Summary: Where can you find GIFs of Anderson Cooper getting blasted in the face with a leaf blower and videos of beagles doing the cha cha cha next to news about the Obama administration's new cabinet or immigration reform? Buzzfeed of course. And the man behind it all is Jonah Perreti. Perreti, a former schoolteacher, first became fascinated with media hacking and experimentation at MIT media lab, where he created such memorable experiments such as his letters to Nike and Blackpeopleloveus.com. He soon took what he learned in the lab and applied it, helping to create The Huffington Post. It was in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, at a time when the Drudge Report gave the right a huge advantage in terms of swaying opinions and setting the agenda for the political conversation in America, but soon Huffpo, with its celebrity bloggers and catchy headlines, became an important and influential answer to Drudge and was expanding into other topics such as celebrity gossip, technology and more. As Huffpo grew, Perreti, ever the experimenter, knew he wanted to continue to his media hacking ways, so soon he set up his own personal media lab in Buzzfeed. Before long, Buzzfeed's focus on viral content, memes and other stuff for the bored-at-work crowd translated into fast growth, and Peretti was a man with two jobs. He eventually left Huffpo to run Buzzfeed full time, and today Buzzfeed has over 40 million monthly unique visitors, making it one of the highest traffic sites on the web. In this NextMarket podcast, Jonah and I talk about his journey from MIT to Buzzfeed, the state of the current media landscape, emerging media business models, the state of political media and what's next for Buzzfeed. Enjoy. If you like this podcast, please subscribe using one of the following channels: iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/nextmarket/id579455690 RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/soundcloud/JEcj or Stitcher: http://app.stitcher.com/browse/feed/32010/episodes
