Jonah Peretti

Founder & CEO, BuzzFeed · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutive@peretti ↗buzzfeed.com/jonah ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

Jonah Peretti co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005 alongside Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer. He subsequently founded BuzzFeed in 2006 to pioneer viral digital media and algorithmic social sharing.

14statements → 3claims → 0claims resolved → 4.07/5average certainty → 2.14/5average debate potential → 8said about them ↓

3 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 2 opinions · 7 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Jonah argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

257 words/min while actually speaking · 22.6 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Jonah Peretti: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,896 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said14 What others said8 Episodes2

Everything Jonah Peretti said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Peretti: Ad tech intermediaries skim money without creating value for consumers

“There's a huge number of intermediaries who are skimming money in the ad tech space, and oftentimes the main value they're providing to an advertiser is, is surveilling and tracking users where, where if users had the choice to say, do I want to be tracked thi…”

Jonah Peretti Dec 19, 2019 ▶ 36:56 What's Next for the Internet?

Disclosure

Peretti: BuzzFeed is profitable while funding investigative journalism and foreign correspondents

“And that's why we've been able to grow so quickly generate profits and in, while simultaneously investing in foreign correspondence and investigative news team and other things that people thought weren't possible for internet companies to invest in.”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:18 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Insight

Peretti: Portable cheap computers disrupt markets, not fancier phones

“And a fancier phone with bells and whistles isn't disruptive, but a cheap computer that you can take with you everywhere is disruptive.”

Jonah Peretti Dec 19, 2019 ▶ 4:59 What's Next for the Internet?

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Peretti: Pinterest drives twice as much BuzzFeed traffic as Twitter

“Pinterest sends double the traffic to BuzzFeed as Twitter.”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:52 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Opinion

Peretti: Paywalls fundamentally conflict with the public interest role of journalism

“The paywall model is unfortunate when you think about news being in the public interest. Where, you know, every time there's really serious news, the news, they have to take the paywall down, you know”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:57 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Insight

Peretti: Social platforms have a blind spot regarding cross-network content sharing

“One of the things that's, there's kind of blind spot for social networks, which is that they have huge amounts of data. They have huge number of logged in users, but they're only seen sharing within their network. And what ends up happening is sharing within t…”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:19 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Insight

Peretti: Multi-platform sharing provides a stronger quality signal than single-network reach

“If someone is sharing it across three or four, you actually realize, okay, this is something that people like in different contexts. It's a stronger quality signal, so it allows us to make better content”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:23 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Peretti: Early HuffPost pioneered real-time headline rewriting using click data

“So, like early HuffPost, we just did something super simple, which was you had a click meter on every headline, and we could just see which headlines were people clicking and which ones weren't clicking. If there was an important story and no one was clicking …”

Jonah Peretti Dec 19, 2019 ▶ 6:15 What's Next for the Internet?

Disclosure

Peretti: BuzzFeed drives $500 million in direct commerce gross merchandise value

“One trend we've seen at Buzzfeed. If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would never have guessed the transformation that's happened in our business from advertising revenue being essentially the only kind of revenue to now having so many of our, so much…”

Jonah Peretti Dec 19, 2019 ▶ 37:47 What's Next for the Internet?

Insight

Peretti: Content sharing is the most important metric for BuzzFeed

“Sharing has always been the biggest metric because it shows someone thinks that a piece of content is worth passing on to a friend.”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:39 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Insight

Peretti: Optimizing for clickbait headlines causes long-term brand damage

“You can use data to get people to click a headline, but then not deliver on the story, and that actually has a long-term negative effect”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:43 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Insight

Peretti: Data science, mobile ads, and scale create media defensibility

“Having a site that runs quickly, having an advertising model that works on mobile having a good data science team that can give you better insights in terms of what people are sharing and what people are engaging with. Certain network properties, once you have…”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:43 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Insight

Peretti: 100x internet reach compensates for lower per-user monetization rates

“So, so they're not the same, and also it's possible to reach more people than ever before, and so even if they didn't, if, even if things were monetized at a lower rate, the fact that you're able to reach a hundred X more people means that you can build a real…”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:44 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Peretti: BuzzFeed hit 400M monthly video views with half on mobile

“We did four hundred million video views last month, and about half is mobile.”

Jonah Peretti Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:52 a16z Podcast | For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

The other half of the tape: Jonah Peretti's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 3 episodes on the a16z Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Connie Chan 4 Michael Copeland 2 Marc Andreessen 1