Facebook Video & Snapchat Drive Nearly Half Of BuzzFeed’s Views

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BuzzFeed is known as a company pushing the envelope on pushing content well beyond its website. A leader in serving audiences wherever they are, BuzzFeed recently shared stats that illustrate just how well that effort is going.

The numbers, presented by CEO Jonah Peretti during a Recode podcast, turn traditional Web publishing on its head. As a “fully integrated social platform,” BuzzFeed draws more than 75 percent of content views from sources other than its website and apps. Nearly 50 percent comes from Snapchat and native video on Facebook alone.

Here’s the tale of the traffic from Peretti (reordered by rank):

• 27 percent: Facebook native video
• 23 percent: Direct to the site or apps
• 21 percent: Snapchat content views
• 14 percent: YouTube views
• 6 percent: Facebook traffic to the site
• 4 percent: Images on Facebook
• 3 percent: Other distributed platforms
• 2 percent: Google search to the site

Of course, views on each of those sites are not the same, and BuzzFeed’s Ashley McCollum added context in Recode: “The percentage of  ‘total content views’ means it’s an equalized view across Buzzfeed.com pageviews, Instagram, Vines, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and other platforms, etc. etc.”

That Snapchat ranks so high — nearly matching direct traffic — is especially interesting. BuzzFeed declined to tell us the split between views from the regular brand account and BuzzFeed’s channel on Discover, Snapchat’s feature that allows a select group of media partners to post native content on the app. BuzzFeed has only been on Discover since late July, so it is apparently showing spectacular growth.