When DuJour magazine launched last summer, founder and CEO Jason Binn made the glossy’s missive clear: It was a luxury publication, in every sense of the word. The print edition would only be sent to the nation’s top-earners, the 1% demo who fit one of the five criteria, which included filters like “a home valued at a million and a half, or a quarter of a million dollar income, or a $5,000,000 net worth, or a charitable donation of $10,000,” according to Mr. Binn.
The online DuJour.com was partly its own creature, with original content and a larger readership base–accesible to any commoner with a modem–but it was still under the same brand which cultivated an air of exclusivity and wealth. So color us shocked to read today about DuJour Media’s partnership with BuzzFeed (BZFD), of all places, for a project called “Tell Us About Your Selfie.”
From the press release:
Launching in spring 2014, DuJour Media will run BuzzFeed’s regular “Tell Us About Your Selfie” features (a celebrity selfie photo and interview) in its magazine, aligned with Binn’s Binnshot page. DuJour Media’s luxury celebrity content will appear on celebrity pages on BuzzFeed, the social news and entertainment media company.
In the partnership with BuzzFeed, DuJour will leverage its access to celebrities and luxury tastemakers, to use in conjunction with BuzzFeed for events and content generation. Using BuzzFeed’s proprietary technology and data from the BuzzFeed Partner Network, the most shareable and social content from DuJour will be triggered in real-time and will be promoted to BuzzFeed’s audience.
“Combining BuzzFeed’s unique voice and massive audience with DuJour unprecedented access to the world’s most interesting celebrities is a partnership for the record books. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be working together,” said Jason Binn, DuJour Media Founder & CEO.
“Over the past twenty years, Jason Binn has been a mentor and a definitive thought leader in celebrity and lifestyle media, and I couldn’t be more excited to bring together our two companies,” said Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed President & COO. He continued, “Jason built the field of celebrity and lifestyle coverage and Buzzfeed built the field of distribution of content across social networks. It’s the perfect pairing of two entrepreneurial businesses.”
Yeah, it pairs like Petrus Pomerol and a list of 29 hair hacks. But in all seriousness, we can actually see how this is so crazy it might work. After all, celebrities love to take selfies, and Buzzfeed loves to post about them. Mr. Binn has the roladex and the influence to get even more celebrities to take even more selfies (and is basically already doing so with Binn Shots), thus creating even more content for ben smith’s legions of content farmers. DuJour gets more pageviews and recognition, Buzzfeed gets an intro to a higher class of advertiser. We all get to look at a higher class of celebrity selfies than Justin Bieber’s dad.
It’s what we in the biz call a “win-win-win.”
