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I regret that this is the actual title of the article, but alas.

Submitted it because this quote caught my eye:

> “One thing Jonah was saying very early on that people thought was crazy — I thought he was crazy — was that platforms were like cable networks, and we had to find distribution on the new networks,” says Smith, now the media columnist for The New York Times. “Ultimately, directly or indirectly, they were going to pay.”

BuzzFeed News' investigative reporting is essentially enabled by the clickbait on BuzzFeed, but what's interesting is the perception that the clickbait and sharing are essentially the currency used to "buy" network time, the network in this case being social media distribution.