The Longest-Trending Buzzfeed News Articles Since Nov 2018 Overall, by Year, and by Month
The Buzzfeed News trending strip
Jeremy-Singer Vine set up a program that took snapshots of the "Trending" strip on Buzzfeed News every 5 minutes from Nov 2018 through the newsroom's final day of operation in May 2023.
He published the dataset here.
Buzzfeed News' trending strip was curated by editors, not an algorithm.
Below you'll find links showing the longest-trending Buzzfeed News articles by year, month, and over the entire dataset's time frame.
Created by Vikram Oberoi (Twitter) (Blog). The code for this site is available on Github.
All-time
These all-time lists cover mid-November 2018 through the newsroom's final day of operation in May 2023.
Yearly
These pages show the 50 longest trending articles in:
Monthly
These pages show the 5 longest trending articles monthly in:
How long did articles stay on the trending strip?
The median time an article spent in the trending strip was 0.892 days or 21.4 hours.
This is the distribution of the number of days articles spent on the trending strip:
The vast majority of articles spent less than 1 day on the trending strip. This is how long every article that appeared on the trending strip remained on it, chronologically:
Let's remove the massive outlier in 2020 and look again:
On April 19th, 2023 the newsroom stopped updating the Trending bar before it shut down on May 5th, 2023. You can see this in the stack of articles at the very end of the chart above.
Let's remove those and look again:
Here's the distribution of the # of days these articles remained on the trending strip:
The longest-trending lists only use articles that appeared on the trending strip before April 19th, 2023.