BuzzFeed buys Kingfish Labs to improve Facebook strategy

In a company blog post Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed president and COO, says the acquisition of Kingfish will “allow BuzzFeed to extend its leadership in buying sponsored stories to extend the reach of content-driven social advertising.”

He says the company will use Kingfish’s technology – which applies natural language processing to analyse and characterise the interests of individuals on Facebook – to enhance social ad targeting.

“We’re going to use that same technology to understand the interests of users on Facebook and show them the sponsored stories that are most relevant to their interests,” he wrote. BuzzFeed also plans to apply interest matching to Twitter in the future.

The deal is BuzzFeed’s first acquisition.