BuzzFeed.

The knowledge held in this unprecedented data set could help us understand our content better, understand our readers better, and understand the social web better. Armed with that understanding, we can have bigger reach and bigger impact for our readers and on the world.