30 Linkbait Phrases in BuzzFeed Headlines You Probably Didn't Know Generate The Most Amount of Facebook Shares [OC]

Fair question, but yeah, I actually I think so. I've read several high quality long form articles and essays on BuzzFeed, and none from its competitors (unless you count Medium as one of its competitors). I've seen several genuinely funny videos from BuzzFeed (as well as several not so funny ones) but I don't think I've seen any from the competitors. BuzzFeed is positioning itself as an all-around media company, which means in their world they provide both what are called clickbait and high quality content, whereas its competitors tend to only provide standard clickbait with little longterm strategy (the one exception might be PlayBuzz, which has focused on quizzes and particularly quizzes with respectable partners like MTV and Martha Stewart as well as quizzes made for free by users--here's more on their strategy; this Gizmodo piece points out that it's actually sometimes difficult to tell PlayBuzz from ClickHole). The editor-in-chief once said in an interview that "We don't do Clickbait", and everyone on Reddit laughed. While they obviously post a lot of superficial content that they hope gets widely shared on social media, they don't do Clickbait in the sense of "you-have-to-click-this-to-know-what-it's-about". Notice on the list /u/minimaxir made, there are no "[X] happens and you won't believe what happens next"s, no "number [x] will make you [y]". Their list titles are most like "[x] things that only [y]'s will understand", where you don't click it to find out "what happens next", but because you're a [y] (or want to know about [y]s). Also, one nice thing is BuzzFeed has no ads, and makes all their money from "promoted posts" with "partners", so aesthetically it isn't this horrible bombardment by companies like it can be when I visit a TV station's website.

Anyway, my point is that, in addition to having different strategies and business models, BuzzFeed has posted a lot of quality articles that I think make them worth differentiating from most of their competitors. I wrote a comment a while ago that said:

Buzzfeed LongForm has published a lot of high quality stories. I think this is one of them. You may have read the story about called "Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500", which was very popular. There's also, for example, the excellent story about the rise of TMZ that puts it in the context of celebrity gossip outlet going all the way back to the fifties (the author, Anne Helen Peterson, has a Ph.D. from UT Austin but has decided to go into media rather than academia). I also particularly liked their long investigative piece, "Why Would A Gay Teenager Commit Hate Crimes Against Herself?". My point is, this isn't a dumb article and I'd encourage you go to read it. If you've looked at it, and think this article couldn't have just as easily been published in the Atlantic or Slate or Medium or the New York Times Magazine or something like that, come back and we can talk about that. But you shouldn't be against a good article just because of where it was published.

That was when I submitted a longform story I liked called The Revenge Porn Fixers: Meet The Women You Call When Your Nude Photos Wind Up Online to /r/truereddit. Anne Helen Peterson I particularly like--I haven't finished her book, but she has written a lot . I have a big intellectual crush on her. In addition to the story relating TMZ to the birth of the gossip industry in the 1950's linked above, she has a great piece called "Zach Efron Bros Down to Grow Up" about celebrity culture and masculinity, and a really, really great piece with a dumb title about how people sort by socioeconomic class in online dating. I can't think of any of its competitors--even viral friendly "news" sites like Huffington Post or Fox News, but certainly not clickbait factories like PlayBuzz, Unworthy, ViralNova, whatever's hot this week--who publish stuff quite like that. Also, some of their foreign coverage is surprisingly good--Miriam Elder, their foreign editor, used to work for the Guardian (obviously, BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief used to work for Politico). So yeah, I actually do think it's worth distinguishing BuzzFeed from its competitors--though I don't often click on their lists, I do read some of their other stuff.

/r/dataisbeautiful Thread Link - i.imgur.com