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May 27, 2014, 10:31 a.m.
Audience & Social
LINK: qz.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Caroline O'Donovan   |   May 27, 2014

BuzzFeed announced to partners that they’ll be turning away from their traffic partner network, powered through the site fre.sh but largely driven through headline modules on BuzzFeed itself. Quartz’s John McDuling explains what its value was to publishers and to BuzzFeed — traffic and data, respectively:

About 200 websites (including, briefly, Quartz) signed up to get traffic from BuzzFeed through its fre.sh website and headline modules on BuzzFeed itself, a program which has been active for about five years. The New Statesman had a good explanation for how the website worked. BuzzFeed would link to the websites of publishers that signed up, in exchange for being able to track information about traffic from those publishers. “BuzzFeed now knows how many of its readers also click around the Daily Mail, and how many of them get their ‘real’ news from the Guardian. All that data pays back back to the site’s native advertising model,” the Statesman wrote.

Though Quartz was a participant, it seems that the loss won’t hit them very hard:

BuzzFeed will now be “shifting the structure of the partner network to a select group of new partners, solely focused around video.”

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The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”