BuzzFeed Lands

By 2013, BuzzFeed was impossible to ignore. The numbers were obscene—130 million monthly visitors, venture capitalists pouring money in like it was the future. You could hate it, you could dismiss it, but the thing was real and it was everywhere.

And Germany was waiting. Not eagerly, just waiting for the inevitable. Everyone knew it was coming. The only question was timing.

Jonah Peretti was in Berlin, saying the obvious: start small, figure out what works locally, then scale up. The logic made sense. And I could already picture how it would go—the formula applied to a new market, finding what stuck, churning out the German version.

I could picture it perfectly. 22 Dschungelcamp Moments That Prove You’re Basically German, Which Mainzelmännchen Are You, 37 GIFs That Describe Life in Buxtehude. Not terrible. Just the inevitable outcome of dropping this thing into a new market and letting it run. Same structure, same bet that people want to see themselves as lists.

Maybe they’d do something smart with it, something that actually connected to how Germans shared stuff online. Or maybe not. Either way, it was coming.