BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?

On a Tuesday in February, Matt Stopera, a 24-year-old senior editor at a website called BuzzFeed, saw something hilarious on Twitter. It was an image from the archives of Sports Illustrated, circa 1991, of the diminutive TV nerd Urkel playing hoops with actor Will Smith and Indiana Pacer Reggie Miller. The next day at work, Stopera looked around the Internet for photographs in a similar spirit. He found one of Ginger Spice sitting at a bulky desktop computer and another of Arsenio Hall grinning at Bill Clinton, who was wailing on a saxophone. He arranged the photos on a single page, wrote a pithy caption for each one, and listed photo credits where he could.

At around 5 p.m., Stopera published “48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s” on BuzzFeed. “These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!” he wrote at the top of the list. A BuzzFeed visitor with an appetite for ’90s nostalgia could scroll down, gawk at the 48 retro images, read the deadpan captions, recall Bob Saget, Tipper Gore, and Scottie Pippen, laugh at the crazy fashion, and resurface to the present day in a matter of minutes. It racked up 1.2 million page views.