Cleary joins from Comedy Central where she was senior vice-president of strategic insights and research for the past three and a half years. She has also worked at Viacom, Adobe Omniture, CBS, Comscore and ACNielsen.

In this role she will expand BuzzFeed’s insights to help advertisers’ campaigns, lead thought-leadership on audiences and measurement practices; as well as help establish accurate and standardised distributed measurement of cross-platform audiences.

Cleary will be based in New York and report to Lee Brown, BuzzFeed’s chief revenue officer.

Brown said: “Shari’s deep understanding of audiences and the way they engage with content across platforms, as well as her impressive background in digital media make her the perfect choice to lead our research and insights group. I’m confident her leadership and ability to tell data driven narratives will provide better insights for our partners.”