The Hot New Viral Trend Is People Who Left Buzzfeed Bashing The Company In 'Why I Left Buzzfeed' YouTube Videos

Variety – A rash of “Why I Left BuzzFeed” YouTube videos by ex-employees explaining why they quit has swept across YouTube over the past several months. The recurring themes: The creators say they wanted more creative control and ownership of their work; they chafed a BuzzFeed’s policies prohibiting outside projects; and some simply feel burned out from the pressure of churning out a high volume of hits.

Several of the confessional videos from the twentysomething ex-BuzzFeeders have garnered millions of views, reflecting an interest in (or schadenfreude about) the inner workings of the internet media company’s content factory.

The friction between BuzzFeed and its video employees has come to a head in the past year: The company has fired employees for working on non-BuzzFeed projects. Last June, writer-producer-actor Jenny Lorenzo and Brittany Ashley (who worked on BuzzFeed’s popular series “You Do You” and wrote the script for the first season) were let go for allegedly violating their exclusive contracts with BuzzFeed after they appeared in a web series produced by America Ferrara. Sources familiar with BuzzFeed say it’s re-evaluating the terms of how it works with creators in such situations in the future.

Here are some more of the other “Why I Left Buzzfeed” videos that all have over 2M views:

So it seems like there’s a bit of well-produced discontent there amongst some of the staff. And while everyone who works online has hated Buzzfeed at some point for a wide variety of reasons (mine? I obviously don’t care about the type of content they do but at my old job they regularly stole shit I or my staff wrote, one time outright plagiarized with no credit. So they can mostly go screw), I still generally feel like Big Cat felt when tweeting about the ESPN layoffs yesterday. Namely that it sucks when people get fired, it sucks when people are unhappy or unsatisfied at their jobs, and you never wanna gloat about that because it could always be you someday.

But the amusing thing to me is how Buzzfeed basically trained these people to do the very thing that’s blowing up in their face now. Every production trick, titling optimization, hint of what makes something go viral, they know all that special sauce after working in the coal mines for however many years, being beaten down into soulless masses of accumulated video views and shares. And people are absolutely eating it up. I think to a lot of regular folks, Buzzfeed is this mysterious figure who has the internet totally figured out, every way to make things go viral and every psychological trick to manipulate people to get a desired result. They’re ubiquitous in the same way a company in a futuristic movie who owns everything and controls all the media might be.

Advertisement

And people reading and watching things online are all about voyeurism, getting a peak behind the curtain, whether it’s leaked nudes or seeing a street fight you’d never see or text messages from a breakup. A lot of what you see online is based around that. So when you combine all those factors, you get a perfect storm of things about Buzzfeed, by Buzzfeed, blowing up Buzzfeed. They radicalized their own employees against them to give them a career on the way out. What an exciting time for media. I can’t wait to do the same some day with the many Barstool skills I’ve picked up like…uh…being called gay a lot? Not abiding by the rules of pizza rating systems? Blogging about sports? …Fuck.