New research from Roy Morgan indicates BuzzFeed’s Australian audience is “interested, intelligent young-people looking for news with a different attitude.”
According to the report, BuzzFeed had almost two million visitors in 2015, with 63 per cent visiting on average once a week.
Approximately one in five of these visitors were teenagers, and only one in 20 were aged 65 and over.
Media Industry expert and spokesperson for Roy Morgan, Shaun Ellis, said the findings from the report reflect the trend of young people migrating from traditional news, to digital news sources with a broader range of content.
“It’s not like they’re going there because they’re just not interested in any hard news or anything. They’re going there for similar content but just with a different attitude,” Ellis said.
“[Buzzfeed are] not trying to compete with, say for example the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age or things like that necessarily.”
Last year, BuzzFeed Australia failed in its bid to become part of the main news category in Australia. Nielsen media ruled it did not think BuzzFeed had sufficient local news content to be featured in the same category as news.com.au, Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Mail.
Head of Nielsen’s media industry group, Monique Perry, said they were willing to look at the issue again this year.
“Buzzfeed’s global site classification was reviewed by Nielsen in 2014 and they did not meet the criteria,” she said.
“We are absolutely open to conducting another review this year, and if they meet the criteria, we will adjust Buzzfeed’s classification as appropriate.”
BuzzFeed opened an office in the press gallery of Parliament House just last month, where Minister for Communications, Mitch Fifield, described the organisation as ‘frisky, wild, edgy, bite sized, digestible’ and ‘all inclusive’.
