Buzzfeed's "thing" is lists. Lots and lots of lists. "We're obsessed by them," Peretti confesses, smiling. "If we take the same point and make it not a list, people don't like it as much."
Not that lists are anything new: witness the Ten Commandments (or, as The New Yorker would have it, "10 Judeo-Christian Moral Injunctions You Need in Your Life Right Now"). But Buzzfeed has taken list-writing to the next level, turning the genre into an art form. But be warned: they're addictive, which explains the hours I lost sidetracked while, ahem, researching Peretti.
Crucially, lists are easy to read on your phone, or "MO-bil" in Peretti-speak. And mobiles account for 50 per cent of Buzzfeed's traffic, which, as he told a packed conference room just before we met, means "content can't spread if it's not viewable on mobile". And "content spreading" is what Buzzfeed is all about: a whopping three-quarters of people clicking on one of its stories did so because one of their virtual friends shared a link on a social network. This has all sorts of implications for the future of media, which Peretti, a quintessential nerd genius, has been quick to exploit.
And a list of buzzfeed lists...
* The 29 Stages of a Twitterstorm
* 13 Simple Steps to Get You Through a Rough Day
* 12 Reasons to Consider a Robot for Your Next Life Partner
* The 30 Most Important Cats of 2012
* The 21 Absolute Worst Things in the World
