Jonah Peretti’s path to leading one of the biggest digital media companies of our time, known as BuzzFeed, was all but ordinary.
He’s not a journalist, but his company has broken many huge news stories in recent years. He’s not a businessman, but he owns an extremely successful organization. He’s not a psychologist, but he seems to understand people’s online behavior better than most of his peers in the industry.
Peretti, a 43-year-old entrepreneur from California, has some really interesting attributes that make him, in my opinion, one of the most admirable media innovators of our time. He’s curious, he likes change and he’s not afraid to experiment or push the boundaries.
A little background on him will help you understand what I mean: Peretti has a degree in environmental sciences from the University of California. After he graduated in 1996, he taught computer science at a New Orleans high school and later left that job to study at the MIT Media Lab.
BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti. Photo by Vjeran Pavic for Recode.
While at MIT in early 2001, he became known for an email exchange with Nike, which went viral after he forwarded it to a few friends, who forwarded it to some of their friends and so on. The emails showed his unsuccessful attempts to order a pair of Nike shoes with the word “sweatshop” printed on them. The viral messages landed him an interview on the Today Show. It was a turning point in his career, one that led to several other experimental projects he developed to test what would go viral.
He was told by several people he could not replicate the success of the viral Nike emails, but he was determined to try it again and he succeeded. With each project, the timeline to spread got shorter, from months to weeks to days.
It became clear at that point that Peretti was obsessed with a question many in the media failed to ask for years and years. He wanted to find out what it meant that the audience became the distribution system and how the media should handle that change.
In a July interview with Guy Raz for NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast, Peretti said he wanted to figure out why people shared things, what value they got from doing so, what kind of content caught their attention and — the million-dollar question — what would happen to the media and entertainment industry if the distribution of content was dictated by users sharing things with each other.
“The audience became the network,” he told Raz. “I felt like that was a big shift… What does it mean that a student can reach millions of people without a gatekeeper blessing it?”
Peretti was asking the right questions at the right time.
In 2005, he co-founded The Huffington Post, where he tried to figure out how to make the publication popular on the internet. We surely know how well that went. In a 2014 interview on Medium, he described his HuffPost work as a constant evolution amid ever-changing business strategies.
“HuffPost, like any other company, had to keep reinventing itself, and changing its model, and evolving, and building technology, and moving from linking out to other sites on the web to making more content,” Peretti said in the Medium interview.
In 2006, as more and more people were trying to create viral content online, Peretti started BuzzFeed as a side project — a lab where he could experiment with and track viral online content. Five years later, he joined BuzzFeed full-time after AOL bought the HuffPost. BuzzFeed — which started as a collection of listicles, memes and cat videos — has since turned into a media giant and it’s now worth at least $1.7 billion.
Peretti’s early understanding that the audience was changing the media industry was crucial to his success. But his vision wouldn’t be enough without a lot of hard work, curiosity and his willingness to experiment, take risks and constantly adapt.
“I like to be working in sectors where there’s no clear model to find yet, where things like social and mobile and online video or things that are still evolving so quickly that there’s not a clear, stable business there yet. I like to be in the kind of places where things are being formed,” Peretti told Medium.
To listen to Peretti’s interview on “How I Built This,” click here: