BuzzFeed officially lands in the UK with a new localized homepage

Almost three months after BuzzFeed landed $19.3m to help grows its social/viral news site, a new UK-centric edition of the Web publication has officially opened for business.

While we already knew it was coming, UK-based BuzzFeed fans will – from today – see slightly different content on the homepage to those living elsewhere in the world. Indeed, courtesy of a team of four London-based journalists headed up by former NME man Luke Lewis, stories deemed to be of interest to a more local readership will be surfaced.

So, unlike the Huffington Post which launched a dedicated UK portal back in 2011, BuzzFeed is adopting a more low-key localization effort based around homepage content and a UK-specific Twitter account.

There’s already a number of British stories on the homepage, such as 43 Things British People Know To Be True, and you can expect to see similar gems cropping up from now on.

BuzzFeed was founded by Jonah Peretti back in 2006 – after he co-founded Huffington Post – and today it has more than 180 employees. It made its first acquisition last year, snapping up New York startup Kingfish Labs, which processes natural language on Facebook to determine user interests.

The publication claims more than 40 million unique monthly visitors (2 million from the UK alone), with a third of its traffic stemming from mobile. And it says its revenue grew more than threefold in 2012, though it hasn’t provide actual sales numbers.