This post originally appeared in Business Insider.
By Jillian D’Onfro
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti just sent a memo to his employees about the company’s growth and its plans for the coming year, and it was loaded with some pretty impressive numbers. August was apparently a big month for BuzzFeed, with record traffic of 85 million unique visitors. For contrast, Twitter gets about 91 million U.S. users per month and Amazon gets 77 million U.S. users, according to Quantcast. Based on U.S. users alone, BuzzFeed has ~41 million users, bigger than Craigslist or AOL.
The company saw a record profit as well (no numbers disclosed, but Peretti says that the company went from “zero revenue four years ago to a profitable company with over 300 employees”). The site has grown three times bigger than it was one year ago, eight times bigger than two years ago, and has served more web pages in 2013 than in the previous five years combined. Peretti’s prediction: “By this time next year we should be one of the biggest sites on the web.”
Other striking numbers: BuzzFeed’s YouTube channel has 2 million subscribers and 50 million monthly views, and the company will more than double its content advertising programs this year (from 265 programs last year to 600-700). Peretti also outlined BuzzFeed’s plan for the coming year, which includes expanding breaking news coverage and devising new video formats, but emphasized the need for patience and focus: “What seems like a lucrative opportunity today is often a distraction from building something much more exciting tomorrow.”
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