What’s left of the company (including the good, hard-working employees who are not fired) will have to navigate the wreckage created by an industry with a broken economic model. I’m worried, on a practical level, about what might happen to the site’s archives, as well as the nearly 200 people the company plans to lay off.
I am sad and angry that the extractive practices of modern finance, the whims of rich and powerful investors, and the race-to-the-bottom economics of the digital-media industry have stripped BuzzFeed for parts. News, no matter how much technology you wrap around it, may be a public good, but if you’re looking for Facebook-level exits, it’s a bad bet. It took less than four years to fully internalize the lesson that venture capitalism is just a form of gambling: You invest in 10 companies to make money off one, and employees are the chips. I started hearing people whispering the word profitability-a term I’d never had occasion to hear around the office-a lot more. This was the first time I heard internal rumblings of investor concern. Just how infectious was this “perpetual growth” mindset? In the mid-2010s, BuzzFeed turned down a rumored $500 million acquisition from Disney, perhaps in part because it wanted to become Disney.Īround the time I left in 2019, it became clear that browsing and attention habits were shifting, turning places like Facebook into ghost towns for politically radicalized Boomers. The fate of the entire digital-media ecosystem was dependent on the line going up and to the right in perpetuity-or at least until the moneymen saw their returns. BuzzFeed News’s bread and butter-telling the internet’s stories and leveraging its systems to promote them-was only nominally a technology strategy, and one that was yoked to the success of other venture-funded social-media companies, including Facebook. The business of news gathering-not content creation-is expensive, and it does not scale. "BuzzFeed News was not, as Andreesen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon once said, a “full-stack startup.” This should’ve been blindingly obvious.
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