Irreverent publisher BuzzFeed’s eclectic approach to web content may be paying off. In a staff memo published on LinkedIn (via TechCrunch), founder Jonah Peretti says the outfit “booked record profit in August”. And Peretti opens up on BuzzFeed’s video strategy, too, saying:
“Ze Frank has recruited a talented team of video producers who have created 570 videos, with over a hundred videos passing 1 million views each, 350 million total views, and 2 million YouTube subscribers.
“The prime time for viewing our video is the same as primetime TV – people are watching our videos on their mobile devices instead of TV or in addition to TV to get through the commercials and boring plot lines.
“Ze is building the TV studio and movie studio of the future but that doesn’t mean he will make TV shows or movies. Social, mobile video will be different, and we are in a great position to help invent new video formats that match new patterns of media consumption. There seems little doubt that the future ‘TV network’ will be social web video that is viewed and spread on mobile.”
When Beet.TV conducted this video interview with Peretti at the Monaco Media Forum late in 2012, he said: “We made the decision not to put banners on our site… brands should be more like publishers and share great stories. Now the market wants that.”
But Peretti’s memo says the firm won’t use its A/V content to emulate bigger forebears: “We will NOT launch a BuzzFeed TV show, radio station, cable network, or movie franchise – we’ll leave that to the legacy media and Hollywood studios.”