7 things you need to know about BuzzFeed

The acclaimed Netflix/Kevin Spacey update of the political thriller House of Cards sees up-and-coming correspondent Zoe Barnes quitting her job on a Washington newspaper to make her name at a web-only reporting outfit called Slugline. The show’s dominant milieu of old-world grandeur accented with slick modernity — as evidenced by Robin Wright striding through her low-lit, wood-panelled home in sharp suiting — is given an interesting complication: the arrival of a new force to challenge the traditional players in the power elite, one with a direct line to its audience and no reason to respect protocols. Even punchy Zoe is shocked when her new boss tells her not to bother showing her stuff before she uploads it: ‘The goal here is for everyone to post things faster than I have a chance to read them.’ These are people who sit on beanbags and type stories on their phones. It’s radical, man.

It's also the shape of things to come — although that shape shifts on a virtually daily basis. In the new landscape heralded and enabled by the explosion of social media, sites such as BuzzFeed are leading the charge. Founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, who also co-founded The Huffington Post, the American site has harnessed our seemingly limitless appetite for lists and our enthusiasm for telling each other about things we like. And with over 80 million individual visitors monthly, BuzzFeed is now a major player in what Will Hayward, the London-based vice president of Advertising in Europe, refers to as 'the age of social'. But not only do we like what Peretti describes as 'content for people that grew up on the web', so do the com-panies rushing to co-create branded material for the site, which means that BuzzFeed is actually profitable. So why stop at New York?

It hasn't. Seven months ago, BuzzFeed UK launched and is thus far so successful that it's laying the train track in front of itself. When I visit its Hatton Garden headquarters, the rapidly expanding workforce is poised for the second office move since March — although this time they're simply moving to a more spacious floor. I take a look around: exposed brick, white trestle tables, glass walls that are already pinpointed for removal to fit more people in; at an editorial brainstorm I attend, staff members perch on tables to lob ideas into the melting pot. (Attention, old-media bores: it lasted about 11 minutes and I think they were spinning it out for my benefit.)

The UK operation is headed by Luke Lewis, a 33-year-old former editor of Nme.com. But when he decided to apply for the role of night editor of US BuzzFeed last October, he probably didn't envisage that a year later he'd have an editorial team of 16 and rising, with recent hires including celebrity editor Kimberley Dadds (from Mail Online), political editor Jim Waterson (from City AM) and 'breaking news editor' Alan White.

Not that it happened entirely by accident: Lewis included, along with his CV, a Photo-shopped mock-up of what a British version might look like. Two weeks later he was in New York meeting Peretti, editor-in-chief Ben Smith and the then editorial director Scott Lamb: three interviews that took around an hour. Setting up shop here was barely more complicated than making a couple of appointments, including writer Ailbhe Malone, and getting going: 'The great thing,' Lewis explains, 'was there was really no commercial pressure at all to begin with.' The message from the top was: 'Don't worry about making money, just build an audience.' On the first day everything they published, including pieces such as '21 Weirdly Angry Mail Online Commenters' and '43 Things British People Know To Be True', went viral, gaining hundreds and thousands of views. 'It was scarily easy.'

The key to BuzzFeed UK's success, Lewis thinks, is how it has homed in on Britons' affinity with humour in the way that the American site has focused on nostalgia and entertainment; we can't get enough of their send-ups of social stereotypes and class indicators, their gentle teasing of middle-class whingers or painstaking analysis of the different varieties of hipster. Lewis insists that they're not mocking their subjects: 'I think the trick is to write about them in a way that those groups themselves would share.'

That word 'share' is perhaps the most important in BuzzFeed's lexicon (with the possible exception of 'list', and its variant, the slightly queasy 'listicle'). It peppers the conversation of every BuzzFeeder I speak to; it underpins the company's entire business model and provides its raison d'être. It is what Will Hayward describes as its 'distribution mechanic'; it is the driver and benchmark for all its edit-orial content. To wit: each writer at BuzzFeed has a 'viral dashboard' on their computer, via which they can monitor where traffic is coming from and which posts are being shared on which platforms. At the moment, says Lewis, 'we think of our natural audience as being teens and twenty-somethings, who are completely immersed in social media all day and who love to share things.' Hence the popularity of a piece such as 'Things Only Noughties Teen Girls Will Understand'; 'girls' because in general women share more on social media, and age-related because it was BuzzFeed US's concentration on youngsters through nostalgic pieces on 1990s cultural icons such as Britney Spears and 'N Sync a couple of years ago that sent its traffic rocketing.

It is, of course, blindingly simple. If you can build into your business a way for your customers to tell each other about your product, then half the work is done. No need for costly advertising or hit-and-miss marketing. The entrepreneurial challenge reduces to the simple business of keeping people interested.

Easier said than done, naturally. I spend an eye-opening 45 minutes with Tom Phillips, on whom I developed a small journalistic crush after I read his 'Pricehound' BuzzFeed post early in October. Entitled 'The 29 Stages of a Twitterstorm' (subtitle: 'Let's Go on a Tour of the Anger Factory'), it was a sharp-as-a-tack and blisteringly funny dissection of how quickly and furiously a twitchmob can congregate and disperse. Phillips cleverly invented something that was unarguably dreadful — a Black and White Minstrel Play Set for four- to eight-year-olds marketed by fictional company Pricehound UK — and imagined the social media reaction to it. The story was complete with familiar Twitter voices: the vicariously offended, the righteously angry, the petition-starters and bandwagon-jumpers, as well as collateral damage in the shape of retired birdwatcher William Price-Hound ('Why is this happening to me?').

It was a hoot; and it was also serious. Phillips wanted to explore 'the way that anger spirals, to the point that it is disproportionate. Even if every individual's response within it might be proportionate, the cumulative effect of us all being legitimately angry at once has an effect that is very akin to group psychosis.' Before he posted he was worried that it was 'far too niche a joke'; in the hours afterwards, when he was running three different Twitter accounts extending the story online and Twitter users were starting to join in, he began to forget who he was: 'All of a sudden fictional characters that I'd created were starting to have conversations with me.' It was, he says, like being in a Christopher Nolan film.

At the time, Phillips had been in his job a matter of weeks, having previously worked at Metro, MSN and most recently developing a BuzzFeed-style internal startup at Trinity Mirror. The real BuzzFeed suits him, he says, because it doesn't try to put you in a 'silo'; crucially, it doesn't assume that if you write both humorous and serious material 'they'll infect each other' and weaken your credentials. It is to Phillips that I pose my own reservations about BuzzFeed's brand of journalism: surely, I ask him, making up comical lists is simply not as difficult as creating a longer, more in-depth, more seriously reported piece of writing — or as important.

He considers the proposition carefully before replying: 'I would say that writing these sorts of funny lists is harder than people think, which is why when you see people trying to copy it, they think it's something to be casually thrown away in a spare hour or two and that's why they're not as good.' On this, he is undoubtedly right, as you'll find out if you try it. But, he goes on, 'there is sometimes a conflation of the perceived prestige of a certain kind of reporting with how effective it is... because a 10,000-word New Yorker piece is seen as the high watermark of what you can do as a journalist, you often find people assuming that there's a direct correlation between word count and quality, and word count and impact, and that's not necessarily the case.'

It's a convincing point well made, and re-inforced by other Phillips pieces, particularly one in which he debunked a Sun front page about crimes committed by those with mental health issues. Nonetheless, there's surely an issue with journalism that responds so instantly to statistics: if your output reacts so precisely to what is already successful, how do you ever do anything new? 'When you have the kind of feedback that real-time traffic analysis and being able to see things being shared on social networks gives you, there is always a worry that that will lead you into a bubble of shallow populism,' answers Phillips, adding that there's nothing wrong with populism unless it leads to work becoming formulaic. 'There is, I think, no blanket solution to this other than the awareness of it.' To my suggestion that another danger BuzzFeed faces is that its voice and style of humour will date as all humour does, he counters that 'it's a place where evolution is built into the DNA of how it operates... It's a constant process of making it up as you go along.'