Website Analysis with "AI" Outline

Website Analysis of "BuzzFeed."

Buzzfeed, Inc is a digital magazine featuring informational and entertaining content. Buzzfeed was founded by Josh Peretti, the current Chief Executive Officer, and John S. Johnson III when it officially launched in 2006. Buzzfeed’s media is diverse and interesting as it features content such as news, food: including another digital site created by Buzzfeed with the purpose of helping people find and create new recipes, shopping, quizzes, and their main topic of pop culture. Buzzfeed’s motto is, “providing trusted, quality, brand-safe news and entertainment to hundreds of millions of people; making content on the Internet more inclusive, empathetic, and creative; and inspiring our audience to live better lives.” This website analysis will explore Buzzfeed’s audience, purpose, context, and design choices and how Buzzfeed continues to maintain its virality throughout an ever-changing social world.

Buzzfeed primarily caters to the current or former generations of younger people. As of now, Buzzfeed’s primary audience is Generation Z and Millenials. Most of the content posted on Buzzfeed is easily relatable and understandable content for these generations which is why Buzzfeed thrives. For example, there are many different interactive quizzes featured on Buzzfeed’s site that even offer up a rivalry between Generation Z and Millenials.

The secondary audience would be considered casual visitors who may visit the site based on a social media ad, etc. I know there have been plenty of occasions where I have used a hyperlink to gain more information on an interesting headline.

Keeping in mind that Buzzfeed is a digital magazine, its sole purpose is to keep readers entertained and informed. There is a great mix of important news happening around the world to help us stay in the know, but there are also interactive games and quizzes that even some in Generation Alpha can get involved with. Having these games on the website can eventually have the younger generations engage more in the news and pop culture side of articles soon also.

Buzzfeed started off as a website, but was also developed into an app in 2014.As social media started to rapidly evolve, the app was created to make it easier to engage in content sharing. Shareability across different social medias would increase overall traffic of the website which would only help expand the reach further. 

There are many different unique design choices used on the website and app. In a typical article, the title is the first thing you see on the page and it is in big, black, bolded letters. Right below that, there is a subheading that tends to act as an attention grabber. These are two design choices deliberately chosen by Buzzfeed to rope the reader in and have them interested in the entire article. Throughout articles, the most important behavior is also in the same font and size which pulls a reader in so that you do not have to necessarily read the whole entire text. Buzzfeed is a multimodal site where they feature pictures, GIFs, videos, audio, etc to tell the full story. They even feature commentary originally posted on different social media platforms like “X” (Twitter).

(Stein 2024)

On Buzzfeed’s quizzes and games, there are many bright colors that help those who play them, Generations Alpha and Z rather than Millennials, interested and wanting to play more.

To conclude, Buzzfeed is an extraordinary example of a digital magazine perfectly tailored to its audience of Generation Z and Millennials. Buzzfeed has served its purpose of keeping the readers interested by incorporating multimedia elements and having relatable content. As long as they keep this up, we can only foresee Buzzfeed’s continued success.

Works Cited:

BuzzFeed. (n.d.). BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com

Stein, M. J. The new USPS truck is going viral again—WTF is happening? BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-new-usps-truck-is-going-viral-again-wtf-is-happening

Reflection:

Overall, I think the outline I created with Co-Pilot greatly helped out. It was able to take my topics and what I had already written and give a little more detail about it, expanding the horizons for my final draft of my website analysis. It helped when dividing topics, for example, in the design choices section, I had three different topics to talk about where I could get my points across on each topic and then move on. To conclude, I think AI is a great tool to help you further your thoughts when doing big assignments like this, or a research paper.

*Full Assignment with all of the parts

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IWY5jhelXYcP-RwfyJ2HVv8OuCgg8EjrK5_GMZ7bjcs/edit?usp=sharing