Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2015. The $1.5 billion valuation, the millions of daily visits and the remarks on Facebook’s algorithm change date from 2015. BuzzFeed later went public (2021) and closed BuzzFeed News (2023).
Social media giant BuzzFeed holds a great business lesson about the importance of turning a problem into a new opportunity, about how to refocus your strategy once your previous growth strategy has been knocked down and, above all, about how to use adversity to become an even stronger company.
Business Insider has reported the account of Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s founder, in which he explains how in its early days the company, like any website, was focused on ranking well in search engines so that users could find it.
In fact, it’s often said that if you don’t rank well on Google, your online presence will be very limited, and if Google penalises you, your company will practically cease to exist online, since it is by far the most widely used search engine.
Peretti describes how, overnight, an error (or a misreading by Google) wiped out all of BuzzFeed’s search traffic and, with it, sank the whole business.
According to him, Google’s penalty came about because of the way some videos were embedded: Google concluded the site was promoting malware. Whatever the cause, they woke up to find they had “disappeared” from Google, and were therefore sunk.
Peretti explains that in its early days the company’s growth strategy was search engine optimisation (mainly for Google), because at the time traffic from social media was very weak.
Back then BuzzFeed was a growing company, not the giant with millions of daily visits that it is today.
At that point the company was doomed to close if Google’s error persisted for too long, but thanks to that problem Peretti had no choice but to ask himself whether they could survive without Google, and how.
That was when they decided that the future of internet traffic would have more to do with social media than with search engines. And if that didn’t turn out to be exactly the case, they would at least have taken the first step towards the future.
They forgot about Google and changed their strategy, producing articles, funny images and videos that would catch the attention of Facebook users to the point where users themselves wanted to share the content with their friends.
And that is how BuzzFeed became the social media giant that other entrepreneurs have long been trying to imitate. The company is currently valued at $1.5 billion.
Looking back on that mishap, Peretti says that having that problem was the best thing that could have happened to the company and, in fact, it was what triggered its enormous success. Of course, until he realised that, the episode was hell for him.
BuzzFeed now faces the opposite problem: Facebook’s algorithm change, since the social network had been its main source of traffic until then. But that no longer worries the company, because these days its visits come from search engines as well as from social media and subscribers, so it keeps running without trouble.
BuzzFeed’s business lesson
Peretti lives up to one of the most famous clichés in the world of motivation: “Don’t focus on the problem; focus on the solution.”
If Peretti had spent his time complaining about the situation and assuming he had been beaten, the company probably wouldn’t exist today. So when adversity strikes, it pays to ask yourself the right questions:
- What happened?
- Can it be solved?
- How?
- What other strategy can I use to keep going?
Once you’ve answered these questions, all that’s left is to get down to work on the new strategy. You could call this process “business resurrection”.
See also: 10 business lessons from business leaders for entrepreneurs
Featured image: nrkbeta, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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