BuzzFeed’s Cultural Cachet: Here's How's that "Clickbait Fiesta" is Doing Now

OK..."But what worked in 2015 is a far cry from what works in 2022. On Monday, BuzzFeed reported earnings for the fourth time as a public company, recording $103.7 million in revenue for the latest quarter, above its own projections. But the rest of the news was dire: BuzzFeed lost $27 million, and the time audiences spent with its content plunged 32 percent from a year ago — its fourth straight quarterly decline. The company expects revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022 to dip compared to last year as well.

BuzzFeed’s ability to reflect, amplify, and create massive cultural moments by giving a staff of hundreds free rein to invent new formats led to a $1.7 billion valuation in 2016. . .

CREATORS 

The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed built a digital media empire in part by aggregating viral content from social media. A decade later, what’s next?

Mia Sato is a reporter at The Verge covering digital platforms and the people who use them. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, MIT Technology Review, Chicago Magazine and elsewhere.

Nov 16, 2022, 7:00 AM MST|10 Comments / 10 New

. . .Today, BuzzFeed’s high-profile hosts have moved on, its news division has been gutted, and its core website pays contractors flat rates starting around $100 per post to chase trending topics. The company’s valuation is down to just $237 million, and dozens of current and former employees are suing BuzzFeed for losing out on millions, saying they weren’t able to sell their shares during the brief financial bright spot after the company went public last year. They now watch from the outside as the company’s value plummets and newer, more ruthless competitors native to the platforms themselves generate viral chum faster and more cheaply. 

As social platforms continue to limit its reach, BuzzFeed needs to generate one more neat trick to reinvent digital media — and save itself in the process.

. . .BuzzFeed still connects with young people, she says, but the bigger problem is that brands generally have lost the trust of their audience. To counter the shifting power from institutions to individuals, BuzzFeed’s plan is to make writers, curators, and other “creators” a more central part of its structure and mission. It’s a tactic that should sound familiar to anyone who followed BuzzFeed years ago because it was BuzzFeed employees and talent that created a loyal following. One by one, they left or were laid off. 

As a former staffer who worked on the business side of the company put it: the BuzzFeed brand just isn’t cool anymore.

“I just feel wistful for early BuzzFeed days. It was a very specific time on the internet and a very specific vibe on the internet,” Holderness says. As we talk, she points to the hoodie draped over the chair she’s sitting on: a branded relic from her time at BuzzFeed.

“It was really fun.”