BuzzFeed hopes to go viral in Japan with Yahoo joint venture

A year ago, new media darling (and champion of the listicle) BuzzFeed announced a US$50 million series E round from Andreessen Horowitz and plans to expand to India, Germany, Mexico, and Japan. After launching in the former three, the company today confirmed a joint venture with Yahoo Japan that will see it enter the Japanese market this winter.

While New York-based BuzzFeed has expanded to other markets on its own, president Greg Coleman explained in a statement the company’s decision to enter Japan with a partner:

We’ve been really successful with the wholly owned and operated, organic-growth model we’ve used for launches in other countries, but in Japan we want to open with a partner who can help accelerate our growth. This is why a joint venture makes the most sense. We put a lot of thought into finding the right partner. Beyond looking at pure reach, we wanted to find a team that has local cultural knowledge, established clients, and strong revenue numbers. [Yahoo Japan] is a perfect fit because it is a pure-play digital company untethered to the legacy constraints of traditional media.

BuzzFeed will provide the technical backend and guidance for both editorial content and native advertising, while Yahoo Japan will be responsible for sales, driving traffic to the new site, and advising the team on cultural matters (for example, take your shoes off when entering someone’s home, don’t pass food from chopstick to chopstick, never wear a bathing suit in the onsen… I see a great listicle coming!).

BuzzFeed Japan doesn’t have a specific launch date – or name – yet, but it could arrive before the end of the year.

“BuzzFeed Japan is to be launched this winter, with the official site name to be determined,” Yoko Atsumi, a Yahoo Japan spokesperson, tells Tech in Asia. “As a Yahoo News content partner, [BuzzFeed Japan] will supply content to Yahoo News in Japan.” Atsumi also said that there is no plan to feature BuzzFeed on Yahoo Japan’s homepage – the country’s second most popular search portal after being narrowly edged out by Google for the first time last year.

BuzzFeed’s announcement additionally stated that 45 percent of its traffic comes from outside the US. In addition to India, Germany, and Mexico, the company also has a localized presence in the UK, France, Australia, and Canada. Adding Japan to that roster is likely to boost non-US pageviews even higher, but the site will face competition from several incumbents.

News aggregation site Virates boasts over 20 million monthly pageviews as of early this year. With a focus on content that’s both sharable and funny, Curazy was bringing in 5 million of its own monthly clicks around this time last year. On a more newsy front, Huffington Post also offers a Japanese language site.

“We do not see any particular competitors in the Japanese market,” Atsumi adds. “There already exist media [that] provide entertaining content [that’s] shared on social media, like animal videos [and] pictures. However, BuzzFeed Japan will deliver not only the usual curated content, but also original stories and research which will make [it] unique.”

Yahoo Japan itself exists as a joint venture between the US-based parent and Japanese internet and telecommunications giant SoftBank. The service claims to reach 88 percent of Japanese internet users, with roughly half of those in the BuzzFeed-friendly 20 to 39-year-old demographic.

We’ve reached out to BuzzFeed and will update this post if they reply.