BuzzFeed, a company founded in October 2006, is a trend gatherer (‘aggregator’) that uses web crawling technology and human editors to link its users to the most popular stories around the web. It provides a snapshot of the viral trend in real time, all the time.
The home page contains a list of posts from users and staff. The content is usually a video, an image or a link. It is free for all to see, without registration.
With registration, every user creates his own homepage, opening with the interesting stories from around the web in the categories that he chose. The homepage also contains the links to their most recent contributions. As a way to encourage users to post links, there’s a scoreboard of how many times they have posted and how many times their posts reached the front page.
Users participate in the site by reacting to what others have posted with a system of badges. These are tags given to posts like “WTF”, “TRASHY”, “GEEKY”, “CUTE”, “OLD” or “LOL”. When enough users feel the same way about a post, the tag is attached to the post permanently alerting other users to its content.
The research done by the site is used by many bloggers, journalists and social media experts to gauge the pulse of the internet community.
In its best month (November 2010) BuzzFeed had 525,000 visitors a day, the majority of which are from the USA (371,000). It is less popular in the UK (37,000) and Canada (39,000) visitors.
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