laybuzz was founded in 2012 by Shaul Olmert and Tom Pachys. Olmert is the son of former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert[6] and has worked as an executive with Nickelodeon and also co-founded the social game app GameGround.[7] Pachys is a graduate of IDC and also the co-founder of Whimado.
Playbuzz was founded as PlayChanger in July 2012. PlayChanger worked with game developers and publishers to distribute crowd-sourced content games within verticals such as sports, music and fashion. Playbuzz was officially launched in December 2013 as a modified version of PlayChanger.[8]
By June 2014, Playbuzz broke the top 10 of Facebook's most shared publishers.[9] The website itself reached 70 million unique views the same month, half of which were referred from Facebook.[9] Within 10 months of the Playbuzz platform's launch, it surpassed 7.5 million monthly Facebook shares, making it the second most shared publisher on Facebook in September 2014.[10]
According to Forbes, seven of the 10 biggest stories on Facebook in September 2014 involved content that originated on Playbuzz.[11] The company took over the number one spot as the most shared publisher on Facebook in November 2014 with approximately 9 million shares, holding the spot through January 2015 with an estimated 10 million shares.[12] Playbuzz was listed by Inc. as one of the 15 Israeli Startups Getting Hot at the Turn of 2015[13] and also voted one of Europe's Hottest Startups the same year by Wired.[14]
