Buzzfeed content — be it a video, listicle or news scoop — is hitting more than 7 billion views every month, founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said on Monday.
That’s up from 6 billion content views in late 2015.
The company, founded nearly a decade ago, has quickly become a darling of traditional media for excelling at the creation of clicky content that’s widely shared in the social-network-driven mobile age; last year, Comcast’s NBC Universal invested $200 million in Buzzfeed, lifting its total valuation to $1.5 billion.
But the latest stat, which was presented to advertisers and marketers at a series of digital-media events in New York known Newfronts, comes after a report by the Financial Times last month that BuzzFeed missed its revenue target for last year and nearly halved its internal projections for 2016. Buzzfeed has rejected the report, with its chairman, Ken Lerer, saying that business is better than ever.
Monday, Peretti said its 7 billion content views are mostly on mobile, with 75 percent consumed through its owned and operated platforms. Buzzfeed defines “content views” as views of videos, articles, lists and illustrations, regardless of the platform. But it doesn’t include homepage or feed views or impressions of link promotions on social networks.
In the last year, Buzzfeed has made a push to draw more eyeballs to its own properties after its explosive growth on external social-sharing platforms like Facebook, with moves like launching its own dedicated video app.