Earlier today I emailed all BuzzFeed employees outlining our plan for the coming year. I wanted to all share the memo here on LinkedIn so future BuzzFeed employees could read it too. 😉

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BuzzFeed’s Next Year….

Hello BuzzFeeders,

Before anything I want to thank you for all your amazingly great work
over the last year. All of our success is because of you. And as we
move into new offices soon and begin a new year (when you have
children like I do, you tend to think of September as a new year
because of school) BuzzFeed is on a significant roll, we have reached
new milestones and our future looks tremendously bright.

Here are some highlights.

BuzzFeed reached record traffic of 85 million unique visitors in
August. We are 3X bigger than we were just one year ago, 8X bigger
than we were two years ago, and we have served more web pages so far
in 2013 than we have in the entire previous five year history of the
company. By this time next year we should be one of the biggest sites
on the web.

Much of this growth is driven by the amazing technology platform built
by Mark’s team, the elegant products built by Chris’ team, the
breakthrough optimization developed by Dao’s team, and the data
science insights delivered by Ky’s team. It wasn’t easy to build all
our own technology from scratch. Most other publishers integrate
off-the-shelf products built by others, but this full-stack,
vertically integrated approach was worth the significant, multi-year
investment and is paying off fantastically today. There are great
tech companies and great editorial institutions, but it is very rare
for one company to take both as seriously as we do.

We are also rapidly expanding to new platforms beyond our website. Our
iPhone app is consistently in the top 5 in the news category and
sometimes at #1. We have quickly become one of the leading original
video channels on YouTube with over 50 million monthly views and 2
million subscribers. And our BuzzFeed Brews live events with guests
like Sen. Rubio, Sen. Gillibrand, and NYC Mayoral Candidate Anthony
Weiner have become a leading venue for newsmakers to reach a young,
web-savvy audience.

We also booked record profit in August. We’ve gone from zero revenue
four years ago to a profitable company with over 300 employees. We’ve
become the leader, and primary innovator, in social content
advertising. Last year we ran 265 programs and this year we will do
between 600-700 with more than half of the top 100 brands.

Despite the struggles of the traditional media, there remains an
insatiable desire for great reporting, entertaining content, and
powerful storytelling. Facebook, Twitter, and the other Silicon
Valley-based social sites are amazing distribution platforms, but user
generated content alone isn’t enough to fill the hole left by the
ongoing decline of print newspapers and magazines. The world needs
sustainable, profitable, vibrant content companies staffed by
dedicated professionals; especially content for people that grew up on
the web, whose entertainment and news interests are largely neglected
by television and newspapers.

This is why BuzzFeed has a major role to play in the coming years
producing great journalism and compelling entertainment. We have the
potential to be a defining company, the same role the traditional
media companies played decades ago. These companies were once small
and scrappy like us. They faced the skepticism of their incumbents,
they pioneered new models, embraced new technologies, and succeeded
because they served their audience better than what came before. This
is a great aspiration for us as well.

It won’t be easy to deliver on this potential. We need to build on our
past successes but also continue to make changes in how we operate as
we move ahead. We are like an energetic teenager, discovering new
talents, but not sure yet how to use all of them them productively. We
are capable of doing so much more than just a year ago and we need to
update our thinking, ambition, and temperament to match our new
abilities. This shift in mindset is a tough challenge for any fast
growing company so I wanted to share some thoughts on big growth areas
in the coming years.

1) News

There is a huge opportunity to be the leading news source for the
social, mobile world. As we saw during the 2012 election, the Boston
bombings, and our LGBT focused coverage of the Sochi Olympics, a new
generation of readers are turning to us for news. This is why Ben has
been growing his team so aggressively, building new teams to cover
topics from business to travel, hiring Lisa Tozzi to run our breaking
news desk, hiring Miriam Elder to build a team of foreign
correspondents around the world, hiring Steve Kandell to lead longform
features, and launching the Michael Hastings fellowship to continue
Michael’s legacy of fearless investigative reporting. And this is just
the beginning. We will continue to hire the most talented reporters
and writers in the world, we will expand our breaking news coverage,
build the infrastructure and team for large-scale investigative
journalism and all the intense research and reporting that entails,
and inform our readers about the issues that matter to them and their
world. We, of course, still don’t have the trust the traditional news
brands have won over the past 100 years, but we are working hard to
earn it, and it won’t take us 100 years to get there.

2) Formats

BuzzFeed is famous, and sometimes infamous, for our lists. Lists are
an amazing way to consume media. They work for content as varied as
the 10 Commandments, the Bill of Rights, Google search results, ESPN’s
Sportscenter, and internal company emails. We will always do lists but
we have the advantage of not being limited to a single format like
many traditional media companies. We do long form, short form,
quizzes, video, original graphic art, rubbable gifs, apps, and more.
In the coming years, we will continue our R&D focused on inventing and
advancing media formats. This requires ongoing interdisciplinary
effort combining product, tech, and editorial, and we are off to a
great start with the weekly “canary ops” meetings and Alice DuBois’
amazing collaborations between edit and product. We are just
scratching the surface of possible formats for social and mobile
content and there is so much more to do.

3) Video

This month, we open our social video studio in our new 12,000 sq ft
LA Bureau and an additional 5,600 sq ft black box production facility.
Before having a dedicated space and in less than a year (!), Ze Frank
has recruited a talented team of video producers who have created 570
videos, with over a hundred videos passing 1 million views each, 350
million total views, and 2 million YouTube subscribers. The prime time
for viewing our video is the same as primetime TV – people are
watching our videos on their mobile devices instead of TV or in
addition to TV to get through the commercials and boring plot lines.
Consumer behaviors are changing rapidly and the rise of social and
mobile is just starting to disrupt the way video content is consumed.
Ze is building the TV studio and movie studio of the future but that
doesn’t mean he will make TV shows or movies. Social, mobile video
will be different, and we are in a great position to help invent new
video formats that match new patterns of media consumption. There
seems little doubt that the future “TV network” will be social web
video that is viewed and spread on mobile.

4) Mobile

In August we had 100 million mobile visits to BuzzFeed’s site and
apps. But much of our success here has been based on luck, not skill.
We are fortunate we don’t have slideshows, banner ads, a complicated
site design, or other features that don’t work well in mobile. We are
lucky that 100% of our advertising is social content marketing that
works even better in mobile. And we are lucky that our audience is
young and embraced mobile content sooner than the general public. But
luck only takes you so far. We need to get good and then we need to be
great. We will be investing heavily in mobile technology in the coming
years with many new developments on the very near horizon. Stay tuned.

5) International

It is an outrage that there are countries and languages where people
don’t get to enjoy BuzzFeed! We are going to work to change that, but
our plan is to internationalize like a tech company, not a media
company. We won’t launch different sites in different markets, or the
equivalent of “local newspapers” in every market. We will have one big
global site that will dynamically change to meet the needs of
different countries and languages. The social web is global; Facebook,
Twitter, and other platforms have strong market share across the
world; memes and viral content jump geographies and languages, and
there is a big opening for a global social content company. We already
have offices in New York, California, London, and soon Australia, with
correspondents to cover world news starting soon in Eastern Europe,
Turkey, Cairo, and more. Web culture is global, youth culture is
global, news is global, and this provides a clear path for BuzzFeed to
globalize as well. This is also a great career opportunity for any
BuzzFeeders who are bi-cultural or bi-lingual who want to get more
involved in this effort!

6) Business

Part of our strategy is being a great business. This sounds strange as
a strategic goal, isn’t that obvious? But we are in a market where
many traditional publishers are run at a loss by wealthy families and
many high profile venture-backed startups generate no or little
revenue. Surprisingly it is contrarian that we are running BuzzFeed as
a profitable business. Jon’s incredible success turning BuzzFeed into
a great business in just three years has been the reason why we’ve
been able to hire so many other talented new people. So don’t forget
to thank Jon for your job if you joined BuzzFeed within the last 3
years. 😉

7) Advertising

Part of being a great business, is being a “must buy” for advertisers
who have many options. This means giving advertisers the full
advantage of our scale, our data, our creative team, our social and
mobile reach, and our technology platform. As we do bigger
partnerships, it is clear that we can offer brands programs that
nobody else can match. The majority of our readers are 18-34 year olds
who are educated, active online, and culturally aware. We have more
expertise about social content than any other company. We can light up
the social web for an advertiser across Facebook, Twitter, and
YouTube, with content that is worth clicking and sharing. And thanks
to the amazing efforts of Andy and our talented sales team, we have
worked with 50 of the top 100 brands (you should also thank Andy for
your job!). In the coming years we will expand BuzzFeed University to
train brands and agencies in the “BuzzFeed way”, we will launch a
branded video studio in LA to compliment our creative team in NYC, we
will grow our partnerships with Facebook and Twitter to expand buys
beyond BuzzFeed, and we will develop our social homepages product to
power social advertising across the web. We have the ability to solve
our clients biggest challenges with a unique combination of
technology, content, scale, and expertise.

8) Team

I am so grateful to work with such a talented group of people at
BuzzFeed, to learn so much from my colleagues each day, and to see so
many people across the organization who are willing to take
initiative, experiment with ideas, and make decisions. We have been
able to grow quickly without major organizational breakdowns by
attracting great people and trusting them to do great work. The best
work comes from small groups of smart people with considerable
autonomy and the ability to collaborate freely with others when it
makes sense. This is why we continually reorganize our internal
structure, why we breakup teams that grow too large into smaller
groups, and why the person you report to this year might not be the
person you report to next year. This is why the talented UK team has
the independence to grow something great in London, why Ze Frank runs
BuzzFeed Video like a sister startup in LA, and why the creative team
and edit team keeps dividing and multiplying into “color groups.”
Nothing is more powerful than small groups of talented people with the
freedom to do their best work. This is the key to our future.

9) Focus

In addition to these big growth areas, we will continue to invest in
the core BuzzFeed platform, following the vertically integrated,
reader-first strategy outlined in the memo I sent last year ->
http://bit.ly/Qza53Q. And we will continue to launch small
experimental projects, such as fre.sh, star.me, and other labs
projects that don’t distract from the core and have the potential to
be much bigger in the medium term future. But there are many exciting,
tempting, glamorous, lucrative opportunities that we will NOT do in
the coming year and as more of these opportunities present themselves
it will take discipline to stay on track. We will NOT launch a
BuzzFeed TV show, radio station, cable network, or movie franchise –
we’ll leave that to the legacy media and Hollywood studios. We will
NOT launch a white labeled version of BuzzFeed to power other sites or
a BuzzFeed social network – we’ll leave that to pure tech companies in
Silicon Valley. We will NOT launch a print edition or a paywall or a
paid conference business – we’ll leave that to other publications. We
have a great business model that has a bright future as social and
mobile continue to become the dominate form of media consumption. We
will stay away from anything that requires adopting a legacy business
model, even a lucrative one like cable syndication fees or prime time
television ads. What seems like a lucrative opportunity today is often
a distraction from building something much more exciting tomorrow. We
need to stay patient and focused.

And that’s our plan for the coming year! We are building the defining
news and entertainment company for the social, mobile age. It won’t be
easy. We need to be ambitious but stay humble, we need to work hard
and have fun. We need to learn from the smart critics, ignore the dumb
haters, and maintain our sense of humor. We need to keep
experimenting, not get risk averse, and focus on the long term. There
will be ups and downs along the way. But there is no reason we can’t
succeed. We are already on our way.

Thank you all for doing such inspiring work and congratulations on an
amazing August.

I’m really looking forward to the coming year!

-Jonah

Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images