BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti as a laboratory for studying why things spread online, running alongside his work at the Huffington Post. It was explicitly an experiment in virality before it was a publication, which shaped everything it later became.
It turned into two quite different organisations sharing a name. One produced quizzes, listicles and the sort of content engineered for sharing; the other was BuzzFeed News, which won a Pulitzer Prize before being closed in 2023 as the economics of digital media collapsed around it.
Its most durable contribution was probably Tasty, launched in 2015: the overhead, sped-up, silent recipe video that autoplayed in a feed and was understood without sound. That format was copied by essentially every food publisher within a year and remains the default way recipes are shown online.
Why people save these clips
Recipes are the obvious case. An overhead cooking video is genuinely useful in a kitchen, and a saved file plays instantly without adverts, without a page reloading, and without a connection you may not have where you are standing.
Media companies also fold. BuzzFeed News closed and its archive became a subject of real concern, and anyone who has watched a publication disappear knows that its back catalogue goes with remarkable speed.
And the format suits offline use. A silent, captioned, sixty-second clip is exactly the sort of thing you want on a phone rather than streamed from a page heavy with advertising.
Saving a BuzzFeed clip
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1
Copy the article or video address
Take the buzzfeed.com or tasty.co address from your browser. An article page containing a video works, as does a video page directly.
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2
Slot the link into the box above
Paste it into the field at the top of this page, which begins reading it at once.
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3
Take the file
Recipe and article clips are short, so there is normally one sensible version with its size shown.
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4
Take it to the kitchen
Tap the row when it turns blue. Downloads on Android, the Files app on an iPhone.
Articles, embeds and where the video comes from
As with any publisher, the video inside an article is not always the publisher's own, which determines whether it can be fetched.
Checking what you are actually looking at
Video in their own player — which covers most Tasty recipes and original productions — behaves straightforwardly. Embedded YouTube, Instagram or TikTok players are somebody else's file, and those platforms have their own pages here.
The quickest way to tell is the player itself. If it carries YouTube's controls or an Instagram frame, the video belongs there and copying that platform's address is the route.
Tasty recipes are also published across several platforms simultaneously, so the same clip frequently exists on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook as well. If one route is awkward, another usually works.
BuzzFeed download questions
Do Tasty recipe videos work?
Yes, where they play in the publisher's own player, which most do. They are also posted to several other platforms if you would rather use one of those.
Why will an article video not save?
It is probably an embed from YouTube or a social platform. Copy that platform's address and use its page here instead.
Can I save the recipe text as well?
No, this handles video. A browser's own save or print function covers the text.
What quality are these clips?
Published at ordinary web resolutions and designed for feeds rather than large screens. That is how they were encoded.
Is BuzzFeed News content still available?
The operation closed in 2023 and the fate of parts of its archive has been uncertain, which is a fair argument for saving anything you rely on.
Do tasty.co addresses work?
Yes, alongside buzzfeed.com ones.
Where does the BuzzFeed file save?
Downloads on Android, the Files app on an iPhone.
Is there a BuzzFeed limit?
No cap and no queue.
An article I had bookmarked has gone.
Digital publishers have been through severe contraction, and archives are frequently casualties of that. It is why copies matter.
Is saving these clips acceptable?
A recipe video kept to cook from is entirely ordinary use. The clips are professionally produced work, so republishing them as your own content is a different matter.