ViralNova: New York’s ‘Most Cynical’ Web Media Upstart

New York: Even though tens of millions of people share its content on Facebook, it’s hard to find someone with anything nice to say about ViralNova. Deemed “horrific, illiterate and monstrous” and dinged as “a BuzzFeed in a box,” it’s widely regarded by people in New York media as the emblem of Everything That’s Wrong With Journalism Today. Perhaps the critiques are tinged with envy: Measured by traffic, ViralNova is one of the fastest growing websites in history. Within a year of its 2013 launch, ViralNova had 100 million unique visitors. Numbers like that immediately catapulted it into the big leagues with sites like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Upworthy.