Jonah Peretti
Founder & CEO, BuzzFeed. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
2shows
4appearances
39statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
12said about them ↓ Everything Jonah Peretti said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Peretti: BuzzFeed made the right call publishing the Trump-Russia dossier
“I definitely think it was the right decision, and the reason we published it was because you had everyone in the senior levels of government and media talking about this document and referring to the document even in public communications.”
Peretti plans to resolve BuzzFeed's going-concern accounting notice
“So our plan and management's plan is to resolve that going concern. And really going, going back to founder mode of saying, hey we got to reinvent the company for this near future, and wanting investors to know there's risk to that, but also now we're getting …”
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: Publisher content no longer goes viral across a fragmented social web
“The biggest difference is that content from publishers used to go viral on Facebook all the time, and everyone used to be on Facebook. Now, now the social web is really fragmented. Some people are on Facebook, some on Instagram, some on TikTok, so, you know, s…”
Peretti: Physical events will grow as AI makes software infinite
“I think that you can embrace AI and use it in products, but you also can counter program AI, which is people are sick of just digital experiences and want to connect with other people in the real world. And it's also scarce. You know, if all of a sudden softwa…”
Peretti: BuzzFeed should not have done debt-laden SPAC deal to go public
“There's a million tactical things that if I had a time machine, I could, you know, like not, not do a SPAC acquisition where we take on a bunch of debt you know, before and go public without raising capital. That was, that I would tell my younger self not to d…”
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: Silicon Valley Tech Companies Are Monocultures Shunning Content Creators
“If you look at all the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, they're monocultures of engineers and business people. They don't really hire people who make and create content.”
Peretti: Why he rejected Disney's 2013 buyout offer for BuzzFeed
“I think that part of it is a gut thing or an emotional thing where you just didn't feel ready. I felt like there was a lot more we had to build. At the time we were really a website and our video business had just started. It was growing so much. And I knew th…”
Peretti: Long-term building requires a high valuation and large investment capital
“The valuation is set through investment, and the fact that people have invested in us has given us resources To build big things in the future, and to not think day to day, like, how are we doing this quarter, or how are we doing, you know, this week, and thin…”
Peretti: Viral consumer businesses often peak in their first year
“There's a weird dynamic of this kind of super connected viral internet, which is that oftentimes people have their best year of sales the first year because it's, there's novelty, and it goes viral, and then it's like, you know, how, what do you do the second …”
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…”
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.”
Peretti: Great content and teaching adapt in real time to audience feedback
“I think if you think about content from a, from at the time, print and broadcast, you think about making something that you push out to this giant audience, but if you're in a classroom teaching, you know, 25 kids that are in front of you real, you start, you …”
The other half of the tape: Jonah Peretti's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 11 times in 6 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 4Connie Chan 4Michael Copeland 2Marc Andreessen 1
Statements about Jonah Peretti, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 7
How I Built This 4
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 4 mentions in 1 episode
2017 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jonah's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & CEO, BuzzFeed | 2 | 25 | 100% 4/4 | full record on How I Built This → |
| a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, BuzzFeed | 2 | 14 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |