The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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.”
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.”
Peretti: Pinterest drives twice as much BuzzFeed traffic as Twitter
“Pinterest sends double the traffic to BuzzFeed as Twitter.”
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”
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…”
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”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
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”
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…”
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…”