BuzzFeed is a news and entertainment website that mixes original reporting, user-generated work, and aggregation. The site is driven by social media as a source for finding what material is likely to become popular, and finding the best online channels on which to distribute it.

BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of the Huffington Post. Originally the site was designed to seek out the links people shared with one another on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other networks, and most often these items appear in lists containing videos, animated GIFs, or static images in a format meant to encourage sharing. As of 2014, it was the second-most-shared publisher on Facebook and one of the top 10 most visited news and information sites in the U.S. as of 2014. In mid-2014, it had 120 million monthly unique visitors, with about 75% of that traffic coming from social media and half from mobile devices.

By January 2013 the site announced it had reached more than 40 million monthly unique users and had raised an additional $19.3 million in funding. Disney reportedly attempted to buy BuzzFeed in 2014, and later that year, the site took a $50 million investment from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at a reported $850 million.

In 2011, BuzzFeed shifted direction with the hiring of Ben Smith as the site’s first editor-in-chief. The former Politico reporter was tasked with building out a news operation, hiring reporters, and building sections. The idea, as Smith wrote at the time, was turn build BuzzFeed into “the first true social news organization.”

Shortly after Smith’s hire BuzzFeed raised $15.5 million and began hiring new reporters from places like Gizmodo, Rolling Stone, Popular Mechanics, and The Village Voice among others. Technology and politics were the first news sections to be launched in 2012. While Smith led the reporting in the politics section, with the presidential election BuzzFeed began adding more staff to cover the race, including Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings to cover the Obama campaign. BuzzFeed eventually opened up a Washington, D.C. bureau in the summer of 2012. It also opened an investigative unit and launched BuzzFeed World in 2013, hiring several Middle East-based foreign correspondents and an Australian editor that year. The following year, it announced plans to open a bureau in Berlin and eventually in Tokyo, Mexico City, and Mumbai. The site began gaining attention as a home of serious journalism as well as fluffier viral content.

Upon its investment from Andreessen Horowitz in 2014, BuzzFeed announced a major expansion that included new content units, an in-house technology incubator, and increased funding for its film division, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. With the expansion, it split its main editorial operation into BuzzFeed News, a lifestyle division called BuzzFeed Life, and an experimental social media-oriented division called Buzz.

By 2013, it reported that it was profitable and had a staff of more than 300.