Transcription
It was once the king of the digital age… until its kingdom came crashing down. BuzzFeed went from winning Pulitzer Prizes to becoming a punchline in memes. Its fall was swift, dramatic, and spectacular. So, what happened to one of the most popular media companies of the 2010s? We’re revealing why this internet giant collapsed on today's episode of The Infographics Show - The Real Reason BuzzFeed Failed.
It’s hard to believe now, but Buzzfeed was once one of the “cool kids” of the Internet. Founded on November 1st, 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III, the site didn’t truly explode into the limelight until 2011. That year marked a turning point - BuzzFeed expanded rapidly, launched a news division, and began attracting massive online attention. Unfortunately, a lot of the reasons for its success turned out to be the reasons for its collapse.
Today Buzzfeed has become known for “what kind of melon are you?” listicles and collections of Reddit posts presented as original content. But before that, the site used to have a reporting team that won Pulitzer Prizes. Seriously. Articles from Buzzfeed News would set the Internet on fire, easily becoming viral at a time when legacy media was still trying to figure out how to get their stories out in this new Internet and social media landscape.
Peretti expanded the news site so aggressively that by 2013, he had hired 130 journalists from companies like ProPublica, Politico, and even The New York Times. Former Politico writer Ben Smith became the founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed news - until he abruptly left almost a decade later in 2020. Even New York Times news desk writer Lisa Tozzi transferred over to this new startup that was taking the media world by storm.
Despite being threatened by this new upstart, the old media was impressed. In February 2013, NYT reporter David Carr wrote, “Buzzfeed is growing some serious news muscle under a silly, frilly skin….it’s gone well so far, with comScore showing 10.8 million unique visitors in December, more than double that of the same month in 2010”.
To some, however, the problems with Buzzfeed’s strategy were already starting to show themselves. Choire Sicha, who founded The Awl and had worked in the digital scene for a while, was amused and cautious; “it’s fun to watch them make all these hires”, he said, “but it’s important that they don’t overspend. Web ad rates are what they are, and that isn’t going to change.” At least, not for the better.
Thus the first problem with Buzzfeed’s business strategy appeared - namely, that it didn’t really have one. Like Vice, and other upstart new media empires, Buzzfeed was so focused on views and disruption it didn’t really have a great plan in place for making money. And it didn’t realize how much it costs to run a serious news division - at least, not until after it had started one.
Sure, many start-up companies are in the red for the first couple of years of their lifespan. But the mistake Buzzfeed and Vice made is that they focused on views and virality rather than building a subscription base and securing recurring payments from users. This made sense for that era of the Internet - and we’ll get to the other huge problem later - but as soon as the site’s views started to decline, there was no plan B to fall back on.
Even in the midst of a deep crisis in profits, the New York Times managed to stay afloat by focusing on what they do best: investigative journalism and serious news. It attracted a class of readers who were willing to pay for it - or at least for the weekend crossword puzzles and eventually, Wordle.
But Buzzfeed was hyperfocused on viral articles and the youth market; which at the time, was mostly millennials. Around the time of Buzzfeed’s peak in 2015, Google Analytics showed that half of 18 to 34 year olds visited Buzzfeed.com at least every month. While this wasn’t bringing in cash, it made the company seem like a surefire soon-to-be success, leading massive old corporations to throw money at it and keep it afloat for a while.
NBCUniversal decided they wanted to get on board with one of the new media companies - a digital native, not a print-first-and-also-have-something-online press outlet. So they invested $200 million into Buzzfeed in 2015, followed by another $200 million investment in 2016. If you’re wondering why your Peacock subscription keeps increasing, it’s partly because of decisions like that.
As with other new business hype cycles, investment firms and old corporations throw money at a business that’s trending - even when it hasn’t figured out how to make money. They believe in jumping on the popular new thing before they understand it. The problem is, Buzzfeed was at a disadvantage partly because of its demographic, and partly because of its focus on views instead of money; young people coming out of a financial crisis were much more price sensitive than the average consumer.
As one Reuters report found that when it comes to subscriptions, price mattered a lot with a younger audience. 41% of non-subscribers aged 18-24 and 31% of non-subscribers aged 25-34 said they’d be more likely to pay for news if the price was cheaper. Meanwhile, only 29% of 45-54 year olds and 22% of 55+ year olds said the same thing. So the heads at Buzzfeed didn’t think a subscription model would work for their site - and honestly, they were probably right.
As one article in The Guardian observed about Buzzfeed’s young audience: “those users failed to spend any money there”. No one wants to pay $19.99 a month to look at “25 Songs That Will Make 90s Kids Cry” or find out what Disney animal sidekick they are. Obviously, we’re Mushu.
So how did Buzzfeed make any money at all? Well, since views were its priority, digital advertising was the obvious answer. With a combination of branded content and native ads, as well merchandise based on its popular content, it became profitable in 2013. However, exact numbers don’t exist because it wasn’t yet public - but in 2014 it was reported to have passed $100 million in revenue.
The media giant started expanding to other platforms as well to keep increasing reach, collaborating with NBC Olympics’ Snapchat Discover channel. If you’re wondering what Snapchat Discover is, you might be starting to understand part of the other problem with Buzzfeed’s business strategy. They were trying way too hard to be on trend rather than developing its own niche. Because Buzzfeed relied too much on views - and its views were not its own to control.
But before we get to that, let’s go into what Buzzfeed was publishing. When the site first started declining in views, it decided it would throw all the spaghetti - or in this case, endless listicles and quizzes - at the wall to see what would stick. As former employee Kenny Moffitt pointed out, “to Buzzfeed, in a lot of cases, quantity trumps quality”. And the result of this new philosophy was.. a mass exodus of its most talented people. And this proved especially bad when recognizable Buzzfeed creators left. Viewers connected with these creators and each departure made them less and less likely to come back.
Because Buzzfeed wasn’t just about the articles - its multiple YouTube channels racked up tons of views in the mid-2010s. In 2015, Buzzfeed’s channels hit a new record - a combined 1.8 billion video views for the month of August. Of those, Buzzfeed Video - the flagship channel - got 772 million views, making it the most popular video creator on the platform according to Tubular. Buzzfeed Food amassed 426 million video views, ranking number five on Tubular’s list. Meaning at one point, Buzzfeed was so popular it had two different YouTube channels on the top ten most popular creators list. A couple of years later, in April of 2017, Buzzfeed’s Tasty channel - focused on short recipe videos - passed one billion views. But then, something started to change. Views started declining, slowly at first, then rapidly sliding.
Buzzfeed might not have been great at making profits, or developing a long-term business plan, but it was amazing at one thing: finding talented creators and giving them the platform and resources to grow. There’s one problem with that though. Many creators were so talented and connected with audiences so well, that they realized they didn’t need Buzzfeed anymore - and the company was actively holding them back.
Buzzfeed series like The Try Guys and Buzzfeed Unsolved became ridiculously popular, easily collecting over 10 or 20 million views per video at one point. Audiences would frequently comment that the series’ creators were carrying Buzzfeed on their back. The Try Guys - Zach Kornfeld, Eugene Lee Yang, Keith Habersberger, and Ned Fulmer - became so huge that they left and started their own channel, one that has almost 8 million subscribers today. And no, we won’t be going into all their drama.
Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej of Buzzfeed Unsolved created content around true crime stories and ghost hunts that made them YouTube stars. This led to their own eventual departure from the company to set up their own channel - Watcher. Because while they were all still at Buzzfeed, both The Try Guys and the Unsolved Guys were salaried employees. That meant if their videos performed well, the bulk of the profit, if not all of it, went to Buzzfeed. So even if the creators got fewer views by making their own YouTube channel, they would still get to keep all the money their videos made. And perhaps - seeing the writing on the wall for the direction Buzzfeed was headed in - they realized they should leave as fast as possible. Thankfully, they did.
Watcher has just under 3 million subscribers as of July 2025, and multiple videos that have hit and passed 1 million views in the last couple of months. Meanwhile, Buzzfeed video - with almost 20 million subscribers - has barely gotten over 20,000 views on its last few videos this year. And the problem many former creators had wasn’t just financial; it was also creative. Because there were much bigger problems than money behind the scenes.
After leaving, many creators went public with the challenges they faced working at Buzzfeed. It got so bad that, “Why I Left Buzzfeed” videos could have become their own category on YouTube. Former individual Buzzfeed creators like Safiya Nygaard and Quinta Brunson have blown up in popularity after leaving the company. Safiya has amassed over 10 million subscribers and travels the world with her own YouTube channel. Quinta Brunson became an Emmy and Peabody award winner, working as the creator, producer, co-writer, and star of the hit series Abbott Elementary.
Creators like Nygaard, Madej, and Bergara talked about wanting more control of their content, as well as ownership of it. Like many other media companies, Buzzfeed owned the content made by the creators they hired. However, unlike most other media companies, Buzzfeed didn’t always give credit where it was due. There were some exceptions, as with the Buzzfeed Unsolved series, where - because of the setup - it was obvious that Ryan and Shane were running things. But Safiya Nygaard shared that many people thought she was just an actress on the series she had helped create and produce - Ladylike. It became a pretty popular series for Buzzfeed, with each video racking up between 1 and 8 million views. Yet it was also sometimes unclear which creator had contributed to which video behind the scenes, frequently leaving Buzzfeed employees like Safiya in awkward situations. As she stated in her own video after leaving the company, “because our names aren’t attached to the videos that we make, people would often ask me to explain or answer for videos or articles that were produced by other people that I had nothing to do with”.
Further complicating the position of creators, Buzzfeed banned them from engaging with their audience in any way. Not only were they not allowed to reply to comments from fans and audience members, they were even discouraged from reading the comments in the first place. For many YouTubers, connecting and engaging with a community on the platform is something that both helps improve their content and increases their chances for brand growth - and Buzzfeed was taking that chance away from them.
Creators like Nygaard and the Unsolved guys got tired of creating great, popular brands for Buzzfeed that they didn’t own. At one point, Nygaard realized that Buzzfeed was considering selling merchandise with her name on it, to capitalize on her popularity; realistically, she would not make any money off those sales. The idea of the company being able to sell her name and likeness without her gaining anything from it - in effect, owning them - was the final straw for Nygaard, who left soon after.
There were problems on the print side as well, with massive layoffs starting at Buzzfeed in the late 2010s. In 2018, Buzzfeed laid off its entire in-house podcasting team. In 2019, CEO Jonah Peretti followed this up with a massive round of layoffs - around 220 employees - mostly in the company’s news, international, and LGBTQ+ divisions. This didn’t help their image. Many of the people laid off were POC or part of the LGBQT+ community, which went counter to Buzzfeed’s original image as an organization sharing stories from marginalized communities - something that had made it appeal to millennial audiences in the first place.
Not only were employees laid off, but at first, those outside California weren’t even offered payouts for the paid time off they had accrued and hadn’t used before they were fired. Though Peretti eventually reversed this decision - after being called out by his own streaming show - it left a sour taste in both the fired employees’ mouths. And those who were left behind were thinking about how they might be treated in the future.
In 2020, Ben Smith - the founding editor of Buzzfeed News - left to take a position at The New York Times - a move that undermined general confidence in the future of the company’s news division. People started wondering how much longer Buzzfeed could stay afloat. However, Peretti decided he was still going to find a way to right the ship. The company would focus on Buzzfeed originals - the lighthearted content and the occasional in-depth news story that had made the media company popular in the first place.
And Buzzfeed did continue doing some important work; in 2021, their news division won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Chinese internment camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang. They also did groundbreaking investigative work when reporting on the FinCEN Files, exposing corruption in global banking. Despite some quality work coming out of the site, the majority of the content had reverted back to Buzzfeed original clickbait, with slightly different versions of ten catchy title formats. And trust me, you won't believe number six! But there’s not much substance to actually make people read. This further worsened their brand recognition, as to many people it seemed like Buzzfeed couldn’t decide what it was - light hearted entertainment or serious news stories?
Even worse, the company had been so focused on keeping its shrinking and aging audience captive - that it wasn’t doing much on the platforms where young audiences actually were. Young viewers were moving en masse to platforms like TikTok, and wanted shorter, bite-sized video content that Buzzfeed wasn’t providing. And that’s when Buzzfeed realized - entirely too late - that it had bet on just one, very wrong horse: Facebook.
You remember Facebook, right? It’s that platform you log onto twice a month to remember when your friend’s birthday is without asking and mute your aunt to remain her rants about lizard people… again. Once upon a time though, Facebook - like Buzzfeed - was cool. So cool, in fact, that it propped up other websites along with it, promoting articles on their platform that went viral and helping media companies - like Buzzfeed - succeed. But eventually, Mark Zuckerberg realized, he’d rather keep all the money, rather than letting other companies and websites capture his audience on Facebook. And so little by little, the Facebook algorithm started to change.
By the second quarter of 2024, Widely Viewed Content Report found that 96.7% of views on Facebook did not include a link to an outside source. Naturally, Buzzfeed’s views started declining. Posts that would previously go viral were barely seen by anyone except Buzzfeed employees, furiously checking the site’s Facebook page to understand what was happening with the article they just wrote.
As anyone who’s worked with, or even had social media accounts knows, thanks to changing algorithms, views started to take a nosedive in the late 2010s and never really recovered. Average engagement rates on Facebook in 2024 had dropped to around 0.05%. This number drops further to 0.03% for pages with over 100,000 fans, and 0.02% for any post with a link. In 2017, traffic from Facebook to a group of major US news sites dropped by 40% after just one algorithm update.
That became a real problem for Buzzfeed, as the company realized it had almost completely relied on Facebook to get its posts out to its audience. After all, most Buzzfeed viewers weren’t even subscribers to the platform, let alone paid subscribers. They just kept coming across viral posts and clicking on them. Though Buzzfeed did get over a million subscribers for its newsletter in just one year, they still didn’t have a funnel to make their subscribers paying customers. Other media companies realized they should use virality and social media to convert audience members into paid subscribers. For example, in 2023, Times Co. - New York Times’ parent company - makes 67% of its revenue from subscriptions and 23% from ads.
When Buzzfeed realized Zuckerberg did not have their back, it was too late. On December 6, 2021, Buzzfeed decided to go public on the stock market, hoping a valuation of $1.5 billion and stock shares would help its deteriorating financial condition. And…the launch couldn’t have gone worse. It made the company look bad to the public, and even worse to their employees.
Buzzfeed stock started at $10 a share; it fell so sharply in the next few days - 39% in just one week, to $6.07 per share - that it caused investors to lose even more faith in the company. And not only investors; Buzzfeed employees, thanks to their agreements with the company, were not able to sell their shares until they had dropped to less than $5…60% down from their initial offering on the stock market. At that point, anyone who was left at Buzzfeed and still wanted a career in content creation or media started making their exit plan. The others, angry at having to sell their shares at such a low price, and mad at Buzzfeed executives for a disastrous stock market rollout, sued Buzzfeed for $8.7 million. They alleged that the company “had failed to properly instruct them on how to trade their shares immediately after the initial public offering in December”, according to one New York Times article about the lawsuit.
CEO Peretti was harshly criticized following not only Buzzfeed’s horrendous stock performance, but also its absolute failure to keep up with the times and stay afloat. To his credit, Peretti himself did accept his failures when - in April 2023 - he announced that he would have to shut down Buzzfeed News after ten years in operation. He said that he was “slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”
Because the most heartbreaking thing about the fall of Buzzfeed is that it didn’t have to happen. Though the company had a few different issues, its biggest failure was trying to stay trendy on social media and chasing success on the back of Facebook’s constantly changing - and sometimes hostile - algorithms. Blinded by this, they failed to realize that social media was slowly turning its back on both Buzzfeed and other digital media companies in general.
But Buzzfeed didn’t have to go the way of Vice and so many other digital media upstarts. Digital media outlet Politico managed to secure a loyal customer base of political junkies by focusing on political news and analysis. At the same time, they sold subscriptions to in-depth reports on policy intelligence to companies with deep pockets that need to know exactly how upcoming bills and laws can affect them.
And perhaps Peretti can still make things work. He has finally started diversifying Buzzfeed’s revenues, moving away from native advertising over the years. By 2020, native ads only made up 20% of the company’s income. Peretti has launched plenty of Buzzfeed branded products, set up affiliate channels so that Buzzfeed gets commissions from purchases people make through their content. And this has put the company solidly in the black.
In the last quarter of 2024, though Buzzfeed’s revenue was down 20% to $56 million, it did go into 2025 with $39 million in cash compared to only $25.5 million in debt. Considering just a year before the company owed $124 million, this was a major achievement. So can Buzzfeed succeed? Well…yes. But. It’s important to note that Buzzfeed got all this cash after selling off a bunch of assets - like Complex and First We Feast - to pay down debt. While this may help the media company stay more narrowly focused on what content it wants to produce, it doesn’t have that much left to sell should it need a cash injection. Peretti is aiming for a total of $195 to $210 million in profit in 2025; let’s see.
Because the other issue is that online, Buzzfeed has become a bit of a joke. It’s an archive of out of touch media formats and millennial humor, trendy clickbait that’s about eight years off trend. It still has a long way to go to recover its reputation. BuzzFeed didn’t just mess up - they got left behind. And weirdly enough, the same thing is happening over at the Golden Arches. Watch The Real Reason McDonald's Is Failing to find out why happy meals are only happy in name. Or click on this video instead.