The Buzzfeed Giant and the Digital Age
What is the Buzz about??
With 14.62 million followers on Twitter, 9,477,655 likes on Facebook, 11, 949,369 subscribers on YouTube and 2.4 million followers on Instagram, the online sensation known as Buzzfeed.com has quite simply exploded since it launched in 2006. With headquarters all over the world, this social media company is constantly up-to-date with the latest gossip or scandal. According to Dan Frommer on the ‘Business Insider’, the homepage of Buzzfeed.com is powered by an algorithm (set of online rules or calculations) that monitors 120 million forms of partner audience including Time, AoL News, TMZ, Life and many more. When this algorithm detects something to be going viral on one of these sites, it registers the story and sends its units to Buzzfeed.com.
However, this gives the impression that they only post news stories, right? Not at all! This social media platform engages with our digital generation in sharing the latest memes, craze, humorous videos and links to generally entertaining articles. They are arguable most famous for posts such as “We Blew Up a Watermelon and Everyone Lost Their Freaking Minds.”
One of the founders of Buzzfeed is quoted in an article, embedded below, by David Rowan as saying, “If you want to be the central organisation of the central communications platform of the social-web era, 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.” Achieving the balance of both funny and news allows this company to be incredible successful as they are able to build the online presence to reach a much wider audience.
What academics may view as nonsense, this generation views as brilliant! Our obsession with keeping up to date with the latest craze whether that be the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge” or the “Mannequin Challenge”, society, in particular generation Y and Z, are always looking for the next best thing to post online. This is one of the main reasons I think Buzzfeed has such a large online presence. They not only have accounts on multiple formats of social media but they encourage society to constantly be online if they want to see the latest postings or crazes and due to a large amount of FOMO (fear of missing out), our society craves it!
Now, I don’t know about you, but without fail, every time I scroll through my Facebook, something that Buzzfeed has shared appears. Whether that be a link to an article, a YouTube video or some random “did you know” fact, there will always be something. Or if I am trying to tell a story to a friend about a funny video I have seen somewhere, I can almost guarantee I will find this video on Buzzfeed. Being so accessible has allowed them to build their audience massively over the past 11 years creating this hugely successful platform for communication online.
Regardless of whether or not you use it regularly, the majority of our society will have heard of Buzzfeed. What can only be described as an online sensation has taken over the internet appearing on many of our well known social media sites making its online presence massively known worldwide.
So to finish my post, it seems apt to share one of their random videos…
Enjoy!!
