Celebrity political blogging failed and drove Peretti to build BuzzFeed

Evidence

Arianna Huffington, partnering with AOL veteran Kenneth Lerer and internet provocateur Jonah Peretti, tested this idea in May 2005 with The Huffington Post, a site she conceived as a liberal counterweight to the Drudge Report. Huffington’s site aggregated news articles and hosted blogs from celebrities like John Cusack. Yet the public wasn’t clamoring for political essays from Hollywood stars. Early struggles led Peretti to build out a separate site called BuzzFeed, where he tested his theories about virality. The site pioneered low-stakes content that appealed to younger audiences. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 195

Categorization

• XREF: Direct origin story for BuzzFeed and Peretti’s virality theories — the mechanism that ultimately collapses distribution toward the omnivore monoculture.
• SEED: Angle: BuzzFeed’s birth from Huffington Post’s failure as the pivot from ‘celebrities confer taste’ toward ‘low-stakes mass content’ — the moment the old tastemaker model was abandoned for distribution-first content.