With over 5 bil­lion views and 80 mil­lion web­site vis­i­tors each month Buz­zfeed has become the news orga­ni­za­tion to beat.  How­ev­er over 75% of those views are due to con­tent being pub­lished on oth­er than Buz­zfeed properties.

Buz­zfeed, known for its non-tra­di­tion­al approach to news with arti­cles like “These Are The 11 Most WTF Things Trump Actu­al­ly Said In A Wall Street Jour­nal Inter­view” was found­ed in Novem­ber 2006 by Jon­ah Peretti, John S. John­son III. and Ken­neth Lerer, co-founder and chair­man of The Huff­in­g­ton Post. With over 18 offices and 1,300 employ­ees Buz­zfeed has become a news orga­ni­za­tion that is chang­ing the way we see news.

The biggest prob­lem The New York Times faces is the lega­cy of being a print news­pa­per.  The ques­tion is does that expe­ri­ence and exper­tise put them ahead of all the new “news” busi­ness­es or behind.  The New York Times web­site sees 78 unique vis­i­tors per month and their video views are not known, although they are uti­liz­ing more and more video on their website.

As for syn­di­ca­tion Buz­zfeed has the New York Times beat with 75% of their con­tent being viewed else­where.  Again is it bet­ter to build the views on your own prop­er­ties or is it more impor­tant to max­i­mize traf­fic today at all costs?

But some say you can­not com­pare Buz­zfeed to The New York Times.

Accord­ing to Jay Yarrow in a Tweet…”Buz­zFeed is a dif­fer­ent busi­ness than NYT! Stop mak­ing this com­par­i­son, unless you think NYT should spin up an enter­tain­ment business.”

This is large­ly owing to the fact that Buz­zFeed Enter­tain­ment is com­par­a­tive­ly video-rich, which means the lighter side of the Buz­zfeed busi­ness can reap the ben­e­fits of high­er adver­tis­ing rates and increased dis­tri­b­u­tion on social media.

While oth­ers think the com­par­i­son is rea­son­able giv­en that most news orga­ni­za­tions are now increas­ing their focus to include lots of video.  Buz­zfeed built their busi­ness on video and the oth­er news orga­ni­za­tions are play­ing catch up by invest­ing heav­i­ly in pro­duc­tion of video con­tent. High­er CPMs and a ready audi­ence are dri­ving demand for video, which is being met by gen­er­al­ly text-cen­tric out­lets like The Wash­ing­ton Post, Vox and The Times.

In a world where tra­di­tion­al divi­sions between media com­pa­nies are dis­ap­pear­ing, per­haps valu­ing Buz­zFeed along­side The New York Times isn’t out­ra­geous as it sounds.

Ger­ry Smith @gerrysmith said this in an Octo­ber 2016 Tweet:

Buz­zFeed is now worth $1.7B
How that com­pares in publishing:
Vice $4B
NYT $1.8B
Time $1.4B
Gan­nett $1.2B
Vox $1B

How do Buz­zfeed and The New York Times rate on Glassdoor:

At Buz­zfeed 62% would rec­om­mend work­ing there to a friend and 82% approve of the CEO.  At The New York Times 66% would rec­om­mend work­ing there to a friend and 73% approve of the CEO.   Not too different.

What is it like to work at Buz­zfeed and The New York Times:

Buz­zfeed comments:

• “Great work/life bal­ance — they threw togeth­er a car­ni­val for us this summer” 
• “Free lunch 2 days a week, free break­fast one day a week” 
• “Good ben­e­fits and great work environment” 
• “Good med­ical, den­tal, vision, retire­ment, free food” 
• “Nice office, employ­ee perks can be good some­times, and pro­duce some cool content” 

Cons

• “Very bad/useless man­agers who won’t hes­i­tate to throw you under the bus due to their poor management” 
• “Still going through some grow­ing pains” 
• “Mid­dle-man­age­ment is offen­sive­ly underqualified” 
• “Low pay with no chance of rais­es or promotion” 
• “Don’t know how com­pet­i­tive the full time pay would be” 

The New York Times comments:

Pros:

• “Great work life bal­ance, I only work more than 40 hours a week when I’m so excit­ed about what I’m doing that I can’t help myself” 
• “Work with real­ly smart peo­ple who are pas­sion­ate about journalism” 
• “Great peo­ple who helped me learn a lot” 
• “Great brand with a long future ahead” 
• “Great place for begin­ners to have a look at the jour­nal­ism world” 

Cons

• “Absolute­ly no work life bal­ance, Senior man­age­ment will slow­ly make you put in longer hours at work” 
• “Soft­ware devel­op­ers don’t have much role in prod­uct deci­sion making” 
• “Com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment, long hours” 
• “Could use some more resources on career development” 
• “Man­age­ment will not care about your con­cerns because no one wants to deal with drama”

Check out the cur­rent jobs at Buz­zfeed below