Buzzfeed is shifting the paradigm, baby! Yesterday, Emily Jane Fox at Vanity Fair published an internal memo in which Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti details some major structural changes: Buzzfeed Media will be split into two separate groups — News and Entertainment — with Buzzfeed Motion Pictures head Ze Frank overseeing the new Entertainment division. I guess prepare for your feeds to turn into an overwhelming hodgepodge of smarmy videos (i.e. delete your account). Jk, they’re already that lol. (Delete your account.)
Peretti says the split is like what John Turner did with CNN and TBS, which: fine, probably. I’m sure he’s right, but I don’t know who that is or what any of those letters mean. I’m a millennial and I get all my news/entertainment from Facebook and Vine and Snapchat. In fact, that’s why he’s tearing his company in half like Jim Tucker did with CBS and TNT, or whatever.
And so Buzzfeed continues to be social media’s ideal content machine; by being inherently shareable, by acting as the model publication for Instant Articles, by demonstrating the potential of Facebook Live, by validating Snapchat’s lofty media hub ambitions (despite the rocky start?), and now by formally recognizing the “need to organize [their] work to take full advantage of many formats and technologies”. Those formats/technologies? Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and anyone else who manages to get to the table on time.
New York Times media critic John Herrman predicted a paradigm shift quite similar to the one we’re currently witnessing some 18 months ago during his editorship at the Awl:
In the future, what publications will have done individually is adapt to survive; what they will have helped do together is take the grand weird promises of writing and reporting and film and art on the internet and consolidated them into a set of business interests that most closely resemble the TV industry.
Facebook/Snapchat/etc have fully realized their assumed roles as distributors, with brands (and their sub-brands!) like Buzzfeed cautiously/optimistically embracing their roles as attractive content for hosting, especially when that content is video. Others will probably follow suit soon, I suspect these wheels have been turning for a long time. (I’m setting a Google alert for “ ‘organize our work to take full advantage of many formats and technologies’ + Vox” because Choire must do SOMETHING all day!)
This time next year or the year after, though, when we’re blissfuly scrolling through our preferred brands/channels on our preferred apps, what will be going on in those funny little websites we used to visit? Up until now everyone’s been operating under the assumption that hosted content is a traffic driver, a way of directing clicks to a website, and hey that’s…fine? But why not put everything where the clicks are in the first place? The web is dead, so why stick around? From Herrman:
[I]t’s not too hard to imagine how Content Internet’s web abandonment accelerates. Following a brief and painful period of can’t-beat-em-join-em soul searching, companies with the most financial and operational freedom experiment with channels in apps. “More people are over there, but we are here, so why don’t we go over there?”
Considering Buzzfeed has already looked into becoming a website-less media brand, their transition to in-app channel should happen pretty naturally.
What happens to those of us who aren’t brands? Will we implicitly become competing channels — you know, more than we already are? Will the more successful users be allowed to cash in on their Good posts or will they be bought by and divided among the brands? If China is any indication, both. Will content become even more aggressively artless? Yes, but that was once TV and now we’re l̶i̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶ wrapping up The Golden Age of Television. Things will be bad, but a market for quality always emerges.
Most importantly, what will the cash flow look like? Um…muddled, to say the least. As the move to platforms accelerates, the main point of contention will inevitably be where to put ads (a creative problem) and how to split revenue (a financial one). No one seems to know how this should work, but platforms have the obvious advantages of 1) Not Dying and 2) having an infinite supply of hapless content providers and brands with which to experiment. The conversation will be loud and messy and probably really fun to watch, and the resulting agreement(s) will evolve to become the economic skeleton of the new order.
Thus, the next — and hopefully final — epoch of media begins. If nothing else, at least we got to see the art of silent film make a charming comeback before we die.
