BuzzFeed Taps In to News Sharing

Jonah Peretti has an idea that media is going to change completely, giant companies will be born around new business models, and he’s aiming for his BuzzFeed to be one of them.

Started two years ago as an aggregator of hot content being shared on social networks, BuzzFeed, based in New York, has evolved into a site and mobile applications that include the shared content, yes, but has in the past month added original political content.

He told Portfolio.com to look for more original work and a ramping up of BuzzFeeds technical capacity.

That’s because the two-year-old company announced Monday it had added $15.5 million in venture capital in a round led by New Enterprise Associates, with Lerer Ventures, Hearst Media, Softbank, and RRE participating.

“It will allow us to invest in technology and editorial at the same time,” Peretti said of the funding. “It’s an amazing luxury to be able to invest in both.”

Peretti, a veteran of the Huffington Post, founded BuzzFeed with the idea that there had to be a better way of attracting readers than writing to please Google algorithms, and a better way to attract advertisers than traditional banner or search ads.

Now, the site has about 26 million unique visitors a month, and the majority are drawn by postings on Facebook or Twitter, rather than through Google search. And the advertising on the site is integrated so it, too, can be shared to social networks.

“BuzzFeed has a huge opportunity to create the definitive publishing site for the social world, and we couldn’t be more excited about becoming their partner,” said Patrick Kerins, general partner at NEA.

Peretti refused to disclose revenue, but said it’s growing.

Peretti is convinced his is at least one of the models that will succeed in a new-media landscape increasingly driven by social and mobile platforms.

That’s something traditional media companies are struggling to incorporate into their models while still preserving their print or broadcast operations.

“We think that there’s this big open space,” Peretti said. “There’s going to be a bunch of companies that grow into really big businesses. We think we can make it into a real growth business.”

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com