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Jonah Peretti Quotes

Total quotes: 11
“Preferential attachment is a node in a network that you connect to early and then it’s more connected so it’s more likely to attract other connections.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“You end up reaching people who are not satisfied with what they’re getting from you. Which isn’t good for a brand.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“I love metrics and I love thinking about optimization, but I think that the optimal state is being slightly suboptimal because as soon as you try to actually optimize, particularly for a single metric, you end up finding that the best way to optimize for that metric ends up perverting the metric and making the metric mean the opposite of what it used to mean.”
— Jonah, Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“There’s sometimes moments where networks are so amenable to spread. Duncan uses this forest-fire analogy, which is if there’s a forest where the underbrush is wet, the trees are far apart, there’s not many dead trees, you could take a flamethrower to it and it won’t burn. If the forest is dry and it’s been hot and the trees are close together, you can just drop a match and the whole thing will burn.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“When there’s a startup that sells, for example, or there’s a startup that’s super successful and is growing, people’s view of who drove the success is very highly correlated to who they know at the company. Chris Dixon will say, “Oh, HuffPost is really a tech company and Jonah was a big important part of it.” Because he knows me. But then someone who’s friends with Arianna will say, “Arianna’s a force of nature. She is constantly on TV. She was the name and the voice of the site. Her blog posts were constantly in the news cycle. That’s where the site mattered.” If you talk to someone who knows Kenny, they’re like, “Oh, Kenny was behind the scenes, building this whole thing and planning this out. He’s done it before, he’ll do it again.” That’s true, not just for HuffPost. It’s true with most companies. The thing you’re closest to, you think has the biggest impact. That, I think, is the cognitive bias that makes it hard for me to answer the question. The system as a whole matters so much. Any one of us who thinks that they’re solely responsible for the success of the company is, by definition, wrong, and the relationship between all the different pieces of the company has to be strong. In some cases, there’s things that aren’t even measurable. Like maybe just having tech, edit, and business teams communicating effectively, is more important. The lines might be more important than the dots.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“I think in general it’s like life is tricky because it happens once and there’s no opportunity for A/B testing. It could be that you are living your best possible life and that if you re-play Felix Salmon’s life hundreds of other times, that this life you’re living is the best or among the top 5 percent of lives that you would have lived, and in lots of other ones you’d end up in an alley or in an unhappy relationship or with a job where you’re not intellectually fulfilled, and that you have found this amazing path. It’s also possible that you’re not even in the top 50 percent of lives and that your life is really tragic and that despite all the wonderful and impressive and amazing things you’ve done, that you had the potential to do all these incredible other things that would have been either bigger in scale or more fulfilling or more modest and simple, but more pleasurable or whatever. That there were all these other paths that would be better. It’s, I think, hard to say whether there is something I missed that would have made things much better. In general, I’m pretty happy, and all these imagined alternate lives, I wouldn’t know how to even begin to speculate on how they’d compare.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“The default is always, and I saw this with all the good teachers, that it’s your fault, not the students’ fault. You should be able to figure out how to teach students something, and if there’s a student who has a learning disability, you should figure out how to route around it and explain it in another way. The worst teachers, in my view, were the teachers who said, 'Well, that kid’s just lazy' or 'This kid’s just stupid,' and they would only teach for the 80 percent of students who thought in a normal way.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“Around that time, at BuzzFeed we had figured out that you could rapidly swarm a breaking news topic, particularly about a person, place, or thing that was new, like a beauty queen who loses her crown and no one’s heard of this beauty queen. If you make a great page about that thing, you often could get to the top of Google results just as searches were surging. It was partly because Google got faster indexing at that point. Google was slow indexing and then all of a sudden became quick, and BuzzFeed figured that out in the lab, but then HuffPost editors got really good at it and we’d swarm stories very quickly and often be the first news source to create a comprehensive page for what was happening, linking out to other multiple other sources. Those pages became huge growth generators for the site.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“When we have something that’s a hit, usually our response is not, “Let’s do more of those.” Our response is, “Let’s figure why this is a hit and make variations of this.” This was successful because it was tied to someone’s identity, it was successful because it had cats in it, or it was successful because it had humor, or it was successful because it tapped into nostalgia. If you’re making entertainment content, which is a big part of what we do, you look at that hit and you say, “Why was that successful? Can I do it again? Can I make something else that people really love and want to share?” And you try to vary it, even though you know doing something derivative would work. Long term, you want to have a deeper understanding of how to make great things. That’s really the focus. That comes from people in a room talking and saying, “Oh, let’s try this, let’s try that.” And valuing people doing new things, not just valuing people doing big things.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“Part of the idea of BuzzFeed from the beginning was can we get to the point where the platform is more valuable than the expertise? If you actually have an idea or an insight into how things are shared or why they’re shared or what works, can you build that into either the technology platform or the data science or the culture of a team of people? Or build an audience that reads the site and engages with the site in a certain way that it gives you an advantage to be able to launch something that will take off? If you can do that, that’s like much better than being a consulting team where you drone on about, “This is why something goes viral, that’s why something goes viral.” A lot of the focus that we’ve had is to figure out do we really know something, and then how do we build that into a platform and how do we build that into a process? If someone said to me, “Help me market a movie, or help me market a new product, but just do it as a consultant,” I would do a much worse job and there would not be as much that I could do as if I said, “Let’s do a partnership with BuzzFeed.””
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
“It’s not paranoid to think that the audience watching broadcast television is old. And it’s not paranoid to think people, particularly young people, are spending a lot of time on their phones and a lot of time on the Internet. It’s accurate to say that media consumption is changing in a pretty dramatic way and that if your marketing stays the same you essentially will be marketing to people who are consuming media the way people consumed media ten years ago instead of the way they’re consuming today.”
— Jonah Peretti, Notes to self
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