Two years ago Buzzfeed’s head of global operations visited Sydney and laid out the company’s vision of being the New York Times.
As Scott Lamb explained, an important part of the Buzzfeed model was generating traffic through social media shares — at that time a tactic which Iwas working well.
Since then the gloss has gone off Buzzfeed as the company misses financial targets and traffic plateaus.
Now Facebook has announced further changes to its newsfeed which sees more emphasis on users’ family and friends’ posts than news and brands.
Sites like Buzzfeed are left in a bind as one of their key sources for traffic dries up and, once again, Facebook’s cahnges show how risky it is for publishers and marketers to rely on individual online platforms.
In truth all of the major online services are predators with Facebook, along with Google and Amazon, being at the top of the food chain, just like tigers.
For those riding the internet tigers, the risk of being mauled is real. As Buzzfeed and others are finding.