On Earth We Were Briefly BuzzFeed
This isn't a Try Guys explainer. I would never do that to you within the sanctity of On Posting. But you are going to need to grasp the basic principles of the controversy to understand what I want to talk about here. Essentially, a man named Ned Fulmer — who previously embodied the perfect silhouette of the chaste, stringy, Pod Save America softboy — was caught cheating on his wife this past Monday. Fulmer first became famous at BuzzFeed back in 2014, when the site was still at the peak of its powers and churning out an astonishing number of twee videos designed to exploit the overripe Facebook video algorithm. (A man in a blue shirt against a red background making faces as they taste-test bacon-and-whiskey-infused breakfast cereal or whatever.) The Try Guys were masters of the format; possessing an instinctual understanding that a video of four men screaming in agony while enduring the simulated pain of labor extractions (30 million views!) would clean up with the Democrat Moms that remained their target audience.
So, like so many Patreon campaigners and Substack writers before them, Fulmer and the rest of his fellow Try Guys felt like they'd grown a little big for their britches. They left BuzzFeed to go independent, with their own YouTube channel, in 2018, and from what I can glean that venture has been largely successful. (About eight million subscribers. Good work if you can get it.) It would take something indescribably desecrating to the Try Guys brand to sabotage their endless, overflowing gravy train of engagement, but documented philandering as a father of two absolutely fits the bill. This was all made worse by the fact that Fulmer made a very public show of his marital status — to the point that I think you could genuinely call him a professional spouse. You can find videos on the Try Guys footprint called "Every Time Ned Says 'My Wife.'" It is 90 seconds long. ("You asked for it, I edited it!" reads the caption.) It could probably be used during the divorce proceedings. Fulmer has been axed from the Try Guys troupe, formally annihilating the group's sexless, nonthreatening demeanor, and nobody is sure where they'll go from here.
A lot of people have written about the Fall of Fulmer as the latest referendum on sweaty, overcompensating Wife Guys writ large, and to be clear, it is really funny that all of this happened hot on the heels of Adam Levine's very bad day on TikTok. But personally, the Try Guys debacle has me thinking a lot about that ancient, primordial golden age of BuzzFeed — long before the layoffs, and the labor threats, and the stock scam — when digital media was genuinely capable of creating these incandescently oppressive new-media stars that looked and smelled lot like Ned Fulmer. In fact, I think you could make an argument that The Try Guys represented the final shadow of a status that could be best described as "BuzzFeed Famous," which is to be a nice-seeming person who stars in funny videos, writes breezy lists, and somehow accumulates approximately one billion Instagram followers. It's a concept that has grown increasingly gnarled and incoherent within the political environs of 2022, and Fulmer's indiscretion feels something like the final foreclosure on the genre, much in the same way Avicii's tragic death signaled the end of millennial hedonism.
I've been fascinated by Prime BuzzFeed for as long as I've worked in digital media. I'd go as far as to say that BuzzFeed, between 2012 and 2015, appeared, from an outsider’s perspective, to be the only happy era in the short history of the industry. I was in college at the time, paying taxes on $33,000 net income, so I was particularly susceptible to the fantasy that somewhere in the ether, it was possible to work at a website that had everything figured out. It seemed as if BuzzFeed cracked the furtive code of internet content, creating an endless, self-replicating loop of traffic — cold fusion by-way-of Harry Potter quizzes — so at last, everyone could become rich by blogging. Ex-BuzzFeed employees have used the Fulmer cancellation to resurrect some of their favorite highlights of the era, in a tone that is simultaneously melancholy, warm, and traumatized. "If you had five free minutes you would get pulled in to try deer penis for the first time," tweeted Sam Stryker, with the same wan observance of a World War One vet. "Hillary Duff glitterbombing you in the office. Salma Hayek crashed a meeting I was running."
"One time Jojo, the singer, sang happy birthday," said Selorm Kploanyi, a Former BuzzFeed producer.
"My second date with my now-husband was filming a Ladylike BuzzFeed video together," added Candance Lowry Bryant.
These are all anecdotes that come from an outrageous culture of optimism that is completely incongruent with the digital media sector we know and love today. Ex-BuzzFeed staffers talk about the site in the same way people talk about the 1978 Saturday Night Live writer's room. It was a total outlier; no parallels or precedents exist; Salma Hayek is not dropping into the Vox all-hands Zoom anytime soon. Of course, a few short years after that white-hot mid-2010s apex, it became clear that all of BuzzFeed glamour was obfuscating a rot at its core. The publication is in the midst of a lengthy, precipitous decline, best exemplified by its stock price, which opened at $10 at the start of 2022 and is currently trading for $1.61. It turns out that GIF-laden lists and game-meat taste tests cannot serve as the backbone of a sustainable business model, but it sure was beautiful when it did.
It will probably be decades, maybe even centuries, before we fully understand why BuzzFeed, ever so briefly, wielded its divine power. Months ago, I started the reporting process to try and answer that question for On Posting, but never followed through because the depth of research was too much for what I was willing to commit to this newsletter. (That said, if you're an editor, let's talk.) My theories are likely the same as yours. Surely there is a hard ceiling to the public's interest in the airy content BuzzFeed specialized in. Willy Staley noted that the site once published a video detailing "masturbation hacks," including advice to cut a hole in a bar of soap and stick your penis inside it, which is the sort of thing you’d expect to read in a questionable Cosmopolitan infographic. I don't know if BuzzFeed has a definitive jumped-the-shark moment, but that has to be a strong contender.
I also feel, more philosophically, that BuzzFeed is one of the most innately Obama-era media companies of all time, and the distilled psychic confusion of the Trump years, and our ongoing American sunset, was always going to put the brand in a tailspin. In 2013, Benny Johnson — then a BuzzFeed employee — published a quiz titled "What Kind of Conservative Are You?" where viewers could determine if they were more of a Reaganite budget hawk, or a Randian objectivist type. Johnson now works at Newsmax, and is one of the most psychotic operatives marshaling MAGA discourse. The blithe, BuzzFeed interpretation of U.S. politics and society simply fell out of step with reality; it is hard to listify the capitol insurrection, and yet, "31 Surreal, Chilling, And Unforgettable Jan. 6 Insurrection Photos You Probably Haven't Seen Before" still exists. The model is broken, to no fault of their own.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with one of BuzzFeed's first employees, back when I was still working on a larger piece about the site. I'm not going to repeat their name here, because I'm drawing this from memory, but towards the end of our conversation, I remember him expressing a twinge of sadness about how he ended his career at the site. He built BuzzFeed by writing lists and making jokes — cornering a vibrant, volatile spark of virality that burned bright enough to sustain a whole fleet of bloggers-turned-celebrities — but by the end of his run, he found himself ensconced in upper-management, totally alienated from the visceral pleasures of posting a hit article on a popular website. It used to be all so simple; internet content really was as straightforward as filming a few staffers chowing into deer penis and crossing your fingers that the algorithms worked their magic. I totally understood where he was coming from. What a strange thing to mourn. We really are getting old.