Digital Media: What Went Wrong

The company’s revenue grew more than 15 percent in 2018 — not quite enough to stave off Mr. Peretti’s decision to cut about 220 of BuzzFeed’s roughly 1,500 employees. As he put it in a recent staff memo, “Unfortunately, revenue growth by itself isn’t enough to be successful in the long run.”

Ben Thompson, an analyst who has become a favorite among the Silicon Valley set, argued that BuzzFeed had inadvertently devalued its content by mostly relying on the kindness of digital giants to distribute its articles.

Facebook’s changes to its News Feed in recent years increased the visibility of posts from your aunts and uncles while playing down articles from professional publishers. That was no good for sites like BuzzFeed.

“The only way to build a thriving business in a space dominated by an aggregator is to go around them, not to work with them,” Mr. Thompson wrote in his Jan. 28 newsletter.

Digital Revolution? More Like Evolution

In BuzzFeed’s youth, Facebook was not the dominant traffic driver it is today, and online sharing was just as likely to occur away from social media platforms. (Remember email?) Five years into its existence, in 2011, the site got newsier, with the addition of Politico’s Ben Smith as its editor in chief, along with a team of editors and reporters. In 2015, Mr. Thompson, the analyst, called BuzzFeed “the most important news organization in the world.”

After that, Mr. Peretti adjusted his approach again. He determined that Facebook had already built the pipes for distribution, so instead of trying to amass audiences around a single venue, like BuzzFeed.com, he went where the audience was: Facebook.

That was back when Facebook was considered a natural ally for media organizations seeking millions of online readers, and before Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, was made to testify before skeptical lawmakers in Washington and Brussels.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/business/media/buzzfeed-digital-media-wrong.html?partner=rss&emc=rss