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BuzzFeed May Go Public Someday (Video)

BuzzFeed sees itself as an independent, public company in the long run.

Asa Mathat for Re/code

You may want to prepare for a new kind of BuzzFeed listicle: “11 Awesome Things to Expect at BuzzFeed’s Next Earnings Call.”

BuzzFeed, which has established itself as a media powerhouse with more than 1,000 employees and hundreds of millions of monthly readers, may have an IPO in its future, according to CEO Jonah Peretti. He didn’t share a time table for an IPO, but BuzzFeed appears to be putting its ducks in a row.

“We’re very focused on building out internationally, we’re very focused on building out across multiple different platforms, we’re very focused on building out our video business,” Peretti said at Code Conference Wednesday morning. “That will give us a diversification… to allow us to build a big independent company with much more predictability and things that would allow us to be a public company or an independent standalone company.”

Peretti was joined onstage by BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith Wednesday at Re/code‘s annual Code Conference at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

BuzzFeed has proven itself as an industry leader when it comes to making clickable content — it also generates more than 1.2 billion video views per month. And it’s not afraid to host that content on sites other than BuzzFeed.com.

Almost all of its video views come from Facebook or YouTube, Peretti said, and the publisher is one of the early adopters of Facebook’s new “Instant Articles” product, and has no reservations handing over some of the controls to Facebook.

But will BuzzFeed’s reliance on other networks lead it down the disastrous path of Demand Media?

“You can’t assume that a platform will have your interests at heart, you have to assume that if they’re smart they’re going to have user interests at heart,” Peretti said. “If we’re making content that Facebook users love that should be the goal.”

BuzzFeed has another platform in mind as well: Snapchat. The publisher was supposed to be part of Snapchat’s original group of Discover partners before the agreement fell through, but Peretti and Smith are still interested in putting their content inside the messaging app.

“We’d love to be on Discover,” Peretti said. “I think Snapchat is super interesting as a platform and hopefully we’ll be on Discover someday.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story suggested Buzzfeed planned to go public, which is just one of its options.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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