There are few stories quite as wonderfully tragic as BuzzFeed's. They jumped in head first into the political propaganda arm of the media and were one of the first such agencies to experience great financial gains because of this. One could say that they were in on the ground floor of "fake news."
Buzzfeed initially experience wild success by being a real force in social media and they covered things that had become viral. For those of us that don't live on social media nor do we care to, this was actually a very useful thing that they were doing at the time. You could find out what was going viral, whether for good reasons or not, without actually being a part of the system. I found it useful because I don't really care enough about modern pop-culture to dive into it, but I also don't want to be completely in the dark when language changes or there is some sort of thing going on that it seems everyone know about.
In my mind those were the glory years but just like a lot of other online "news" outlets Buzzfeed suddenly found themselves with a ton of competition and didn't really have a plan on how to evolve with the times. A great deal of their traffic was generated by redirects from social media but when Google, Facebook, IG, and Twitter changed their algorithms to redirect to their own partners, Buzzfeed saw a dramatic drop in visitors and therefore a drop in the amount of money they could charge for advertising, which as far as I know is still their only source of revenue.
Between 2014 to 2022 they saw a massive drop in their company's valuation as it went from $1.7 billion to a mere $144 million. This doesn't even cover the $50 million and $200 million cash and later $400 million cash injections they received from NBC alone. As it stands now the company is valued at $89 million and they have laid off 15% (probably more) of their staff and completely shut down their "news" branch of the company.
Their biggest mistake was not adopting with the times of course since nobody really pays a lot of direct advertising anymore and hasn't for a long time but this wasn't the only reason why they had such a rapid downfall.
Buzzfeed became one of those companies that was so politically biased and so "woke", which is a term that I have grown to loathe, that they completely alienated over 50% of their potential audience. The way that it was described by some pundits kind of hits the nail on the head as to what made BuzzFeed completely lose relevance as a source of any news.
"BuzzFeed News is/was a mixture of incessantly woke grandstanding, oddly combined with an almost Daily Mail-esque thirst for celebrity gossip, interspersed with some genuinely great reporting."
I think that BuzzFeed learned the hard way what most of the MSM is slowly starting to realize as well: You can't alienate more than half of your potential audience or guilt them into reading by continually calling everyone racist, homophobic, islamaphoic, transphobic, and insert whatever other made up phobia they want to call people.
BuzzFeed also fell victim to the same thing that many smaller companies that expanded very rapidly fell victim to: They went all in on a political stance that was initially profitable for them but as people lost more and more faith in the media, eyes started focusing elsewhere or simply tuning out altogether.
I think that this is where most people are these days in that they reject news from any source and this is probably a good thing. No news is better than news that was intended to manipulate you and unfortunately that is what 90% of all news is these days.
I don't normally think about BuzzFeed at all but because it is a hobby of mine I put a generic search in Brave that said something along the lines of "terrible news headlines" and BuzzFeed's page was the first result. Initially I was thinking "BuzzFeed is still around?" so I clicked on it to see how they were going to interject politics or social issues into this only to discover that ALL 21 of their headlines now show this.
To me it is hilarious that they have gone so far down the hole of failure that their search result, which was number one, has all broken links on it. This would be acceptable of something a teenager made for a school project but a once $1.7 billion company? Well, that's not so OK. But as the saying goes BuzzFeed "built this maze they can't get through" and are now facing eventual oblivion.
Honestly, I think that even a company as disgraced and discarded as BuzzFeed could turn it all around if they would issue an apology, publicly announce that they made a terrible error in judgement, fire everyone, and then start doing actual unbiased reporting. Honesty! Why is no one doing this?
If they don't completely change direction BuzzFeed will completely disappear and really, that would be best. I hope all the other ones follow you as well BF!
