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Comment by masmullin | Hacker News Reader

> Last week Buzzfeed reported on an entire cottage industry of web users in Macedonia generating fake news stories related to Trump vs Clinton in order to inject them into Facebook’s Newsfeed as a way to drive viral views and generate ad revenue from lucrative US eyeballs.

Does anyone else find this incredibly ironic? Buzzfeed ratting out others doing clickbait?

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Buzzfeed lately has been trying to 'outgrow' their reputation as clickbait, and actually do traditional investigative reporting. With moderate success.

I agree with you though, it's hard to take them seriously.

"Actual journalism" Buzzfeed articles are of surprisingly great quality. They fund that quality through clickbait, which is their primary monetization strategy if I recall correctly.

It does make the right hand difficult to believe when the left hand is off being silly - but I'm actually impressed by the level of works produced by their journalism department.

Their monetezation strategy is advertorial content posts.

People are so used to clickbait as a way to get impressions and clicks from display ads that many don't realize there isn't a single 'traditional' display ad on BuzzFeed's entire site.

They make their money by charging for references to 'advertisers' products and services throughout BuzzFeed content - something they do really well.

Doesn't come cheap either - big cash outlays iirc.

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