BuzzFeed Gets $50M from Andreessen Horowitz: Venture Capital Seed Funding Ensures Viral Content News via Facebook, Twitter
There is truly a shifting trend in media consumption as influenced by Facebook and Twitter. It was recently announced that BuzzFeed, a viral content company based in New York, will get an investment worth $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist, according to The Wall Street Journal.
BuzzFeed is considered a profitable company. It started in 2006 and immediately made a name for itself as a site where easily shareable content that is lightweight, such as funny photos, Internet memes and lists. It recently ventured into covering news.
The fact that one of Andreessen Horowitz's general partners, Chris Dixon, will be joining the board of BuzzFeed is not new to the company. He had already invested in BuzzFeed when he was still with Founder Collective, a New York-based seed-stage venture company.
The investment will go toward a major expansion for BuzzFeed, which is creating all the buzz right now. From the announcement that Dixon made, he said that the trend in media consumption positively favors BuzzFeed, which is distributing entertainment and news on social networks that invariably find their way onto mobile devices.
Although there are detractors, the fact is BuzzFeed has remained profitable. It now has legitimate content. They have employed about 200 writers from almost every field, from tech to politics. They have reeled in Ze Frank, a public speaker, humorist, composer and online performance artist and a vlogging pioneer. He is now BuzzFeed's vice president of video.
The company has their own custom CMS, an in-house ad team for their native ads and their own analytics engine.
Currently, BuzzFeed has an audience of 150 million and has the potential to generate triple-digit millions in 2014, according to Dixon.
People behind BuzzFeed -- like Jonah Peretti, the company's CEO and co-founder, and its chairman, Ken Lerer -- were the former co-founders of Huffington Post and Lerer Hippeau Ventures, respectively.
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