I reverse-engineered Buzzfeed's most viral posts and the truth is shocking!

Anyone who has ever produced content for the web knows how torturously tough it is to even get people to click on your post and read it, forget going viral, especially when you don’t have any furs in your content. (Read: Cats and dogs, who seem to have a god-given right to internet virality).

How then does BuzzFeed, the random-list generating, cat-pic aggregating, wannabe serious journalism, perpetual pop-culture referencer produce viral content day in and day out? What insight into basic human psychology or secrets to Facebook algorithms (More than 60% of BuzzFeed’s traffic come from Facebook) has it discovered, which ordinary mortals such as you and me seem to struggle with? Deeply intrigued, I set to find out.

Traffic on BuzzFeed doubled to 200 million monthly unique visitors while their posts received over 16 billion page views in 2014, as it gleefully gloats.

THE MAN WHO’S BOTTLED UP INTERNET VIRALITY

To chart BuzzFeed’s undeniably meteoric rise, which enabled it to recently raise $50 million, valuing it at an astonishing $850 million, one would have to go back in time to follow the early career path of the man behind it, founder-CEO Jonah Peretti.

The story so goes that back to 2001 whilst a young Peretti was still a graduate at MIT. Nike was then promoting a new range of customisable sneakers and Peretti, who had read about the inhuman conditions of labourers producing the said sneakers, wanted to imprint the word ‘sweatshop’ on his pair. Nike, refused flat-out, leading to an amusing back and forth of e-mails with a Nike representative. Amused, Peretti forwarded the mail to ten of his friends. and that should have been the end of that.

But the internet is a curious beast, and something about the mails so irked it that the mails exploded, being forwarded inbox to inbox, catapulting Peretti to something of a legend, leading to him being invited on numerous TV shows, albeit as a reluctant labour activist.

While normal people may have gotten carried away with the intense exhilaration of having been a part of something viral, Peretti was more intrigued by the hows and whys of internet virality.

He had a chat with his friend, Cameron Marlow, now head of Data Sciences at Facebook, then just a fellow graduate writing a thesis on viral phenomena. Marlo insisted that virality was well nigh impossible to manufacture, as the complexity of human emotions ensured it wasn’t possible to predict what a certain individual would share, with any degree of certainty.

Peretti argued otherwise, they both made a bet, and the rest as they say, is history. 

THE EARLY DAYS 

Peretti started BuzzFeed as a side-project in 2006. He knew, if he could reliably churn out contagious content, content that you will want to share, daily on an industrial scale, he would have developed a modern day internet dragon, devouring page-views by the millions and starving the age-old news agencies, already dying out in the digital age.

Peretti basically wanted to develop memes, originally coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and built BuzzFeed as a laboratory to do just that. The defining characteristic of memes being that they self-replicate.

Initially, BuzzFeed was just an algorithm to handpick stories  from around the vast internet which  showed even the slightest inkling of virality. BuzzFeed persuaded partner sides to install  code on  their website which allowed it to monitor their traffic. (The network now encompasses some 200 sites that serve 355  million users.)

Currently though, BuzzFeed employs editors whose full-time job it is to put out content on the web which will  consistently get a huge number of shares and go ‘viral’ so to speak.

So how do they do it? Since the viral articles and listicles were the end-product of a till-now unknown process, I determined I would need to go down the rabbit-hole  back to where it all begins: the content-creation stage.

The results I found were shocking and more importantly, easily repeatable.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT BUZZFEED

I went to buzzFeed.com and started hunting around for something interesting. What caught my eye was a particularly intigruing piece of content titled: “After Finding Out Mid-Wedding That Her Groom Was Unwell, This Bride Married A Wedding Guest Instead”.

This article had generated more than 4 Lakh hits in a few hours and was featured on the front page of BuzzFeed’s India site! It began with the following sentence: “It was like any other wedding ceremony in India, where 25-year-old Jugal Kishore was to wed 23-year-old Indira.”

Curious how BuzzFeed had stumbled onto this particular piece of news, I ran a search on Jugal Kishore and Indira on Google. It instantly threw up an article from ‘The Times of India’ which had the exact same content, only from a couple of days earlier. Fair play to BuzzFeed though, since they gamely admitting to lifting the content from ‘multiple news outlets’.

They basically just added a couple of stock images showing scenes from an Indian wedding to a story already out on various news outlets, appended a funny HIMYM meme at the end and topped it off with a clickbait headline and let the magic unfold!

Shocked at how easily I had stumbled upon the source, I determined to reverse-engineer some other posts as well. Another BuzzFeed post trending on the homepage was titled: “24 Pictures That Perfectly Capture How Insane The Snow In New England Is”. This had generated more than 3 million hits at the time of writing.

Seeing that the images were mostly from Twitter where hashtags make it extremely easy to search, I searched for #Boston, #BostonBuried, #Snow, #BOSnow and #BostonSnow. Unsurprisingly enough, I found around 15 of the 24 pictures within just 5 minutes of searching and using just these five hashtags.

Which got me thinking how easy it is to actually make a viral-worthy post on BuzzFeed with a lifted scoop and a simple Google Image search!

Though BuzzFeed has now hired senior journalists and scores of reporters to create content on politics and technology, it is still these light-hearted listicles and clickbait news engineered to go viral that generate a bulk of the site’s traffic and more importantly how thousands are introduced to the site on a daily basis.

SHOCKING INCIDENTS FROM THE PAST

A cursory search on the internet about BuzzFeed’s questionable sourcing policies  threw up a few interesting links.  A controversial Slate article by Farhad Manjoo told  me that back in 2012, NedHardy.com—a kind of poor man’s BuzzFeed—posted an  item called, “7 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.” Then, the following  month, NedHardy posted another piece, “13 Pictures To Help You Restore Your Faith  in Humanity.”

Half of the photos in BuzzFeed’s iconic post “21 pictures that will restore  your faith in humanity’’which generated a humongous 15.5 million views, appeared  first in NedHardy’s two compilations. NedHardy isn’t mentioned anywhere in  BuzzFeed’s “21 Pictures” post.

But wait, there’s more. The first photo in the list shows a group of Christians at a Chicago gay pride parade holding signs apologising for their church’s homophobia. The second shows a gay man wearing nothing but underwear hugging the men holding  those signs. These two pictures have been reportedly shared ‘over 34 million’ times on  the web!

But here’s where it gets really interesting. The christians apologising in the  picture are actually members of The Marin Foundation, led by Andrew Marin who  himself has been accused of being a secret homophobe and of propagating his own agenda pretending to be friend of gay people!

So, when properly researched, as  evidently BuzzFeed did not think important, the most iconic internet picture ever of ‘faith  in humanity restored’ turns out to be a slap in the face of internet crazies who will just  as easily fall for cute cat pics as fake cancer patients!

LIFTING FROM ONLINE MEME HAVENS

Another example is “14 Mistakes That Really Should Never Have Happened.” This post  shows workplace failures, e.g., Pineapples in a big box labeled “watermelons.” Under  each picture in the post, BuzzFeed includes a tiny link to Imgur, a picture-hosting site.

But there’s something suspiciously sneaky about the way BuzzFeed links to Imgur. BuzzFeed chooses to link directly to the file name of Imgur images. That means when you click on the link, you see only the photo. It’s only when you remove the “.jpg” from the URL that you see the full Imgur page for the image.

If you do that for all the images in the “14 Mistakes” post, you’ll find that 13 of the images include the phrase “one job” in their titles (as in, “You had only one job to do, and you failed.”) and link back to a Reddit page titled “one job”.

THE BUZZFEED WAY

So basically a BuzzFeed staffer typically works something like this:

1. Scour the net for interesting content on the web. But, wait! That sounds familiar! Heck, that’s what ALL OF US do on the internet: search for interesting content.

2. The BuzzFeed staffer finds something interesting enough.

3. He starts finding more pictures to populate the list which is all but a matter of simple searching on Reddit/Tumblr/4Chan or even a Google Image Search.

4. He puts it up online and waits for the two main demographics BuzzFeed thrives on.

BuzzFeed defines this as the bored-at-work brigade, which according to Perreti is the single largest demographic of any kind in the world. A close second comes the bored-in-line segment, people browsing through their phones, say while waiting for the tube at the station.

These people ironically enough do not have time to waste, to go through numerous web-pages before they can finally guffaw at something hilarious.

Enter BuzzFeed, which does the hard work for you, unlike other sites such as Reddit, 4Chan and Tumblr, where even though tonnes of interesting content is being constantly produced, you have to wade through hours of threads and decipher tonnes of inside jokes and references before hitting shareable gold. 

THE TRUTH IS A BIT OF A LETDOWN REALLY

Once you understand how BuzzFeed actually functions behind the scenes, it’s a bit like a magician revealing his tricks to you. Whenever you see a popular BuzzFeed post, search Reddit, 4Chan, Tumbler or run a simple Google Image search and the truth shall be revealed.

The enchantment fades off and you see BuzzFeed for what it actually is: A cold-blooded early-warning system which triggers off alarms as soon as a particular piece of content from the relatively obscure parts of the web begins generating buzz, repackages the same with clickbait headlines that create what is known as a ‘curiosity gap’ and pushes it to the millions it has access to so that probabilistically speaking, the chances that at-least one in ten people who view it would feel compelled to share it go up. (On particularly good posts, 3 in every 10 people who view a BuzzFeed post share it!).

“A lot of what the BuzzFeed editors do is have conversations about the things people are talking about on 4Chan and message boards and Reddit,” Peretti says. He concedes that some of its ideas have appeared elsewhere online, but he argues that it is extremely difficult to unearth the true creator of content on the web.

Copying other’s stuff as inspiration is now standard practice online. Even posting other people’s pictures, a strict  copyright no-no is considered ‘normal’. (BuzzFeed does this often; Peretti hasdefended it by arguing that because BuzzFeed transforms photos into lists, it is protected under the fair use exception to copyright rules.)

WILL THIS TOO WEAR OFF?

I’ll leave it to you to decode the ethical issues surrounding BuzzFeed’s sourcing policies, but my chance peek behind the scenes of BuzzFeed has me convinced that it is indeed  possible to create the right environment to optimise content to become contagious.

Not  everything may take off with quite the same forward momentum, but whatever does, will inevitably be based on an easily repeatable formula.

But as with all things which can be copied, it is indeed skeptical if BuzzFeed can keep an audience of millions hooked over a sustainable period. Already, websites like Viral Nova, Upworthy, Business Insider and even Indian counterpart ScoopWhoop have started repeating the same formula with great success.

Because it’s obviously not magic, it’s science.

Do let me know in the comments your views on what spreads and what does not.