BuzzFeed reveals its secrets to going viral, and its plans to win India

As every regular on the web now knows, BuzzFeed thrives on making content go viral. Listicles, jokes, GIFs, self-help tips – anything that will be shared. That was their mantra, and still is. But BuzzFeed is also learning and evolving as it goes along – experimenting with different forms of content, understanding new markets like India, adapting to new platforms like WhatsApp and so on. This is interesting not just because BuzzFeed is one of the biggest media phenomena of our times – you won’t believe how fast it grew to billion-dollar valuation – but also because it reflects how we respond to content online.

It has spawned imitators as well as mockery. There’s even a site called FuzzBeed, showing how BuzzFeed has touched a nerve in our digital persona.

I got a chance to discuss all this over lunch in Mumbai recently with three people who are neck-deep in innovation and expansion strategies at BuzzFeed: the Los Angeles-based VP of international, Scott Lamb, who left Der Spiegel in 2007 to join the original editorial team at BuzzFeed; Alice Suh, who recently moved from New York to London for a more central location as the global marketing head; and Rega Jha, BuzzFeed editor for India, where it launched a few months ago.

We were at a restaurant called The Tasting Room – a name that could as easily be given to the traditional editorial space where copy-tasters sift through a ceaseless stream of reports to pick out the few that they’ll carry. The trick is to know what could engage a newspaper reader the next morning. Now, at places like BuzzFeed, it’s about what will immediately go viral in social media. How is that so different, you might wonder.

“Well. it can’t just be interesting and good, it needs to have some social imperative as a part of it. And that is difficult to pin down. There is no list of rules to just check all the boxes. It really is a sort of editorial instinct,” Lamb tries to explain.

Old wine in a new bottle? Not quite, because here it’s the bottle that shapes the content. In many ways, BuzzFeed thinks of social media reach as the primary goal of its content.

Lamb elaborates on how this works internally: “We have 200 editors at Buzzfeed, we publish 700 to 900 stories today on our website. So we let our writers publish a lot of stuff, but not everything lands on the front page. If people are not sharing something enough, it disappears without a trace. There is no downside to that. If it is really doing well, we promote it like crazy, kind of push it out to as many people as we can.”

The new viral order

Some of the highest numbers BuzzFeed had for its India posts were for Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Dil To Pagal Hai [popular Hindi movies].

Rega Jha was working for BuzzFeed in New York before she moved to her native land last year for the launch in India. “Before I got here to Mumbai,” she says, “I asked a lot of people, ‘what does India care to read?’ And sort of the conventional advice I was given by almost everyone, whether they are 25 or 55, is Bollywood, cricket, politics. That these are the things that are viral in India. And that is true. Every time we do a Bollywood post it does really well. Politics has worked well for us. I think those are the three safe options, but if you go on Twitter and follow a lot of Indians, you will see they are more often talking about things like LGBT rights and feminism than Bollywood, cricket, or politics.”

This calls for a balancing act from Jha’s team. “For us, sticking to those three tried and tested topics is a priority, but it is also important to figure out what are the young internet users of India talking about now, what are the new topics that interest them now, and what are the most shareable ways of joining those conversations, instead of harping about just Bollywood, cricket and politics, which every other media house in India is already doing.”

So, how does one have one’s cake and eat it too? How do you keep Bollywood a priority, and also give enough play to an LGBT issue, which may have limited appeal compared to Bollywood, but reaches new audiences? It’s about being smart on the metrics, recognizing that the number of shares relates to the potential of a topic.

Jha illustrates this with an example: “Some of the highest numbers we had for our India posts were for Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Dil To Pagal Hai [popular Hindi movies]. But we are also kind of happy with the numbers for our posts on Section 377.” Section 377, the Indian penal code which criminalizes homosexuality, may never be as viral as Dil To Pagal Hai (which translates to ‘The Heart Is Mad’), but the numbers from the articles about gay rights could be more important for targeting new audiences and future growth.

Lamb chimes in. “We hired this guy in LA, who had a blog about being a father. We hired him specifically to go after a slightly older demographic, because parents spend a lot of time on the web and it is a very strong identity. And he is being wildly successful writing for a very different audience than the typical BuzzFeed audience.”