Just under 13 million people took it in 2014 BuzzFeed quiz “What kind of dog are you?” (pitbull), which is small compared to the 49 million who answered the question “Which US state do you actually live in?” (Georgia). We were two years out from 2016 – that’s it a terrible year for millennial optimism – and while the crash was still hitting, Barack Obama was in power and Brexit wasn’t even a word. That was it: end of story, 27 cat pictures that are never funny.
2016 administered a sharp correction to this assumption. But on November 21 of that year, 13 days after Donald Trump’s first election and 151 days after Britain voted to leave the European Union, BuzzFeed was valued at $1.7 billion by NBCUniversal. For most of the decade, BuzzFeed prevailed, setting the terms of the conversation—white feminism this, girl boss—while uniting users across the vast, anarchic Internet into a catalog of micro-identities (“16 Pictures That Are Too Real for People With ADHD,” “27 Signs You Were Raised by Asian Immigrant Parents,” “Which Shrek Character Are You?”). Politics was intertwined, the mantra was “no haters,” and the future of the Internet seemed set to be cheap, smart, and tabloid forever.
In 2023, BuzzFeed shut down its news function altogether. Since then, the website is little more than a billboard, supported by AI and a disorganized staff. now BuzzFeed is on the brink of bankruptcy, as it reported this month. Its founder, Jonah Peretti – the Gutenberg of the liberal bent of the 2010s – hasn’t given up yet. “I’m going back into founder mode and we’re building again as a start-up,” he told her New York Times.
But BuzzFeed helped define the spirit of an era: upbeat, twee, kitsch, cringe, sugary, honest, swotty. Whatever BuzzFeed done, we know that the soul is lost. What, exactly, have we lost with it?
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“You think I’m in a regular newsroom,” says a hysterical reporter down the camera lens, “but I’m not—this is BuzzFeed!” She tours the New York office in 2015: the walls are red and screaming BuzzFeed to you; everywhere there are big yellow “stickers” bearing the vernacular of the company – “LOL”, “YES”. There is a games area, a ping pong table, a giant Connect Four set. “We sit down and have pizza, throw back a few beers.”
The cut sequences are blurry (don’t watch if you have epilepsy) and blissful millennial muzak plays throughout the edit. From the perspective of 2026, it feels as dated as a Brooklyn pilsner bar with exposed brick and string lighting. I think if you told a 1980s Fleet Street hack that this was – by some metrics – the biggest news source in the world at the time, they would have laughed in your face.
But that was the cultural shorthand of the moment. BuzzFeedThe UK office opened in Hatton Garden, Farringdon, in March 2013. Within a year, the operation had recorded at least one month in which its traffic exceeded that of the BBC and MailOnline (160 million users, compared to the BBC’s 150 million). By 2015, everyone wanted to work there: one former editor recalls receiving 250 applications for a single internship; at least one journalist was rumored to have rejected the graduate scheme at Financial Times for a placement in BuzzFeed.
“You know that feeling you get sometimes in London, that there’s always a better room to be in? Somewhere where something more exciting is happening? Not with BuzzFeed“explained one veteran employee. Another compared it to an 18th-century coffee shop—but instead of tough conversations about capitalism and rationality, it was all virality, reach, traffic, identity. “At the time we felt like we were on the verge of doing something very different.” After a flood of VC money, the London office moved to “an airplane hangar” in Oxford Circus in 2015.
The office looked more like a tech start-up – BuzzFeed had effectively sold itself as a technology company, without any technology – rather than a media organisation. Staff wore hoodies and jeans and had access to food and drink: “It was really wild, the amount of Brazil nuts we would eat,” recounts one reporter. In 2017, around the time of a series of gluts, the now infamous oyster incident occurred, when trays of oysters arrived at HQ for lunch – “we all remember oyster day!” But it wasn’t all generous: “I wouldn’t want to give the impression that we were eating swan while writing memes,” one defense worker told me, while another recalled eating a foie gras burger at a Christmas party.
As first reported by the Press Association, tension ran high: There was a failed attempt to form a union, a round of layoffs and a developing fault line between the serious news desk and the We Make Quizzes and Sponsored Content department. I was told over and over about the row over live music in the office: “You’d be hiding in a filing cabinet, get a subtle phone call from the Buckingham Palace press office and explain why ‘Five Colors in Her Hair’ was playing in the background.” In one apocryphal story, an editor mistook Little Mix for a group of interns.
Peretti had discovered something – the secret to guaranteed virality, the method for mastering the wild west of the Internet. To understand how he did this, we have to go back to 1996, when he, as a student, wrote a paper entitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution.” Through a critique of Anti-Oedipusa book on schizoanalysis by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with a detour through Lacanian psychoanalysis, Peretti argued that capitalism would eventually sort people into narrow identity categories, making them easier to sell. It was the nineties and he was really talking about advertising. But it’s hard not to see now that the long tail of this thought is BuzzFeed quiz: tell me what Frozen The character I am, whether I’m a picky eater, which Hogwarts house I belong to, and which historical time period would suit me best. In a complicated and scary world, Peretti never underestimated the spiritual medicine a quiz could offer a millennial.
BuzzFeed had cracked the traffic code and was no longer limited to reductive quizzes like “What Your Hair Says About You” or lists like “32 People Who Absolutely Nailed It In 2013.” In 2011, Ben Smith was created BuzzFeed News. Amidst all the early silliness, serious journalism gained prestige: the UK team got a lobby pass and in June 2016 they hosted a live Facebook town hall debate between then-prime minister David Cameron, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Ukip leader Nigel Farage and Tory MP Penny Mordaunt. In 2014, a self-commissioned report on how the BBC could expand its online presence concluded: “Be more BuzzFeed.”
In 2012, Peretti said, “The baton has been passed from print to the traditional network and now from the traditional network to the social network. The whole industry is shifting and we aim to be the leader in social publishing.” He was right for a while: the network seemed to belong to a triumvirate that was redefining media. Gawker traded on a publish-anything sensibility, but was eventually undone by a lawsuit after the site published a sex tape of the late Hulk Hogan. Vicea kind of Wario BuzzFeedwanted readers to feel at ease – with the “global drug editor” and deliveries from coups in Sudan. At its peak, in 2017, the company received a valuation of $5.7 billion. By 2024, Vice had filed for bankruptcy.
By 2020, BuzzFeed announced that it would close its UK operation. In 2023, BuzzFeed News stopped posting. And now, the whole thing is at stake. The reasons are complicated. The company assumed that if it played the game set by Google, Facebook and Twitter, it could win — and keep winning. But Facebook deprioritized news and Twitter, now X, became vague about linking to websites. BuzzFeed he had the secret of the traffic but could never pay for it. (Most of its successful UK graduates are now back behind paywalls – in Financial TimesBloomberg, or Special Interest Substacks.)
But what we also have is a total reactionary departure from the motivating spirit of BuzzFeed. “No Haters” was a loose, slippery policy, but it was evident in the website’s DNA. And it was of its time – when the conversation was less strident and the politics considerably less hyper.
BuzzFeed’s liberalism cannot survive in a world where the right has split into Reform and Restoration, and parts of the left have coalesced around a cross-platform, anti-US, anti-Israel platform. When a nasty war breaks out on the eastern border of this continent and America is considering boots on the ground in Iran, perhaps “This paint stain test will determine your personality“ it just feels too frivolous for the circumstances. The world is very difficult BuzzFeed now. He returned to serious news, yes, but the spirit of LOL, WTF and YES haunted him. And in its wake: 7 reasons why this millennial will never feel better.
(Further reading: Donald Trump is my old friend – but he’s lost the plot)
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