How Jonah Peretti built a billion-dollar company Buzzfeed?
Internet entrepreneur Jonah Peretti is co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, the company, which was formerly renowned for online quizzes, “listicles,” and pop culture pieces has developed into a global internet and technology organization that covers a range of subjects, such as politics, Crafts, animals, and business. He was the co-founder of The Huffington Post, and creator of the “Reblog” project, which pioneered reblogging.
Early Life
Jonah Peretti’s life appeared to be fairly typical until he founded the billion-dollar media giant BuzzFeed. He earned an environmental studies degree from UC Santa Cruz and found work as a teacher in New Orleans.
His passion for viral media was then kindled following an email argument with sportswear giant Nike. Before going to MIT to acquire his master’s, he spent over three years instructing computer science. During his time at MIT, his email conversation with Nike regarding a request to print “sweatshop” on specially ordered shoes became viral.
Read More: The Success Story of the Founder of The Huffington Post
Nike continued to cancel the order after several emails back and forth, so Peretti copied the emails together and forwarded them to a select group of pals. His idea became an initial email forward and eventually reached millions of people at a time when the idea of “going viral” hadn’t yet been coined.
Success Story
In 2005, Jonah Peretti co-founded the Huffington Post with Arianna Huffington after meeting her through the widely circulated Nike email. Peretti founded BuzzFeed as a side gig soon after HuffPost was acquired by AOL for $315 million in 2011. In November 2006, Peretti launched the “Internet popularity contest” website BuzzFeed.
After quitting HuffPost, Peretti started a full-time job at BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed began as an Instant Messenger bot. The bot distributed links to groups of buddies after identifying trendy content online. Although the website was initially recognized for its blend of listicles and internet memes, it was the first to report that John McCain will support Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican Primary.
After then, the website kept expanding and the following year raised over $35 million in capital from investors. The website received an additional $50 million in funding from the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz in August 2014, almost doubling its prior fundraising rounds. According to Peretti, BuzzFeed’s audience has roughly doubled every year since its start.
Over 400 employees now work for the website thanks to Peretti, who Business Insider once dubbed “the web’s king of viral content.” Over a short period of time. Ben Smith, a well-known political journalist, was even hired by Peretti in 2012 to help develop Buzzfeed’s more serious journalism.
By 2021, BuzzFeed News had invested years into developing its investigative reporting, and it had been awarded the National Magazine Award, the George Polk Awar, and been nominated for the Michael Kelly Award. BuzzFeed news crew was a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize in the foreign reporting category in 2018. In 2021, BuzzFeed received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for a series of investigations into the Xinjiang detention camps.
I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.