- I decided to determine which phrases in BuzzFeed headlines are the most successful in order to see if it’s possible to reverse-engineer BuzzFeed’s business model. Therefore, I scraped BuzzFeed’s website (after initial frustration) and obtained 60,378 distinct articles and the corresponding number of Facebook Shares for each article. From there, I decomposed each headline into its component n-grams, allowing me to perform quantitative analysis for each possible permutation of words in the article titles. You probably don’t know that the 3 most interesting things I found will blow your mind.
God I fucking hate Jonah Peretti so much. His big talk that he gives is how to exploit people with mental illnesses to get your shit to go viral. He actively discusses different neurotypes and how to best exploit each one, as if this is a totally normal and not at all Lex Luthor scumbag thing to do. Fuck I hate that guy. If I ever become a ruthless warlord after the fall of civilization, I'd love his skull as a fashion accessory. Symbolize the come-uppance of techie scum. #DieTechieScum. :)
A different take on Buzzfeed: Why Buzzfeed Is the Most Important News a Organization in the WorldIn short, by not making money from display ads, and by extension deprioritizing page views, BuzzFeed incentivizes its writers to fully embrace Internet assumptions, and just as importantly disincentivizes pure sensationalism. There is no self-editing or consideration of whether or not a particular post will make money, or if it will play well on the home page, or dishonestly writing a headline just to drive clicks. The only goal is to create – or find – something that resonates.
At work, I block this crap at the router level. I do the same at home. No regrets at all. I keep in tune to the new clickbait nonsense and add it to the gawker-buzzfeed-superficial etc networks that are blocked. I also get fewer virus outbreaks, but that is surely a coincidence.
You must not have read the listicle "27 regrets you'll have if you block Buzzfeed".
Oh hey, it's written by that one guy who vacuously commented on every TechCrunch article for years. Seriously, most of the time you could have taken any one of those comments and copied it onto another article, they were so vacuous and uninformative.