Buzzfeed Calls For Reimagined Metrics Beyond ‘Unique Visitors,’ Says It Has Global Reach Of 400 Million

Though Buzzfeed says it boasts a towering 80 million unique visitors to its destination site every month, this figure may represent just one-fifth of its actual reach, according to a blog post today from the media giant’s publisher, Dao Nguyen.

Since its inception way back in 2009, Buzzfeed has shifted its focus to publish content directly to social platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat rather than utilizing those channels solely as a means to redirect traffic back over to Buzzfeed.com. Nguyen explains that, therefore, “the metrics we cared about then are vastly different from the metrics we care about today.”

Nguyen writes half of the site’s YouTube views take place on mobile devices. And there are literally billions of views of BuzzFeed content on social media sites and destinations like Facebook, Snapchat Discover, Instagram, Yahoo, Tumblr, and Vine. None of these mobile views or view counts on other platforms, however, are accounted for by comScore.  The marketing data and analytics company only accounts for BuzzFeed’s “U.S. web, app, and Facebook instant Article audience plus desktop YouTube views.” Therefore, Nguyen writes, “based on ad hoc data provided by partners,” the site’s actual global reach could amount to as much as 400 million people.

In addition for a call for new metrics, Nguyen also breaks down which platforms account for the most Buzzfeed video views. Visitors today spend more than 100 million hours watching Buzzfeed videos every month according to data provided by the site And Facebook is by far the most popular platform to watch said videos. The social network is home to a commanding 49% of all BuzzFeed video views and 30% of all watch time.

BuzzFeed currently has teams in 11 countries that publish content to over 30 platforms in seven languages. That broad content distribution and overall social strategy has made determining viewership metrics more complicated than ever. “Even now, as BuzzFeed adopts a ‘global cross-platform’ strategy,” Nguyen concludes, “we are dreaming up new ways to understand and learn from data.”

Check out more insights from Nguyen’s post over at BuzzFeed.com.