BuzzFeed is best known for its viral content made up of GIFs, cute animal pictures and laugh-out-loud videos, but the site has been building up more serious news content for some time now and is teaming up with CNN on CNNBuzzFeed, a news mash-up channel hosted on YouTube.
Launched today, CNNBuzzFeed has just one video uploaded so far, offering a taste of what viewers can expect from this channel.
The video uses footage from CNN to create a montage of ‘amazing rescue moments’ and sounds like it’s narrated by online personality Ze Frank, who was recently hired as BuzzFeed’s executive vice-president of video.
This mash-up video format will apparently be typical output for the channel, which will host three new videos per week. Like all of BuzzFeed’s content, the videos will be made for sharing with the hope of gaining new audiences for both brands, The Wall Street Journal reports. For CNN, this could mean tapping into a younger market, while, for BuzzFeed, it will help the site’s drive to be seen as a news source for 18 to 34-year-olds – a dream market for advertisers.
Though BuzzFeed creates branded content on its website, the CNNBuzzFeed channel will launch without advertisers meddling in the content, though it’s quite certain that both companies will figure out how to optimise advertising within these videos down the road.
