It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Buzzfeed’s immense growth over the past several months is anything but organic.
Yesterday, Business Insider chief correspondent Nicholas Carlson stuck a subtle shiv into his competitors at Buzzfeed, attributing the site’s success in exploiting Facebook’s ever-evolving newsfeed algorithm to its practice of buying traffic in the form of Facebook ads—as opposed to, you know, attracting readers. Then he took it out. Without telling anyone.