Reddit and Imgur, amirite?

We wrote a simple crawler (see code) using the Priceonomics Analysis Engine, our tool that makes it easy to crawl and analyze web data, and then analyzed what the sources were used for the images that BuzzFeed includes in their articles.  In the last year, BuzzFeed published about 69,000 articles, included 830,000 images/videos with attribution strings, and linked to approximately 74,000 distinct sources.

However, just 25 sources made up 62% of BuzzFeed’s content. While the Internet is a huge place, Internet Culture is birthed in just a few areas. What are these sources?

Source: Priceonomics data crawling

The number one place that BuzzFeed sources its images from is Tumblr. This is where The Dress was discovered. Instagram, Getty Images, and Youtube round out the top 4. This is analysis isn’t perfect, however, as it ignores content that BuzzFeed embeds without putting an attribution link under it (Twitter embeds for example don’t need an attribution link since they are clearly from Twitter). A number of these sites a simply providing stock photos.

There is a perception in the Reddit community that BuzzFeed is merely a sourcing all of its content from Reddit. Even though Reddit barely cracks the top 10 sources that BuzzFeed cites, this analysis doesn’t necessarily disprove this notion. For whatever reason, Reddit, doesn’t have its own image and video hosting. Instead, most people upload the content to Imgur or just link to the original source of the media on a place like Tumblr or Youtube for example.  BuzzFeed could very well be using the Reddit community as a mechanism todiscover the content that is hosted elsewhere. Or not, this analysis doesn’t say.

Yeah, that's the big flaw in their analysis.

Reddit / Imgur surfaces content from Tumblr, Instagram, Getty, YouTube, Giphy... even BuzzFeed!

A clever BuzzFeed writer merely lifts the source they find on Reddit so it looks like it's coming from the source, not from Reddit.

I'm sticking to my original assessment. BuzzFeed editors comb Reddit looking for things to stick clickbait headlines onto.

Personally, I prefer the PandaWhale style of avoiding clickbait headlines and instead using descriptive keywords in the headlines so we can google for the content and find it again.

I did not see the blue dress post on PandaWhale or FB or BuzzFeed. I saw the gold dress post there though.

Nice. Do you remember where you saw it first? Facebook?

Dude, I saw it IRL first. I was *there*. 

Mind blown!

Btw, did you see the blue dress post on PandaWhale?

Or did you see it on Facebook or BuzzFeed?

Personally, I saw it on Reddit first. Then PandaWhale. BuzzFeed was much later.

I don't remember where I first saw it. It seemed to be everywhere at once!

It really was. This came way after I saw it on Reddit...

http://pandawhale.com/post/59186/is-the-dress-white-and-gold-or-black-and-blue-photoshop-says-thedress-is-both

Beating the horse black and blue and gold and white...

http://pandawhale.com/post/59548/beating-a-dead-horse-black-blue-gold-white-thedress-gif