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

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

BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti and branch founder Bill Shouldis announced at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, that the team has been secretly developing a series of experimental apps, with the first two launching now and more on the way this year. The project grew out of BuzzFeed’s years of AI experiments, ranging from weird 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 in algorithmic feeds, the idea was to create new types of social experiences that help people create things together and connect with their friends.

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

The bet behind all this 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 are entering an era of endless fake news, slop, personalization bubbles and cutbacks in organizations that actually care about content,” Peretti said. “We need a solution. The branch is that solution.”