BuzzFeed launches its own 'public chat' channel in messaging app Viber

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/16/buzzfeed-public-chat-messaging-app-viber

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Online news site BuzzFeed’s initial growth may have been fuelled by social networks Facebook and Twitter, but its next frontier is likely to be messaging apps like its latest partner, Viber.

BuzzFeed has launched a “public chat” channel within the app, which is owned by Japanese internet giant Rakuten, and which has more than 209 million monthly active users.

BuzzFeed’s journalists will post links to stories within the channel and chip in to the discussion around them.

It’s part of the public chats feature that Viber launched in November 2014, initially focusing on celebrities including musicians Pixie Lott and Paul van Dyk, YouTuber Tyler Oakley and gossip blogger Perez Hilton.

“We’re always looking for new channels to expand our reach and public chats is a great opportunity to give Viber’s worldwide audience a way to discover and engage with BuzzFeed’s latest news, lifestyle, and entertainment content,” said BuzzFeed’s product lead for growth and data, Ben Ronne.

Viber is not the first such partnership for BuzzFeed. In October 2014, it inked a deal with Chinese messaging app WeChat, inviting its 400 million-plus users to follow BuzzFeed’s account to be sent “one or two of the most viral things on the web” each day.

WeChat and Viber may soon be joined by another high-profile messaging app as a partner for BuzzFeed. In November, it was named as one of the media companies in talks with photo and video messaging app Snapchat about serving stories to a new section of its app called Discover.

CNN, MailOnline, ESPN, Comedy Central, Cosmopolitan, Spotify, Vevo, National Geographic, Vice and People magazine were the other media brands and digital services linked to the talks at that time.

Those rumours and BuzzFeed’s confirmed deal with Viber reflect the desire of messaging apps to become media distribution platforms in their own right, as well as the interest of media companies in using those apps to reach a young, hyper-engaged audience.

“Messaging is the new social media,” claimed Union Square Ventures’ partner Fred Wilson in a blog post looking back at technology trends in 2014, posted at the end of that year. “Families use WhatsApp groups instead of Facebook. Kids use Snapchat instead of Instagram.”

It is thus no surprise to see companies like BuzzFeed that initially built large audiences through Facebook sharing looking for new partnerships with messaging apps.

BuzzFeed has also been ramping up its efforts on YouTube, with its main BuzzFeed Videos channel ending 2014 with more than 4.2 million subscribers, and 1.3bn video views in that year alone.

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