BuzzFeed launches AI apps through Branch Office spinoff to combat $57.3M loss

BuzzFeed debuts AI slop apps in bid for new revenue | TechCrunch

BuzzFeed, the U.S.-based media company known best for its quizzes, listicles, and, for a time, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism division, is reinventing itself for the AI era. At least, that's the pitch. At the SXSW conference in Austin, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti introduced the company's next media foray: a spin-off called Branch Office, which will explore artificial intelligence in consumer-facing apps designed for creativity and connection. The new company is an extension of the experiments BuzzFeed has run for years using AI technology, Peretti explained, in a halting presentation that began with slideshow glitches, before moving on to app demos met with silence or a polite tittering of laughter. "We've been working on this secretly for over a year, and we've learned a lot from the BuzzFeed platform about what is coming with new kinds of AI formats," Peretti said. "Using AI is the way of connecting people, building community around these pillars of culture, and taste, and community." Bill Shouldis, a director of product at BuzzFeed and the founder of Branch Office, presented two of the company's new apps: BF Island and Conjure. The first product, BF Island, is a group chat platform offering features for changing and editing photos using AI. This is not exactly groundbreaking tech, in and of itself, but that's not the point. The key feature here is not the AI toolset but the in-app library of online trends and memes, created by an editorial team, which could inspire users to create AI photos referencing blink-and-you-miss-it trends like the McDonald's CEO taste-testing a burger, or the "frame-mogging" drama. (If you don't know what these are, you're probably not the "very online" audience that's being targeted.) Another app, Conjure, is an app similar to BeReal -- the once-a-day temporary photo app -- except that it instead appears to guide users to take daily photos of things besides themselves. (As a reminder, BeReal itself didn't stick, ultimately exiting to Voodoo after losing traction.) In the demo, for instance, the photo prompt was "What lies between the trees and the moon?", leading the users to snap a photo of the night sky. A series of spooky images flashed on the screen, followed by a whisper, "What will you conjure?" We don't get it, and clearly the audience didn't either. After the demo, a lone cough could be heard among the silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter. Shouldis then noted that AI is involved in Conjure, too, as the app has an "AI spirit for a CEO." (Again, what?) Peretti also introduced Quiz Party, a social app that lets you take BuzzFeed quizzes with friends and share your results. BuzzFeed's underwhelming presentation comes only days after the media company shared that it has "substantial doubt" about its ability to continue as a business, and was engaging in strategic conversations focused on fixing its liquidity challenges. The company, which had a net loss of $57.3 million last year, said it would focus this year on its Studio IP and new AI apps, like these. But even the tech-forward audience at SXSW was not convinced. As one person pointed out during the Q&A session after the presentation, BeReal had struggled to get people to come back after the novelty wore off. What would an app like Conjure do to combat the same sort of retention problem? Shouldis said that the app would evolve, "and have different types of things happening and not just be exactly what it is today." He referenced the potential to integrate things like video, audio, and prototyping with Claude Code to build community. The premise behind the new apps is not unreasonable: AI can lead to faster software development, which makes it possible for companies to more quickly iterate and keep people engaged. "In a way, software is the new content," Peretti noted. Of course, before you can iterate, you have to attract users. With its new apps, BuzzFeed seems to have thought more about what AI can do than what people want to do with AI, which is not a recipe for success.

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

Macy has been working for CNET for coming on 2 years. Prior to CNET, Macy received a North Carolina College Media Association award in sports writing. 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. Read more: Social Media and AI Want Your Attention at All Times. This New Documentary Says That's Bad 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."

Buzzfeed Hopes AI Apps Can Help Solve Its Financial Woes

"We're accelerating into an era of infinite fake news, slop, personalization bubbles, and cuts at the organizations that actually care about content," said Jonah Peretti, CEO of Buzzfeed. "We need a solution. Branch Office is that solution." At the SXSW conference, Peretti premiered Buzzfeed's new creative studio, Branch Office, alongside new apps that will come with it: Conjure, BF Island, and Quiz Party. Buzzfeed AI Apps Conjure will be the most physically interactive of all the apps. The platform sends users a daily "summons," a prompt to photograph something specific, turning each submission into a creative offering meant to pull people out of their feeds and back into the real world.

Inside BuzzFeed's Secret Lab: Three Apps, A New Company, And A Bet On The Future Of The Internet

AUSTIN, TX -- March 13, 2026 -- BuzzFeed, Inc. (Nasdaq: BZFD) today unveiled Branch Office, a new spinoff company that has been secretly developing a slate of apps designed to reinvent how people connect on the internet. The first two are launching now. More are coming this year. Branch Office operates independently, with its own founders, its own mandate, and a product philosophy built for a world where AI has blurred the lines between software and content. BuzzFeed saw a gap no one else was filling, and built a dedicated company, quietly, to move fast enough to actually fill it. "We're accelerating into an era of infinite fake news, slop, personalization bubbles, and cuts at the organizations that actually care about content," said Jonah Peretti. "We need a solution. Branch Office is that solution." BuzzFeed has been running AI experiments for years -- a game where you raised a nepo baby, a chatbot that lets you attempt to talk a Karen down in a Starbucks line. Through hundreds of projects the team learned what AI could do when it wasn't trying to replicate existing models of static content production, but building totally new experiences that would not have been possible before the advent of GenAI. While most social media companies are using AI to keep people isolated in their own algorithmic feeds, BuzzFeed's projects were built on the premise that creativity and engagement can bring people closer together, help them connect with their friends. THE PHILOSOPHY: NINTENDO, NOT BIG TECH Led by founder Bill Shouldis, Branch Office operates with a clear vision: treat software as a creative medium. Build fast. Iterate constantly. Let real communities, real culture, and genuine taste shape what gets made. The guiding philosophy comes from an unlikely place: Nintendo. The gaming giant's principle of "lateral thinking with withered technology," taking maximum creativity out of what already exists, is Branch Office's north star. We don't need to build our own foundational models or compete with Big Tech. We just ask one question: what's already here, and how do we make it genuinely fun? When Branch Office looked at the market, they saw two camps: companies building AI to replace humans, and companies building AI to simulate them. Branch Office is doing neither.