Let’s face it: Following the “Grow Fast” rule of richly funded tech companies, BuzzFeed dreamed big right from the outset. In its pursuit of television advertising dollars, it set up a 100-person studio in Los Angeles, mainly to produce video for brands, initially at a price tag of about $100k per campaign. At that price, the product had to be perfect. It means endless refinement and audience testing (the latter being crucially important in BF’s promise to max out social reverberation over more than 30 different platforms).

But despite its power and talent for producing video contents and mastering the “social lift”, BuzzFeed monetizes poorly.