Founder’s Big Idea to Revive BuzzFeed’s Fortunes? A Merger With Rivals

He pointed to how Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have had to answer for the latest content crisis plaguing social media. In addition to Russia’s misinformation campaign to try to sway the 2016 presidential election in the United States, hate speech and conspiracy theories regularly show up on their platforms.

“Having some bigger companies that actually care about the quality of the content feels like something that’s very valuable,” he said.

Though initial discussions involving a few companies have taken place, they were all very preliminary, according to five people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. BuzzFeed has spoken to at least one other company, while other publishers have had separate discussions, these people said. Mr. Peretti declined to name which companies he has talked to regarding any potential mergers.

Any deal would be difficult to pull off given the number of investors involved and the compounding losses that would result from combining several money-losing start-ups. Staff cuts would be inevitable.

Still, publishers have been getting squeezed by the tech platforms as online advertising rates continue to level off.

“If BuzzFeed and five of the other biggest companies were combined into a bigger digital media company, you would probably be able to get paid more money,” he said .

Content companies everywhere are hurting, especially after Facebook introduced a sweeping change in 2016 that significantly reduced the visibility of articles and videos from publishers in News Feed, its main artery of content. Vice Media will be profitable by the “next fiscal year,” the chief executive Nancy Dubuc said, but staff cuts would be needed to meet that goal. Vox Media, publisher of The Verge and Eater, has struggled to hit its more ambitious revenue targets. Group Nine, owner of popular sites such as The Dodo and Now This, has sought ways to get better ad terms from Facebook and Google. Refinery29, a publisher focused on videos aimed at young women, recently had to lay off nearly 10 percent of its staff.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/business/media/buzzfeed-jonah-peretti-mergers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss