The List at the End of the World

BuzzFeed had 130 million unique visitors in November 2013 alone—a doubling within a year. Venture capital had poured $46 million into it. Whatever you thought about the recycled lists and reaction GIFs, by 2014 you couldn’t wave those numbers away and still claim to be paying attention.

What interested me more was the anxiety the site produced in European media circles. German journalists especially had been asking—with a mixture of professional curiosity and barely concealed dread—when the viral machinery would officially arrive on their shores. The answer, per a Wall Street Journal report, was soon. CEO Jonah Peretti was in Berlin, talking about starting small: three or four people, figure out what works locally, then scale. We’re very interested in world cities that create culture, he said, which is the kind of thing you say when you’re about to do something to a city that its residents won’t fully understand until it’s already done.

The thing about BuzzFeed’s model is that it was never really about the cats. The quizzes and listicles were the delivery mechanism—the actual product was attention at scale, which could then be redirected toward real reporting. In the US, investigative journalism was being quietly funded by traffic from personality quizzes. A German version could theoretically push for fair use reform, normalize the internet as a primary news source, do something genuinely useful with that reach.

Or it could just publish 37 GIFs that describe growing up in a small provincial town, and everyone would click it anyway. Both things seemed equally likely. That was always BuzzFeed’s actual genius—and its most dispiriting quality.