Fluxblog
January 28th, 2019 2:45pm

How Laid Off Are You?


I have been laid off from BuzzFeed after working there for six and a half years. I started there as the music editor, but the majority of my time there has been serving as the company’s Director of Quizzes. (Here is a page collecting my favorite quizzes, reviews, interviews, and miscellaneous funny posts.)

BuzzFeed was a fantastic place to work, and the fact that I could mutate my career path so drastically is a good example of the sort of flexibility and creativity that has made the company quite successful. While it is not ideal to be laid off, I can say that I pretty much did everything I wanted to do in my time there, and had been feeling a bit adrift in the recent past. It was time to move on, and sometimes the world has to force your hand.

You might be wondering – wait, why would they lay you off? You were doing the quizzes, and that brings in a lot of money! Well, that is true. But another thing that is true is that a LOT of the site’s overall traffic comes from quizzes and a VERY large portion of that traffic comes from a constant flow of amateur quizzes made by community users. In the recent past, the second highest traffic driver worldwide has been a community user in Michigan who is a teenager in college who, for some reason, makes dozens of quizzes every week. It’s kinda amazing how much revenue-generating traffic the site gets from unpaid community volunteers. So, in a ruthless capitalist way, it makes sense for the company to pivot to having community users create almost all of the quizzes going forward. I understand math. I get it.

Anyway, I am now looking for work! I have two parallel careers, so let me break this up a bit.

• I am looking for work that allows me to continue on with the fairly complex skill set I developed at BuzzFeed. I was in editorial but worked with teams in video, social media, product, engineering, data, business, and creative – quizzes touched almost every part of the company, so I often worked as an internal consultant. A lot of my job involved looking at data and the big picture of what the audience wanted, developing strategy, and encouraging writers to come up with creative ways of entertaining the audience and expanding the range of what we could do.

I worked closely with the tech side of the company in developing new apps, formats, and tools. A huge amount of my job involved constant formal and technical experimentation. A lot of what I did involved understanding human psychology, and how to make things that resonated with people and encouraged them to share results that flattered or amused them. The job involved a deep understanding of semiotics in pop culture and cuisine. A large portion of what I wrote was comedic in nature. I have a very nuanced understanding of a mainstream audience primarily composed of young women, and am almost certainly the world’s foremost expert on online quizzes.

I feel like there’s a lot of applications for all of this in technology, advertising, and media. Probably a lot of other things I haven’t even considered, really. I’m open to anything. If you want to reach out, I’m at perpetua@gmail.com, and here is my LinkedIn page.

• I am in the market to write about music, movies, television, comics, and other pop culture things for whoever is interested in having me. I am also working on a book of music writing and shopping around for an agent and a publisher. Please hit me up if you would like to work with me on any of these things!

If you’ve read this far, I’d like to acknowledge a lot of the key people I’ve worked with over the past several years.

Anjali Patel is probably the most brilliant and impressive person I have ever worked with, and watching her evolve from a shy workaholic into a bold, one-of-a-kind hybrid of writer, artist, and product designer has been a privilege. Cates Holderness, Ryan Broderick, Katie Notopoulos, and Bob Marshall understand the internet better than anyone else on earth. Joanna Borns, Andrea Hickey, Alexis Nedd, Erin Chack, Daniel Kibblesmith, Sam Weiner, Julia Pugachevsky, Nathan W. Pyle, Loryn Brantz, and Matt Bellassai are the funniest writers I’ve had the pleasure of working with.

Thanks to Doree Shafrir, Scott Lamb, and Ben Smith for hiring me, and to Summer Anne Burton and Tommy Wesley for keeping me around. Thanks to Julie Gerstein, the best manager I have ever had in my career. Shout out to Tanner Greenring, Jack Shepherd, Dave Stopera, Matt Stopera, Lauren Yapalater, Dorsey Shaw, and Peggy Wang for creating the voice of BuzzFeed. Thanks to Louis Peitzman, Ashly Perez, Jen Lewis, and Heben Nigatu for making quizzes a thing. Much love to Andrew Ziegler, Sarah Aspler, Alana Mohamed, and all the other mindfreaks.

Thank you to Gavon Laessig for personally giving me the news. Thanks to Lisa Tozzi and her army of reporters who do their best to make the world a little better. Thank you to all of the designers and developers and data folks who created the best publishing tools a writer could ever ask for. Thanks to everyone who ever enjoyed anything I ever made and shared it with other people.

RSS Feed for this post8 Responses.
  1. Julie says:

    PERPETUA!!! This is so sweet.

  2. Daniel says:

    Positively unemployed… Sometimes this layoff news is a bummer but your situation’s a lot more compelling, Matthew. Your skills will recombine, I mean I can see you doing another writing role or shifting to a consulting career telling a room full of people their whole content strategy (preferably growling at the room as a giant robed hologram). Apart from being so nimble you sound ready for the change already. And unlike so many around you, you have focus and energy in your career.

    The music project alone has a bright future. That’s on display all over this site of course.

    And the 9-5 will take an enriching new direction. Your imagination will find a new group to connect with, just like you did at Buzzfeed.

    Lastly, great inside baseball account of writing quizzes there. Eye opening.

    Remember to keep your people here posted.

  3. Daniel says:

    Positively unemployed…

    Sometimes this layoff news is a bummer but your situation’s compelling, Matthew. Your skills will recombine, I mean I can see this leading to another writing role or shifting to a consulting career telling a room full of people their whole content strategy (preferably as a giant robed hologram, periodically choking people). You’re nimble, and you sound ready for the change already. PLUS…you actually have focus and energy in your career.

    The music project alone has a bright future. That’s on display all over this site.

    The 9-5 will take an enriching new direction. Your imagination will find a new group to connect with, just like you did at Buzzfeed.

    Enjoyed the inside baseball of writing quizzes there. Eye opening.

    Remember to keep your people here posted.

  4. Dan says:

    Very sorry for your bad news, Matthew. Best wishes for your next chapter.

  5. Scott Bateman says:

    I’m so sorry.

  6. Emily P says:

    So sorry to hear this. I love taking your quizzes and reading your writing. Thinking of you

  7. rob says:

    Been reading your blog for years. Getting laid off from a job you like really sucks, but in a few weeks your perspective will change. If they’ve decided to depend on volunteers, that just means it’s another nail in their coffin, not the first one.

  8. mr gilbert says:

    Sorry, sir! Real bummer about the lay off, but I’m rather glad to see that you’re in relatively positive spirits & seem to be optimistic about whatever comes next.

    FWIW: BF quizzes are like crack to everybody in my office, so I can attest first hand to your work being very much appreciated (despite your position “becoming” redundant)


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