I decided to determine which phrases in BuzzFeed headlines are the most successful in order to see if it’s possible to reverse-engineer BuzzFeed’s business model. Therefore, I scraped BuzzFeed’s website (after initial frustration) and obtained 60,378 distinct articles and the corresponding number of Facebook Shares for each article. From there, I decomposed each headline into its component n-grams, allowing me to perform quantitative analysis for each possible permutation of words in the article titles. You probably don’t know that the 3 most interesting things I found will blow your mind.

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God I fucking hate Jonah Peretti so much. His big talk that he gives is how to exploit people with mental illnesses to get your shit to go viral. He actively discusses different neurotypes and how to best exploit each one, as if this is a totally normal and not at all Lex Luthor scumbag thing to do. Fuck I hate that guy. If I ever become a ruthless warlord after the fall of civilization, I'd love his skull as a fashion accessory. Symbolize the come-uppance of techie scum. #DieTechieScum. :)

posted 3181 days ago