Jonah Peretti
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| Jonah Peretti | |
 Peretti circa Jan 2008 |
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| Background information | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Jonah Peretti |
| Born | |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse(s) | Andrea Harner |
| Internet activity | |
| Notable work(s) | Nike Sweatshop Emails, Black People Love Us |
Jonah Peretti, who the New York Times called the "viral marketing hotdog," [1] is an Internet entrepreneur and a founder of BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.
A graduate of the MIT Media Lab, Peretti is best known for his experiments with "contagious" or "viral" media, including the parody website BlackPeopleLoveUs.com, which enthusiastically documents a couple's rapport among the African-American community, and a widely-forwarded email thread known as the Nike Sweatshop Emails in which Peretti exchanges politesse with an anonymous Nike representative over why "sweatshop" was not allowed to be printed on his custom Nike iD sneakers.
Peretti is married to Andrea Harner and lives in New York City.
Contents |
[edit] Contagious Media
In 2005 Peretti hosted the Contagious Media Showdown at Eyebeam Atelier, where he served as Research Director. Showdown participants competed for hits for three weeks starting on May 19th, 2005, with the winners receiving cash prizes. Showdown projects -- including top performers Forget Me Not Panties, Crying While Eating, and Blogebrity -- collectively amassed over 2 million unique visitors during the competition, and over 50 million during the entire period when stats were being collected (exact dates unknown). [2]
During the process Peretti developed the concept of the "Bored-at-Work Network", which he supposes to be larger than some major television network audiences[3]. Peretti claims this relatively untapped market segment is behind the bulk of the e-mail forwarding and link sharing that drive the spread of Internet memes.
[edit] Recent Work
Peretti is the founder of "Internet popularity contest" site BuzzFeed, started in Sept. 2002[citation needed]. He is also the co-founder of the popular political blog Huffington Post.
[edit] References
- ^ New York Times, Building a Brand with a Blog, May 15 2006
- ^ From Contagious Media Showdown site, http://showdown.contagiousmedia.org/
- ^ *Peretti interview in STAY FREE! magazine
