BuzzFeed’s New Spinoff Is a ‘Creative Studio’ Trying to Make the Internet Fun Again

BuzzFeed, known for its many quirky quizzes of the 2010s, has launched a company called Branch Office, an independent spinoff built to rethink how people connect on the internet in the age of AI. 

BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti and Branch Office founder Bill Shouldis announced at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, that the team has been developing a slate of experimental apps in secret, with the first two launching now and more on the way this year. The project grew out of years of BuzzFeed AI experiments, from strange little games to chaotic chatbots, where the company began to see a different path for the technology. Instead of using AI to flood the internet with more content or trap people inside algorithmic feeds, the idea was to build new types of social experiences that help people create things together and connect with their friends.

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Branch Office runs more like a creative studio than a traditional tech startup, the founders said. The guiding influence is Nintendo and its philosophy of creating surprising things from existing technology. 

The first apps follow that spirit. Conjure sends you a daily photography prompt wrapped in strange unfolding lore. BF Island turns the language of group chats into a collaborative playground for inside jokes and visual riffs. Quiz Party brings the classic BuzzFeed quiz into a shared space where friends compare results and roast each other in real time. 

The bet behind it all is quite simple. Buzzfeed predicts that as AI makes content infinite, cheap and easy to produce, the real value online will come from community, culture and taste.

“We’re accelerating into an era of infinite fake news, slop, personalization bubbles and cuts at the organizations that actually care about content,” Peretti said. “We need a solution. Branch Office is that solution.”