Recently my friend Anthony Volodkin from HypeM tweeted about a recent press release from BUZZMedia.  As Anthony points out, BUZZMedia does NOT own HypeM.  I also need to make some other things clear.  HypeM is a stellar independent Web brand and BUZZMedia  represents  them exclusively for ad sales.  In fact, there are a few sites that we represent solely for ad sales, and only when it can be a win-win for both the site and BUZZMedia.  It has been the founders’ strategy since 2005 to be a publisher and owner of our brands because that makes much more economic sense for us, but there are rare occasions when you bump into genius like  HypeM, Rcrd Lbl, and Concrete Loop and you take what you can get.

With that said I wanted to take a minute to tell the Buzznet story.  Buzznet was founded by myself (@djabatt), Marc Brown, Steve Haldane and Kevin Woolery in 2003 as a social photo sharing network focused on music and pop culture (SF Gate article).  One year later, in July 2004, Marc and I presented at the first Blog-On conference where we met Jeff Clavier and Jonathan Fram who both became our angel investors and helped us secure an investment of $1,000,000  from Transcosmos, so we could finally ignite the engines (hire a small staff and actually pay ourselves) after over a year of  self-funding the Company.  Around the same time Bill Woodward, Founder of Anthem Ventures Partners, and Brian Mesic lead a small Series A investment round.   I have been friends with Bill from a previous venture and he’s a great investor to have on the team early. His experience of having been recently on the board of the MySpace owners, Intermedia, during the acquisition by Fox was helpful as well!

Buzznet grew quickly and we found that pop on the Web was hot and sticky and created engaged audiences that wanted to consume and share their ideas.   In early 2006 the Buzznet model was to grow authentic music and pop culture voices on the web by using our published brand Buzznet and by acquisitions.  We were fortunate enough to have met a huge supporter in Alan Beasley from Redpoint Ventures who lead Buzznet’s series B financing. Alan joined our board where he has been an instrumental advisor to me and the company.  As the CEO of Buzznet I was looking for talented folks to join the team and I was introduced to Tyler Goldman who came from Movielink.  We brought on Tyler to assist Buzznet in its business development and acquisitions efforts.  After about a year of outstanding work Tyler finally agreed to join Buzznet as CEO and I became President in order to focus my time on the product and content strategy.

After we completed additional investment rounds with incredible investors including  Sutter Hill Ventures, NEA, Universal Music Group, MK Capital, and Focus Ventures, followed by the acquisition of several additional Web properties,  we all agreed that it would be best to create a new parent company called BUZZMedia – to separate the site, Buzznet.com from the ever-growing company, now called BUZZMedia.

That brings up to 2010 and speaking as a Founder of the Company and a member of the Board who’s been grindin’ for a long time now,  I couldn’t be more thrilled with the current management team, the growth of the company, and the sites we publish today.  This team represent some of the best and brightest in Web media today.  Our sites are very authentic and independent which makes their voice so unique in market.  We don’t tell our brands what to write. we encourage them to fearlessly produce as authentically as possible.

And that’s the story of Buzznet and how we became BUZZmedia

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