AFAIK, that was always the plan. You need a huge audience to have the revenue to do great journalism online, and one of the few proven ways to build that audience is with clickbait and listicles.
So while it may seem like Buzzfeed has a split personality, it's very much intentional.
Its not a crazy business model. My early stage company gets nearly all of its revenue from a product no one in engineering has touched in over a year, which funds some more intensive and risky product development. Similarly, DuoLingo has a foundation in teaching languages while building up a large supervised data set for machine translation. A lot of companies are basically fronts for getting average folks to either curate a label set or provide permission to access existing data. My old company provided a vague statement like, "Improve your experience, integrate your gmail account", providing quite literally nothing to customers except remove the button, yet provided us unlimited access to contact books and emails/attachments, many of which were very private and confidential. Not proud of that one, but thats the reality and for some people, very profitable.
Wow, that's nuts. My gmail account is the gateway to password resetting a bunch of different accounts, not to mention all the private correspondences. It would have to be quite the value proposition to make me give up the keys. And these idiots give it away for nothing at all?
Yes. We had numerous SSN and bank account details, basically anything you might find in a personal or professional email inbox. Obviously we weren't making use of any of this, but if we had one malicious engineer, things could have gone very poorly. One automated tool inadvertently posted an individual's SSN on the paid version of our site was very angry. The level of access was something we were always discouraged from discussing with sales folks and management always kept things very vague.
Can you actually give that kind of gmail access to third party apps? Luckily I don't but it's unnerving to think that doing so can have those ramifications.
I'm not clear exactly what that old company of yours did, and its putative value proposition for clients. Remove a button, where for what? Very curious!
While I'm sure plenty of people might disagree with my sentiment, I feel Gawker had a shot at this back in the day when they had Neetzan Zimmerman writing all the "viral" articles and bringing in some majority percentage of the daily PVs. This then gave room for others to do some great/interesting journalism.
Buzzfeed can credibly do investigative journalism because despite all the clickbait, they maintain a good reputation. Gawker on the other hand is the Trump of journalism, absolutely shameless, willing to do and say anything for clicks. No amount of investigative journalism will ever allow them to free themselves of the hole they dug themselves into.
Yeah because for all the flak it gets, Buzzfeed's "trash" content is very benign. Cat GIFs might be annoying, but they are nowhere near harmful, unlike the kind of crap Gawker pulls off
That's why these comment threads are always the same. People remarking how surprised they are that something of this quality came from buzzfeed. I see this as a desperate need to separate their investigative brand from their click bait one.
My theory is that when you're doing 90% cheap clickbait crap, you probably have a few dollars extra to spare and use it in paying good writers for actual good articles which will give you enough clout with people who actually cares about good articles.
I believe the New Yorker did a piece about building up their news department, which included hiring a couple of Pulitzer winners to the staff, but I don't seem to be able to find the article.
A lot of other places can't pull it off because investigative journalism doesn't pay all that well. But it looks like drawing a strict line between "clickbait" and "investigative" while serving both is actually a win for Buzzfeed. Clickbait makes money from "most people", investigative journalism encourages thought and shows off how good Buzzfeed can be.
Indeed. It looks like modern publications need not just a separation of church and state but also the bar across the street from the church to bring some foot traffic in the area.
