Office With a View: ”Having a trend that you can align with is really important,“ says Jonah Peretti
Jonah Peretti, founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, began his career as a high school computer teacher in New Orleans in the late 1990s. “It was a time when technology was a new thing in high schools, and we were figuring out how to help kids understand these shifts and use these new tools,” Peretti told TheWrap in a recent conversation at New York-based BuzzFeed’s Hollywood headquarters.
Then, in 2001, Peretti went viral.
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Click Here Already a subscriber? LoginWhile pursuing a master’s degree at MIT’s Media Lab, Peretti decided to take advantage of the NikeID (now Nike By You) offering, which invited shoe shoppers to customize their footwear. Peretti ordered a pair of the shoes customized with the word “sweatshop,” a none-too-subtle jab at Nike’s reputation for using low-paid labor. Nike canceled the order.
This spawned a lengthy email exchange with the Nike representative who had deemed Peretti’s choice inappropriate. In one of Peretti’s emails, as reproduced on the site Know Your Meme, Peretti wrote that his choice of the word as his personal ID did not violate any of Nike’s specified criteria and added, “I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes.”
At first, Peretti shared the details of this exchange with friends, who then shared it with friends, who continued to share it until finally, “I ended up on the Today show,” Peretti recalled. “I was realizing that I didn’t really know anything about the sweatshop issue… but I had made something that people wanted to share. In the early 2000s, for the first time maybe ever, it was possible to make something that would reach millions of people and would eventually saturate the mainstream media.”
That idea led to various viral media experiments, co-founding the Huffington Post (now HuffPost) in 2005 and then founding BuzzFeed in 2006. He described BuzzFeed, known for its shareable online quizzes, listicles and pop-culture updates, as “the purest expression of the idea I was thinking about, which was how to build a media company that was based on people sharing content with each other.”
More than two decades after Peretti’s first viral experiment, many observers believe BuzzFeed is now struggling to ride the social media wave that first lifted it. However, Peretti remains confident that the next wave in media is AI — and insists that BuzzFeed is primed to ride that wave back up to the top. He sat down for TheWrap’s Office With a View to give his take on how to spot and seize on a valuable new trend.
In 2014 and 2015, NBCUniversal made waves by investing a total of $400 million in BuzzFeed, which was then reportedly estimated to be valued at as much as $1.5 billion. The now-public company has a current market cap of $197 million. Can the tide be turned?
I started the company because I was obsessed with the major changes that were happening in the world and in media, particularly what was happening on the internet with social media. I haven’t throughout the years spent much time thinking about what the value of the company is. I’ve never sold a share of the company. I’ve been building the company to be the best media company for the digital age. [I knew] that you could possibly fail and expected that there will be times when the market might value the company maybe too high, and times the market value would be too low. It will not be a straight line. It will be a windy road with lots of bumps and twists and turns.
It is true, undoubtedly, that there was a period of real exuberance around these new digital media companies and now there’s more skepticism. But I think these things can change surprisingly quickly. Our job is not to try to change the way people see the entire industry. Our job is to execute, do the best work we can and to connect the audience in ways that can grow our business.
What would you tell an entrepreneur just getting into digital media now?
If you are obsessed with digital media, that’s the first step. You’ve got to have some obsession and passion and excitement about what the subject is. I think the other thing is having trend that is happening in the world that you can align with, that’s really important.
A lot of entrepreneurs like to pretend to invent the wave, but really, they’re surfing the wave. If you were starting a company in the early 2000s, the wave was social. And I think if you are trying to get into this space now, generative AI is the wave that is forming.
Social media is now an institution, and AI is still mostly in the future — where would you say we are now?
I think the creator wave is another big wave. It’s also [becoming] a little more mature and bigger and is already out there. AI is the new wave that’s forming that’s going to be very big. [It is] the area that I would look to.
What do you see as the darker side of today’s digital media landscape?
I think there’s always controversy, and I think the media landscape right now is more driven by controversy and negative emotion. We’re in a more polarized society. Algorithms on platforms are favoring more extreme content, or more “out there” content.
And so I think — and I think the younger generation is learning this — it’s about not taking everything too seriously, and trying to think about what are the things that really matter to you, and to be able to stay true to that, even with all that noise that might be swirling around.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Diane Haithman
Senior Entertainment Business Reporter • diane@thewrap.com • @dhaithman