There are countless efforts to reach people with this sort of information. Official medical sources, highbrow papers, trashy sites. What's to say that this isn't the best option to reach a certain segment and that, as a bonus, it reached beyond that?
Buzzfeed may well be a Trojan to get better content to those typically reading vapid junk? Or, more likely, a way of building a financially-secure publication from trashy beginnings.
If Buzzfeed can achieve financial security by creating an audience who enjoy feeble drivel ("54 Things You Probably Didn't Know About 'Gossip Girl'"), surely if they then start replacing that material with long-form, well-written, thought-provoking content (like this article), they run the risk of losing that audience? It seems to me that the people who want to see 27 pictures of Beyoncé with staccato-sentenced captions - and haven't grown sick of this type of content yet - probably don't ever want to read a long article about something more important than Paris Kardashian.
That rather than just vapid trash, I'd prefer seeing something occasionally informative in there for that market.
That monetising first through listicles in order to fundraise for more serious efforts could well be a valid strategy.
If you're Buzzfeed, and you're offering a bit of both, you can't really lose. You have the daily visitors reading their listicles and occasionally stumbling across something premium, and you have other markets who don't enter via the front page, but follow viral links from aggregators like HN or Reddit. Unless a front page is saturated with "ugh boring!!1" content, I don't know that there'd be a risk with their existing market.
One side of the fence gets slightly more educational content. The other gets more quality content, propped up by tabloid junk.
Buzzfeed may well be a Trojan to get better content to those typically reading vapid junk? Or, more likely, a way of building a financially-secure publication from trashy beginnings.