"You're more likely to summit Mount Everest than click on a banner ad," he told a room full of delegates at Yas Viceroy, Abu Dhabi. Moments earlier he had posed a question to the room: "Has anybody been on the internet in the past 24 hours?" Naturally, every hand in the room shot up, before Perelman followed up with another question: "Can you remember the last banner ad you saw?"
No hands went up.
"Nobody comes to Buzzfeed to look at the ads, but they'll come for the content," said Peretti. "When the advertising is content – good content they're willing to click on and engage with, and share if it's good – that's the future for publishers."
But what about distributing that content? "Content is king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants," Perelman said in another pithy one-liner. "You have to create good content – you start with that as a base… but you have to understand how it's going to travel and spread in the social world."
