By its own measure, BuzzFeed now has a larger reach than any cable network. And its next step could be taking on the industry.
BuzzFeed Won’t Be a TV Network, but We Will See BuzzFeed on TV
BuzzFeed’s approach to TV will look like its approach to Internet publishing: Go anywhere.
Asa Mathat for Re/code
At day two of Code Conference, CEO Jonah Peretti said that the online media powerhouse could soon bring its video content to television — though it won’t have a traditional approach. “We don’t have plans to have our own network,” Peretti said in an interview with Re/code’s Peter Kafka.
But Peretti did spell out some of the company’s future plans to move “upstream” in media markets, including “linear TV.” That would look similar to BuzzFeed’s current distribution strategy for its viral and news content: Publish it anywhere and everywhere. Its videos, Peretti added, could appear on YouTube, Snapchat or CBS.
“I’m not interested in the end product of television. I don’t really watch television,” he said. “It’s not the end product, it’s the process for making media. You could be watching something that looks like a television show.”
The company announced that its video production arm, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, now exceeds one billion views in a single month. And a bulk of those are viewed off of BuzzFeed, Peretti said. He said that BuzzFeed publishes with 20 different platforms. BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, based in Los Angeles, has 160 staffers.
Overall, BuzzFeed has an audience larger than any cable network, Peretti said on stage. And it does it more cheaply, using its rapidly expanding editorial staff and in-house advertising agency, which employs around 70 people, he added. “We have a cost structure and economics that is vastly superior to traditional media companies,” he boasted.
Update: An earlier version of the story had an inaccurate quote from Peretti about BuzzFeed’s economic model.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
