BuzzFeed is drawing an absurd amount of content views every month (FB, GOOG, GOOGL)

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BuzzFeed's popularity is undeniable, but the true scope of people viewing its content is staggering.

The company announced at this year's NewFronts that it pulls in 7 billion content views each month, up from 2.5 billion per month last year, reports Adweek. And most of these views come from BuzzFeed's off-platform distribution strategy.

More than 75% of BuzzFeed's content views occur outside of its website, and a significant portion of that comes from social media. Facebook represents 33%, Snapchat accounts for 21%, and YouTube represents 14%.

This varied distribution strategy has multiple benefits, and chief among them is the scale. Facebook has 1.09 billion daily active users, while Snapchat claims it has more than 100 million. YouTube, meanwhile, says it has more than 1 billion users. BuzzFeed claims more than 200 million monthly unique visitors to its homepage, and 75% of those come as referrals from social media platforms.

Therefore, BuzzFeed is able to take advantage of social media channels to reach the public at a much wider scale than direct traffic can provide.

BuzzFeed can also tap into mobile-first media consumption. Mobile accounts for almost two of every three digital media minutes, and smartphone apps represent almost half of all digital time spent, according to comScore's Cross-Platform Future in Focus report.

Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube are three of the most popular apps, and BuzzFeed has leveraged them successfully, as more than 70% of BuzzFeed's total traffic occurs on mobile.

Finally, BuzzFeed's strategy has enabled it to generate more ad revenue. These social platforms help publishers reach consumers who might be outside of their core audience, which helps publishers pull in more advertisers.

However, this strategy does have some drawbacks. Overreliance on social media could ultimately put BuzzFeed at the whims of these companies, which could change their revenue share models or content algorithms at any time.

Dollars are increasingly flowing from traditional ads to digital, as strong growth in mobile, video, and social spending continue to change the face of the US media market.

Over the next five years, marketers will especially embrace mobile. Mobile will drive up spending on video, search, display, and social, and propel the migration of ad dollars away from traditional media, including newspapers and magazines.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report that forecasts spending trends for the major digital ad formats — including search, display, and video — and mobile vs. desktop. It also examines trajectories for social ad spending and programmatic ad buying, which cut across digital formats. Finally, the report looks at how spending on traditional media formats will grow or contract over the next five years, as digital, and particularly mobile, rises.

BII

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Mobile will be the fastest-growing advertising channel and buoy spending on each of the digital formats. US mobile ad revenue will rise by a 26.5% CAGR through of 2020.
• Digital video ad spending is rising faster than search and display. US digital video ad revenue will rise by a CAGR of 21.9% through 2020.
• Mobile search will overtake desktop search ad revenue by 2019. Mobile search ad spend will rise by a 25.2% CAGR, while desktop search ad revenue will decline during the same period.
• Mobile display ads, including banners, rich media, and sponsorships, will overtake desktop display-related spending even earlier, in 2017.
• Social media ads, which cut across display and video, are seeing fast adoption. US social media ad revenue, which includes video and display ads, will grow by a CAGR of 14.9% through 2020.
• The rapid embrace of programmatic ad-buying tools is fueling a dramatic uptick in the share of digital ad spending coming through programmatic channels. Programmatic transactions will be a majority of total US digital ad spend this year.
• Unlike digital, traditional ad revenue will remain flat overall through 2020. Total traditional ad revenue will rise by a CAGR of just 0.4% between 2015 and 2020.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts ad revenue for emerging digital ad channels and formats like mobile, video, social and programmatic over the next five years
• Explores why ad revenue is flowing from desktop to mobile
• Examines the stagnation of traditional advertising channels like TV, magazines, and newspapers

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