Jonah Peretti (as horse) with his colleagues including Jon Steinberg (far left) Peter Yang

This article was taken from WIRED's February issue, out now!

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On 17 January, 2001, an MIT grad student named Jonah Peretti sent a dozen friends an email detailing his mischievous correspondence with the NIKEiD sneaker-customisation store. His online order, number o16468000, had been cancelled and he'd complained to customer service, even though the word he'd wanted printed on his ZOOM XC USA running shoes -- "sweatshop" -- was neither profane nor a breach of trademark. "I choose [sic] the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes," Peretti had written back to nikeid_personalize@nike.com. "Could you please ship them to me immediately."

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When Nike changed its objection in its emailed response -- now it explained that his order had used "inappropriate slang" -- Peretti persisted. "After consulting Webster's Dictionary, I discovered that 'sweatshop' is in fact part of standard English, and not slang," he wrote back. "The word means: 'a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions' and its origin dates from 1892... My personal iD was offered as a small token of appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realise my vision." And when that failed to generate a response other than that Nike found the word "otherwise objectionable", Peretti sent a final email admitting defeat. "I have now decided to order the shoes with a different iD, but I would like to make one small request," he wrote. "Could you please send me a color snapshot of the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?"

By the next day, Peretti's email had been forwarded until it reached an engineer at rival custom shoe company Customatix, who emailed Peretti back; within days, it had been picked up by tech blog Lot 49, the San Jose Mercury News, Village Voice, TIME, the Guardian, the Independent, MetaFilter, Slashdot and Salon, eventually, in his reckoning, reaching millions of people. Peretti, meanwhile, was receiving 500 messages a day, sent from Australia, Asia, Africa and South America. On February 28, he was invited on to NBC's Today Show to debate with Vada Manager, director of global issues management at Nike. "I never expected my conversation with Nike to be so widely distributed; the email began to proliferate without my participation," he wrote in The Nation on April 9 2001. "Although the press has presented my battle with Nike as a David versus Goliath parable, the real story is the battle between a company like Nike, with access to the mass media, and a network of citizens on the Internet who have only micromedia at their disposal... The only force propelling the message was the collective action of those who thought it was worth forwarding... My guess is that in the long run this episode will have a larger impact on how people think about media than how they think about Nike and sweatshop labor."


If there is a science to BuzzFeed's content strategy, it is built on obsessive measurement KeepInline

Thirteen years later, Jonah Peretti's own evolving thinking about media, virality, network theory and what exactly motivated people to share his initial Nike email is upending traditional media's business model -- and enticing its editorial talent pool -- faster than you can click an "OMG" button atop stories such as "25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions".

BuzzFeed, which Peretti created in 2006 as a "viral lab" side project after he'd cofounded The Huffington Post, has expanded from listicles and animal memes to investigative journalism, foreign news bureaux and local sites from London to São Paulo. He has also raised $46.3 million (£28m) in funding, from the likes of Hearst Ventures, Ken Lerer, SoftBank Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Ron Conway. "We are three times bigger than we were just one year ago, eight times bigger than we were two years ago, and we have served more web pages so far in 2013 than we did in the entire previous five-year history of the company," he emailed staff in a memo on September 4. "By this time next year we should be one of the biggest sites on the web. We also booked record profit in August. We've gone from zero revenue four years ago to a profitable company with over 300 employees. We've become the leader, and primary innovator, in social content advertising. Last year we ran 265 programmes and this year we will do between 600-700 with more than half of the top 100 [US] brands."

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Editor in chief Ben Smith (and Peretti) Peter Yang


At the time of the September memo, BuzzFeed was claiming 85 million unique monthly visitors. By October, that had risen to 93 million uniques, and its YouTube videos had had 92 million views and 2.7 million subscribers. (By November, it was 110 million video views and three million subscribers. In December, as Wired went to press, BuzzFeed announced that monthly site traffic had reached 130 million unique visitors.) The company had also moved into a 5,360m2 office at 200 Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan, leased from Tiffany &

Co. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed announced the hiring of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Schoofs to build an investigative team ("report like a pitbull, write like an angel," said the job ad); launched sites in Spanish, French and Portuguese; grown to 365 employees; and partnered with language-learning website Duolingo to use students' translations of English language stories. A UK site, with 15 staff, launched in March. Even as its growth soared above his own paywall-cloistered site, the Sun's UK editor David Dinsmore declared BuzzFeed "the best thing on the internet".

How did this happen? How did BuzzFeed grow from a much-mocked LOL to be a media-industry WTF?

The story begins in Oakland, California, where Peretti, the super-talkative son of a teacher mother and a public-defender father, proved painfully slow at learning to read. Teachers thought him lazy; in fact, he had dyslexia, preferring to express himself through sculpture. "It wasn't fun, but having a brain that works slightly differently gives you a different perspective," he says now, in his company's cavernous new office overlooking Madison Square Park, its many meeting rooms named in honour of favourite BuzzFeed memes (Surprise Kitten... Grumpy Cat... Princess Monster Truck... I Should Buy A Boat Cat...). Growing up, he'd make money teaching over the summer break or fixing computers; after graduating in environmental studies from the University of California Santa Cruz, unsure of his career direction, he moved to New Orleans at 22 to teach computing to sixth-, tenth- and twelfth graders. His brightest student, a dyslexic sixth-grader, built a dynamic version of Myst using a microphone to embed interactive commands into the game; the principal had dismissed the student as a problem child because of his poor literacy.

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Then, after three years of teaching, Peretti moved to MIT's Media Lab to study educational technology, and then took a job at New York's Eyebeam, an art and technology centre. It was here that he met Duncan Watts, a Columbia University professor who studied how ideas moved through social networks, and Ze Frank, who had created his own viral sensation when he uploaded a video titled "How to dance properly" for a party invitation in 2001. Watts later became BuzzFeed's science adviser, Frank its head of video.

Ben Smith wants BuzzFeed to have serious journalistic credibility, even if that means sacrificing traffic KeepInline

The Nike encounter had led Peretti to rethink media. "There wasn't Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, but I was able to reach millions of people purely by making something that spread through this decentralised network, where there was no gatekeeper -- it just spread on its own, through what I started to think of as the bored-at-work network, office workers who spend half their day sharing content." That led him to try to repeat the trick, along with his comedian sister Chelsea: first with the New York Rejection Line, a brutally witty way to deal with unwanted sexual advances; and Black People Love Us!, a website about a fictional white couple and their painfully awkward attempts to relate to black people. "I thought, if there's this massive shift happening in the way content and ideas spread, what does that mean? The best way was to make things, and track them as they spread."

Watts introduced Peretti to a New York entrepreneur called Kenneth Lerer, who wanted to help preserve the Clinton-era assault-weapons ban in 2003 and asked Peretti to help him create StoptheNRA. They failed to stop the NRA, despite gathering 150,000 signatures, but decided to work together again. "He said, 'You know the web, I know business -- let's do something together,' even though we didn't know what,"

Peretti recalls. "Soon after, he went to LA and met Arianna Huffington." They conceived a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report, leveraging Huffington's network and Peretti's online-dissemination skills. Peretti led tech and product, Lerer focused on business and news, Huffington on the blog. Using early data-analytics tools, they discovered which headlines weren't working, and the late Andrew Breitbart would rewrite them. Search became a key way to grow traffic. "It was interesting, but not as satisfying to make content for search," Peretti recalls. He wanted a higher bar: "Instead of making content that the robots like, it was more satisfying to make content that humans want to share." So he created BuzzFeed as his lab, with funding from Lerer and John Johnson, founder of Eyebeam. When AOL bought the Huffington Post for $315 million (£191 million) in February 2011, he moved in full-time.

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Viral today is BuzzFeed's current post, "17 Bizarre Foods Every Russian Grew Up With (Besides borscht)", which editor-in-chief Ben Smith says "will totally hit everybody it could possibly reach through Facebook" -- anyone who grew up in Russia, knows someone who did, or is simply curious. "Chris Geidner did a story about advances in the treatment of transgender people under law. Maybe 10,000 [people] cared about that -- but it was a big scoop that maybe all 10,000 heard about. To me, that's a huge success. It's not just numbers, it's being part of the conversation."

Smith, 37, was lured from the US political site Politico in January 2012 to build what Lerer calls "a great trusted news brand" that wins Pulitzers. His own BuzzFeed scoops include breaking the story of John McCain's endorsing Mitt Romney. He hired the late Michael Hastings to cover the Obama campaign "because Obama is so boring"; made the Guardian's Miriam Elder foreign editor; put The [London] Times's Sheera Frenkel in Cairo and Mike Giglio in Istanbul -- but with a mission to cover Syria.

Hard news "is a huge opportunity if everyone else is pulling back", Smith says. "Great reporting is undervalued. You want to be the story people are tweeting about. Our coverage of the gay-rights story around the Sochi Olympics helped propel that to be the key conversation about the games -- and that began with '36 Photos From Russia That Everyone Needs To See' of gay guys being beaten up at protests."

Outside his office is a cardboard sign saying: Vote Cats for Mayor KeepInline

Smith wants BuzzFeed to have serious journalistic credibility, even if that means sacrificing traffic. "Ben drilled into me that if you're doing something that will get only 50,000 views, that's fine -- as long as our piece is optimised to get all 50,000 who

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should see it," says Shani Hilton, deputy executive editor, previously at NBC in Washington, and whose beat now includes tech, LGBT, fashion and sport. But why does BuzzFeed need news anyway -- and an editorial staff of 140, 11 of whom cover only politics? "If you want to be the central organisation of the central communications platform of the social-web era," Smith says, "a lot of the emotionally compelling content that people share is news, not just funny. You want to do both. On your Twitter feed, you see both jammed up together. That's what we do here."

At youth-focused VICE, which is investing heavily in a more gonzo approach to foreign news, cofounder and CEO Shane Smith sees BuzzFeed's strategy as smart. "It's a complete failure of mainstream media that has disenfranchised the whole generation," he says. "They say young people don't give a shit about news. That's a bunch of malarkey. Because it affects their lives so much. BuzzFeed can be the next CNN. And quite frankly I hope they are, because news needs it."

CNN itself came out of a new technology: cable. "It took someone like Ted Turner to do 24/7 video news," says Eric Hippeau, former Huffington Post CEO and current BuzzFeed board member. "Every turn of technology in the news business leads to one huge brand emerging. Huffington Post became the breakout brand among online newspapers. BuzzFeed defines viral, shareable news and content, and it's global. That's a much bigger opportunity. And their big gift is native advertising, where the money is coming from TV, a $100 billion (£60 billion) business."

Native advertising -- the packaging of paid-for content as editorial stories, albeit with a "Featured partner" label -- has its critics. In September, Wall Street Journal managing editor Gerard Baker used a speech to New York University's journalism school to warn the industry of an emerging "Faustian pact" with advertisers that would erode reader trust. "The clear delineation between news and advertising is becoming more blurred," he said. "We have to resist that." Andrew Sullivan expressed his own scorn on The Dish in a post titled "Guess Which BuzzFeed Piece Is An Ad"; the same evening, during a debate with Ben Smith, he said: "If journalism is not understood to be separate from advertising, then it has lost something incredibly important in a democratic society." "We label everything really maniacally," responds Peretti, who prefers the term "branded content" or "social advertising". "We take church and state really seriously. The byline is the brand.

That's pretty obvious. We use the same yellow background [for paid-for stories] that Google uses for ads. The fact is, brands can tell their story on their own site, or on YouTube. Today, if Elon Musk is attacked in the New York Times, he can post on his site and get millions of views. Brands have a voice online as everyone has a voice online. It's going back to the Mad Men era, where it was about helping brands tell stories. Our goal is to help brands create compelling, authentic stories."

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Dao Nguyen (with Peretti), BuzzFeed's director of growth and data, who came to the company from Down Jones Ventures Peter Yang

As Peretti and commercial head Jon Steinberg see it, branded ads hold advertisers to a higher standard than conventional marketing: they need to make readers want to "super-share" their messages. The result, they say, speaks for itself: a Motorola campaign involving "custom social posts", such as "10 Places You Need To Visit Once In Your Life" had a 6.1 per cent click-through rate. A Virgin Mobile campaign involving 190 branded stories such as "27 Cats That Just Can't Handle It" generated 9.7 million "engagements", with that particular story seen 600,000 times after social-media sharing. The company boosts such traffic by buying ads elsewhere to promote sponsor stories.

BuzzFeed staff receive a list of Golden Rules of Shareability. These include: Don't use tricks. People don't like to feel stupid... KeepInline

"Other companies have done native content just as well as BuzzFeed, but what they've done is scaled it really effectively," says Ben Huh, founder of viral network Cheezburger. "If the medium is the message, then the format becomes the message. BuzzFeed is helping to prove the model --media is going through a revolution with billion-dollar opportunities as consumers change their consumption habits." Or, as Peretti's August memo put it, "We will stay away from anything that requires adopting a legacy business model... We are building the defining news and entertainment company for the social, mobile age."

If there is a science to BuzzFeed's content strategy, it is built on obsessive measurement. The data-science team uses machine learning to predict which stories might spread; the design team keeps iterating the user interface through A/B testing and analytics. Every item of content has its own dashboard that shows how it spreads from "seed views" on the site to the scalable "social views". Currently the site has a "viral lift" of three -- meaning three times as many people come to stories via social media. "This blue line is the traffic we've sent to this story, the red from other sources, so we get a multiplication on traffic," says Peretti on an October afternoon in his office. Outside his office is a cardboard sign saying: "Vote Cats for Mayor", which, disappointingly, turns out to be New York Republican mayoral primary election candidate, John Catsimatidis. "You can see Facebook was the biggest referrer for this story," says Peretti, clicking through a story's dashboard, rolling his mouse over a cat-themed mouse mat. "The biggest search term was people inputting the URL itself -- which shows it's not about SEO traffic, but people who've heard about it on Facebook."

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Luke Lewis, BuzzFeed's new UK editor, who happened to be visiting the New York office when Wired was in town Peter Yang

Search over-optimisation on other sites gave Peretti an opportunity. "You can make a crap article that's perfectly SEO'd and generates a lot of traffic, but you can't call that a win if it gives people a bad experience. In the SEO era, getting readers was about smart tricks. We think differently -- what need does a story play in someone's life? When you're having a rough day at work and see '13 Simple Steps To Get You Through A Rough Day', that's servicing an emotional need: look at this hedgehog wearing a tiny hat -- you feel better, you share it with your friends."

Editors can use the dashboard to boost under-performing stories with higher visibility or tweaked headlines. Before a story goes live, the system allows editors to view how it will look on a variety of screens. "We see most social traffic now from mobile, so if your site doesn't work well on mobile, it guarantees that nothing you do will be shared," Peretti says.

BuzzFeed staff receive a list of Golden Rules of Shareability.

These include: "Don't use tricks. People don't like to feel stupid...

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Be yourself. Content should reflect your own identity, not anyone else's... Make content you would be proud to share... Experiment. No ideas are bad ideas... Have a heart." "You can be too clever, and focus on IQ instead of EQ," Peretti says. "And while you can have some success with tactical approaches, a more powerful approach is to ask: is this a compelling human story?" This is where kittens and puppies come in. "Look, animals are single-digit percentages of our traffic, yet they're used as shorthand by people who want to dismiss us. Animals matter because they get to the human element.

Cats are not about cats, they're about telling human stories. "When you go home for the holidays, the highlight is petting the family dog. Animals connect us at an emotional level. With serial killers, there's always stories about how they torture animals. And in Philip K Dick's book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which Blade Runner was based on, the way to catch androids is to test their empathy to animals. When people say there are too many animals on BuzzFeed, my answer is: are you an android or a serial killer?"

Peretti's challenge is to stay grounded as his business explodes. He turned 40 on January 1, and prefers to keep a low profile KeepInline

The more successful stories in the social age also tend to reflect the sharer's identity. "Sharing leaked Rihanna cellphone pictures isn't really something you do on Facebook. 'Hey, I hear there are nude Rihanna pictures, can someone send them to me, as I've got some time this weekend?' That's not something you'd post, even though people do Google for the pictures. Social has enabled the ability to do substantive stuff that ties in with people's identity. If you share a Harvard Business Review article, it's partly because your peers see you sharing something from a respected publication. People got used to this idea that you had to dumb down your content to be popular. In fact you're more likely to spread smart content. We did a very literary post on books you need to read in your twenties. It has millions of views, partly from people who want to be seen as literary."

In mining the web for stories to release speedily, BuzzFeed has at times been less than thorough about sourcing, attributing and clearing the rights to other people's work. Blistering criticisms were expressed in posts last winter on Reddit (owned by Condé Nast, which publishes Wired) from photographers who found their uncredited images used without permission in Geico- and Samsung-sponsored BuzzFeed posts.

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Such are the challenges facing what began as a quirky link-aggregator as it transitions to a global empire. Next on its list is an expansion of original video: it recently opened a "social video studio" in a 1,100m2 Los Angeles bureau and a 520m2 production centre. It is also building teams in cities to localise content while retaining the BuzzFeed voice. "We put a small team in London as an experiment, and within months doubled our traffic," says Peretti. "We'll have one global site that's different in every country, rather than inferior editions in local markets. We've heard from a few Brazilians, for instance, that there's less of a taboo there about sex. Here, we might see sex content as a guilty pleasure." Further growth, he says, will likely come through acquisitions: "We've done a couple -- Ze Frank came through acquisition; and we bought a Facebook-data company, Kingfish Labs.

We'll probably do more... It's possible as we move upmarket that the video content will be better produced. But TV isn't our business."

Peretti's challenge is to stay grounded as his business explodes. He turned 40 on January 1, and prefers to keep a low profile, recently declining an invitation to Founders Forum's New York event because company founders, he responded, take too much credit for the work of their teams. "I don't go kitesurfing, do any space exploration, have no submarines to get around," he says over lunch. "I just have conversations with people and think about things. We're a tech company that presents ourselves as a media company, as tech is something people don't understand as much as great stories. It's not like I really want to be a CEO or founder of a company. I could have become an academic. There's a lot of chance in people's paths that gets presented as an inevitability.

If I hadn't had that Nike email spread, I wouldn't have thought about these ideas."

He is reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, and has been reflecting on prospect theory, the idea that losses hurt more than gains. "What does loss aversion mean for a startup? When we started there were four of us. Now we have this much revenue to protect. That can lead to conservative thinking. So with the team I try to anchor people at least where we'll be six months in the future than where we were."

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Ken Lerer takes an aggressive view of that future: "I think BuzzFeed should be 140 million to 150 million uniques next year, 600 million in three years," he predicts. "It will take the place of AOL and MSN and Yahoo!."

For Peretti, what's more exciting is what the future is going to teach us about the counter-intuitive nature of networks. "People don't get that we started as a tech platform, one that's fairly agnostic about the content that it spreads -- reported news, branded content -- and that the world needs a platform like that because the way people consume media is changing. That's different from making a magazine and putting it online. It's very hard for a magazine to have better content than my Twitter feed. These global networks, powered by people sharing content, can't just be filled with user-generated content. You need to think natively about how you make content for them. "When the Nike 'sweatshop' email was circulating, there wasn't Twitter or YouTube. The idea that something could spread was a novelty. Now it's the way things work." He pauses. "There's something profound about that that people haven't fully got their heads around."

How to go viral

Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, credited a small number of "influentials" with spreading "social epidemics". Duncan Watts, BuzzFeed's science adviser, argues that influentials are not needed for ideas to spread. Watts's research found that a "global cascade" through a social network relies more on "a critical mass of easily influenced people", each of whom may be influenced by a single person. Watts helped BuzzFeed develop something it calls "viral rank" -- the likelihood that a post will be shared.

Jon Steinberg, president of BuzzFeed, offers these tips:

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Keep it short.

Ensure the story has a human aspect.

Give people the chance to engage.

And let them react.

People mustn't feel awkward sharing it.

It must feel authentic.

Images and lists work.

The headline must be persuasive and direct.

BuzzFeed's guide to shareability

People like to share things... That say something about themselves: "I am a person who knows about typography." That are highly visual: "100 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography". That have a call to action: "Add your own image in the comments!"

They do not like fuzz -- fake buzz. Take lists that are lazy, meaningless or too short. Something that says "the best of", but seems random and not the best of anything. Or an image that has a one-dimensional, unfunny joke. Ask yourself, would you share it with your friends?

Be positive. "We have this no-haters policy," Peretti says. "There was an era when, snarking was what blogs did. On the social web it's about building a larger society. There's been progress in marriage equality because you're connected to someone, and they're gay, and they're a good person... That's true for content."

David Rowan is editor of wired. He interviewed will.i.am in 08.13

This article was taken from WIRED's February issue, out now!

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