About

Why I Left Buzzfeed is a series of videos on YouTube in which former BuzzFeed employees discuss why they quit their jobs at the internet media company. The videos subsequently inspired other YouTubers to satirically use the title in both parodies and unrelated content as a form of humorous clickbait.

Origin

On August 2nd, 2016, Kenny Moffitt posted a video titled "Why I Left Buzzfeed." In the video, he explained how when he joined Buzzfeed, he wanted to make scripted videos that tell stories, but due to Buzzfeed's desire for what he describes as "quantity over quality," he found himself making videos he did not enjoy making. He also noted that Buzzfeed does not allow its employees to make original content that is separate from Buzzfeed. His video, shown below, gained over 5.5 million views.

Spread

A week after Moffitt's video was uploaded to YouTube, a parody was uploaded by Carson Judd^[1] that gained 8,900 views. On the 13th, YouTuber and former Buzzfeed employee Jonah Feingold uploaded his reasons for leaving Buzzfeed (shown below, left). On November 16th, thevlogbrothers channel posted a video in which former BuzzFeed employees Allison Raskin and Gaby Dunn explain why they left the company, in which they claimed to have received pushback for having their own channel (below, right).

While these videos continues to appear over the coming months, frequently gaining millions of views, it inspired other creators to make parody videos with that title. One popular video by Chubbs on February 8th, 2017, gained over 1.7 million views (shown below, left). On March 12th, YouTuber Pyrocynical uploaded a video with "Why I Left Buzzfeed" as his still image before showing an episode of his Dark Souls Let's Play (shown below, right).

On April 23rd, 2017, Redditor Daronh submitted a post asking "What is with all of the 'Why I left BuzzFeed' videos on YouTube recently?" to /r/OutOfTheLoop,^[2] where Redditor 92girlie commented that many former BuzzFeed employees claimed to have quit the company due to overly restrictive contracts, which granted BuzzFeed ownership to any entertainment media they uploaded to the web:

"Basically, when BuzzFeed started making youtube videos with different ppl, eg, try guys, lady like, etc, the people in the actual videos worked for BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed basically owned everything they did on the internet. So if they made youtube videos on their personal accounts, buzzfeed owned it because thats how their contracts were."

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References