Huffington Post’s celebrity-blog strategy failed and spawned 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: BuzzFeed as the origin of low-stakes virality directly feeds the ‘collapse of subcultural difference’ thesis — the reader can trace it into the omnivore monoculture mechanism. — connects to: The Huffington Post launched in 2005 using celebrity bloggers as attention bait. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 952