BuzzFeed Hires Web Video Pioneer Ze Frank
Here's a good chocolate/peanut butter combination: Buzzfeed, the click-factory that has figured out Facebook and Twitter, plus Ze Frank, the guy who figured out Web video back in its infancy. — Together they're going to try to figure out modern-day YouTube.
Context & Ripple Effects
With no earlier corpus coverage of BuzzFeed's video ambitions, the signal here is the pickup itself: within days the hire traveled from AllThingsD through Fast Company, ReadWriteWeb, PandoDaily, and the New York Observer — the kind of breadth usually reserved for funding rounds, suggesting tech media reads this as a strategic marker rather than a personnel note.
The framing across outlets is consistent: BuzzFeed has mastered distribution on Facebook and Twitter, Ze Frank built his reputation pioneering Web video formats when the medium was young, and the stated mission is cracking YouTube as a third leg. As of September 2012, BuzzFeed's franchise rests on shareable text and image posts; video is the unproven channel.
First-order effects
- BuzzFeed gains an in-house video lead with a track record of inventing shareable formats, moving video from experiment to a staffed strategic pillar aimed at YouTube.
- Ze Frank shifts from independent creator to executive inside a company whose core competency is engineering virality, trading autonomy for distribution scale.
Second-order effects
- Rival social-native publishers competing for the same Facebook and Twitter traffic now face pressure to recruit comparable video talent or cede the emerging shareable-video ad market to BuzzFeed.
- Brand advertisers buying BuzzFeed's sponsored content gain a video-format option alongside listicles, pulling video budgets toward social distribution rather than pre-roll alone.
Third-order effects
- If the hire works, social publishers reorganize around video-first teams, making YouTube fluency a standard capability next to feed optimization — and turning video talent into the scarce resource publishers bid for.
The trend: Social-native publishers are hiring Web-video pioneers to extend their distribution playbooks from Facebook and Twitter onto YouTube, treating video as the next shareable format rather than a side business.