BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg has the key to how his website has become a huge success while legacy outlets are floundering: they don’t care about young people. Also, Ryan Gosling.
“I think the traditional media really doesn’t care about young people,” Steinberg said on Fusion’s “Morning Show.” “I really think that. When you read most traditional news, the hard news is the same. The politics, the business. But then they do stuff like expensive vacations and luxury houses. No young person could pick up an architecture section about an 8 million dollar house and think ‘oh, this is a product that’s for me.’”
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BuzzFeed’s January article, Aren’t Castles the Greatest Things?, a guide to “eight of Great Britain’s best castles” for people who are “wedding planning and rolling in it and still need a venue,” has over 32,000 views so far.
“We create the same important news, but we do native web-culture content that appeals to young people,” Steinberg added. “Young people want to see web memes and things about Ryan Gosling, and animals and all of that stuff adjacent to their hard news. And we have a lot of technology as well. Everything on the site needs to be shared. If things aren’t shared we stop showing them on BuzzFeed.”
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