In an all-hands meeting with the BuzzFeed News team the day its shutdown, Peretti told that team that he “should have started putting us on a path of profitability six, seven years ago,” said Albert Samaha, a (now former) senior reporter at BuzzFeed News. And 94% of the $287.5 million the SPAC raised was withdrawn by initial investors when it merged with the publisher to take BuzzFeed public. But a year later, BuzzFeed’s stock was trading at roughly less than a third of the value it had when it debuted, at around $3 a share. At the time, the deal valued BuzzFeed at $1.5 billion. As part of the deal, the media company acquired Complex Networks from Hearst and Verizon for $300 million. Right now, we need to be focused on businesses that will grow our revenue.” AI or IPO to blame?īuzzFeed announced it was going public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in June 2021. “With our current performance and the surrounding economic conditions, it became clear the company can’t afford a standalone BuzzFeed News organization at this time. “The decision to close is no reflection on the leadership of the newsroom or the progress they were making to monetize news,” said a BuzzFeed spokesperson in an email. “We exceeded our Q1 goals and were poised to make this newsroom financially sustainable over the course of 2023, only to be told - four months in - that we were out of time,” Waclawiak wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News’ staff. HuffPost came back under Peretti’s purview in 2020 when he acquired it from Verizon Media Group.īuzzFeed News’ editor-in-chief Karolina Waclawiak had one year to make the division profitable when she took the job in June 2022. Peretti left HuffPost in 2011 when it was acquired by AOL and turned his attention full-time to BuzzFeed, tapping Politico’s Ben Smith to lead its newsroom. Peretti was one of HuffPost’s (then called The Huffington Post) co-founders when it launched in 2005, and created BuzzFeed as a side-gig in 2006. Facebook especially has been a culprit of this, he added. Most of the social traffic was coming from Facebook for both publications - 56% of BuzzFeed News’ social traffic was from Facebook, compared to 55% of HuffPost’s.Īs short-form vertical video is prioritized, Eisenband said external links back to publishers’ sites are less amplified within social media platforms’ walled gardens, as the goal is to keep users on their app. Social channels made up 26% of BuzzFeed News’ traffic, compared to 13% at HuffPost. Even for the whole of 2022, BuzzFeed News’s average monthly unique visitors was about 19.5 million compared to HuffPost’s 22.4 million - a difference of only about 15%.įrom January-March 2023, 31% of BuzzFeed News’ traffic direct, compared to 57% of HuffPost’s traffic, according to SimilarWeb data. Notably, Comscore data showed that HuffPost’s average monthly unique visitors for the first three months of 2023 was only 13% higher than BuzzFeed News’ average monthly unique visitors: 22.6 million to vs. That traffic pattern combined with a general tough advertising market over the past year, would make it difficult to sustain a business. “Anyone relying on social referrals as a key monetization factor has struggled in the last couple of years,” said Justin Eisenband, senior managing director of corporate finance in the Telecom, Media & Technology division at FTI Consulting. They declined to comment on how close to profitability the news division was. The site is still “profitable” and has a “loyal direct front page audience,” Peretti claimed in the memo, but a company spokesperson did not provide numbers to affirm that claim.īuzzFeed News was the only part of the company that was unprofitable, a BuzzFeed spokesperson said. Peretti hopes its remaining BuzzFeed News readers will migrate to HuffPost, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020, and quickly laid off 70 people in a restructuring to make it profitable. This round of layoffs comes after BuzzFeed cut 12% of its workforce in December 2022, and offered buyouts to the news division last March. BuzzFeed News has about 60 employees, and some will be offered jobs at other parts of the company, according to a report from The New York Times, but the number of employees who will stay with BuzzFeed was not disclosed. And then as social media goes away, the tide comes out, but HuffPost is still kind of there among the rocks.”īuzzFeed Inc.’s CRO Edgar Hernandez and COO Christian Baesler will depart the company in the next few weeks and 180 staffers, or 15% of the company, are being laid off. And then got kind of eclipsed by BuzzFeed in the social media age. BuzzFeed News was “a social media ecosystem company, and the ecosystem went away,” said a former BuzzFeed exec who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “… HuffPost was a pre-social media company.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |