Social Publishing FTW: With 40M Users, Jonah Peretti?s BuzzFeed Raises Another $19.3M Led By NEA

BuzzFeed, the online social publishing powerhouse with 40 million readers started and headed by Jonah Peretti, today announced that it has raised another $19.3 million to continue building out its empire. The Series D round was led by new investor NEA with existing investors RRE, Hearst, SoftBank, and Lerer Ventures also participating, as well as new investors Michael and Kass Lazerow — the founders of a social empire of another sort, Buddy Media. The funding takes the total raised by BuzzFeed to $46.3 million. Some believe that we are entering a period in which the big social media companies out there — up to now focused on scale — are going to start to have to think about making money. CEO Peretti, who had also been one of the masterminds behind Huffington Post (now part of AOL, also owner of TechCrunch), says the funding will be used to accelerate building the “next great media company.” ?We have the senior management, board, and investors we need to build the next great media company: socially native, tech enabled, with massive scale. We are all focused on that big goal and raised this capital to move even faster,? he said in a statement. While businesses like Tumblr have advanced the blogging model with a super-simple platform for people to publish and consume snackable pieces of content, BuzzFeed has adopted that model to a bigger journalistic effort: viral image galleries, lists and other kinds of charticles pull in traffic for the ad-based site, and that helps finance more serious, often excellent, long-form features and investigations. It’s a balancing act, a little like this: Another interesting Tumblr comparison: BuzzFeed eschews traditional display advertising. In its case, the way it gets around this is to work with brands who buy sponsorships of posts that align with their wider marketing campaigns. Last year BuzzFeed acquired Kingfish Labs to help buy social ads on sites like Facebook to pull in initial readers to these sponsored posts who then share them with friends. That drives unpaid views to BuzzFeed’s sponsored posts, earning it a margin on top of its own ad spend. It doesn’t reveal what its current annual revenue is, but notes that revenues grew “more than threefold in 2012, exclusively from content-driven, social advertising.” BuzzFeed says that one-third of all of its traffic already comes from mobile devices, but as I pointed out yesterday, mobile is also

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/YTiCf66_7_4/

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