You may be getting some vague tingle in the back of your brain. Didn't Buzzfeed already shut down? Well, no, not exactly. Back in 2023, Buzzfeed News, which was the part of Buzzfeed that did actual news stories, shut down.
BuzzFeed News, a pioneering digital news site that won a Pulitzer Prize and stirred controversy by publishing the Steele dossier, said Thursday it will close after 12 years.
In a staff memo, Jonah Peretti, the site’s co-founder and chief executive, said his company would lay off 15 percent of its employees and begin shuttering BuzzFeed News, which was started in late 2011 as an adjunct to BuzzFeed, a site that specializes in creating more frivolous content such as viral “listicles” about celebrities and popular culture.
BuzzFeed and its sister publication, HuffPost, will continue, but the news site will be wound down, Peretti wrote.
The site limped along for a while, losing lots of money, until this May when Byron Allen bought a controlling interest in the company.
Byron Allen, the comedian turned entrepreneur, is buying a controlling stake in BuzzFeed, the digital media company that pioneered virality on the internet.
Allen Family Digital, a company associated with Mr. Allen, will pay $120 million for a 52 percent stake in BuzzFeed, the companies said on Monday. Mr. Allen will become chief executive and chairman of BuzzFeed, replacing Jonah Peretti, the company’s founder, who will become president of artificial intelligence...
Mr. Peretti decided to sell this time as BuzzFeed grappled with serious financial pressure. The company told investors this year that it was at risk of not continuing as a business as it struggled with $58.4 million in debt and millions in annual losses. Mr. Peretti said experiments with artificial intelligence were a bright spot for the company, and he oversaw the creation of interactive games made with the technology.
The losses were massive. Buzzfeed lost $15 million in just the past quarter.
In its latest quarter, BuzzFeed reported a nearly 20 percent decline in advertising revenue year-over-year. The company’s net loss for the quarter was $15.1 million, up from $12.5 million last year.
Now here we are two months later and Allen has dropped the hammer. About a third of the remaining workforce is being cut.
In the first major restructuring move of Byron Allen‘s ownership tenure, BuzzFeed Inc is set for a significant round of layoffs, with some 180 staffers to be given pink slips companywide, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
BuzzFeed, across all its units, had approximately 510 employees prior to the cuts. The company said it expects to see $29 million to $32 million in annualized savings from the move to cut staff, it said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. The layoffs amount to a 35 percent reduction in staff for the media brand that owns HuffPost, Tasty and BuzzFeed Studios.
Saving $30 million a year is good, but it seems like it might not be enough if you're losing $15 million a quarter. Allen is promising big things for the future.
Mr. Allen has promised investors big things for BuzzFeed, which is one of many properties in his media empire. When he acquired BuzzFeed, he said it was “chasing YouTube and the other big tech platforms,” and promised to fuel the company’s ambitions in streaming and user-generated content, an industry term for video not created by employees.
I guess we'll see if he can deliver or if Buzzfeed continues to shrink over time. At one point, the company had more than 1,200 employees. Now it's down to about 330 after this move. I'm not exactly bullish on the company's future but Allen seems to be doing pretty well with his other investments. He recently took over Stephen Colbert's late night slot. His approach is definitely a new one for that time slot.
The Comics Unleashed host — whose comedy talk show will take over the Late Night with Stephen Colbert time slot following the Late Show's conclusion — appeared on CBS Mornings on Wednesday, May 20 and insisted there will be "no politics" on his show as it takes on CBS' overnight shift.
"No. No politics," Allen, 65, said. "That’s it. You come, you laugh. I created the show 20 years ago and we’re about to have our 20th anniversary this fall. The 20th anniversary of Comic’s Unleashed, 20 years of laughter."
He added, "We’ve had on a thousand comedians — every shape and size, you name it. I want to bring people together using comedy."
So, Allen seems like a smart guy and is very successful. That said, I haven't visited Buzzfeed one time since the last time I wrote about Buzzfeed's decline. I'm not sure who is using this site anymore. It's basically just the same flashy headlines and stories about whatever they found on Reddit. What's the point?
