BuzzFeed

“That was a business that did very well. They were very innovative around a different era of the internet and you could take search traffic and social media traffic and turned it into commerce dollars or other things. That era is gone.”

“So our plan and management's plan is to resolve that going concern. And really going, going back to founder mode of saying, hey we got to reinvent the company for this near future, and wanting investors to know there's risk to that, but also now we're getting …”

“There's a million tactical things that if I had a time machine, I could, you know, like not, not do a SPAC acquisition where we take on a bunch of debt you know, before and go public without raising capital. That was, that I would tell my younger self not to d…”

“It's not gonna go bankrupt next year.”

“It's thirty-three million dollars.”

“I've been asked, and I said no every time.”

“One of the things I saw when I was at Twitter was how easily you could inject cultural bias in your algorithms. I have so many stories about how if you pick the right kind of Twitter accounts, which then feed into the trending algorithm, which then feed into T…”

“Like, I think that's a, there's going to be a very large business to be created there, right? Like Buzzfeed, you know, hustle, et cetera. Like, you know, all of these were like high growth businesses in that era. Of news. And I think now there's going to be a …”

“That's a scale effect. And it's a very weak one. Yeah, no, he's very vulnerable. Just like Buzzfeed was very vulnerable and wasn't going to go anywhere.”

“And, you know, even in 2015, 20 17, we were like, yeah, PuzzFeed, it just doesn't make sense. It's not worth a billion dollars.”

“So we have a store in Williamsburg, and then we do a lot of business services types of arrangements with companies like Facebook and BuzzFeed and Chovani and Nike where we do plant installations, rentals, and so forth.”

“Well, so they sold off First We Feast, which is the like a parent company of the Hot Ones, Hot Wings TV show or YouTube show for 82.5 million dollars”

“They say Buzzfeed has sold the show hot ones for 82, 82.5 million dollars.”

“I sold a company to StumbleUpon, which was many years ago, a very large social network that would refer traffic to publishers' websites, and people used to see in their analytics that StumbleUpon would send them traffic. So then all of a sudden we'd have, like…”

“Vivek Ramaswamy he's now the second largest holder and shareholder in BuzzFeed”

“The thing I was positing is I expect we'll end up with the same outcome, right? Which is you're going to see a huge run up, a lot of excitement, but unfortunately the beast audience is in highly competitive, straight up media, right? Like it's straight up, you…”

“Well, I think Buzzfeed along with a lot of other publishers have sold out to programmatic and have relied upon the platforms, the Facebooks and the.”

“Vivek Ramaswani has declared his position in it, and he's gonna do like a mini Elon Trump thing to BuzzFeed, where he like, you know, at the cost of nothing, because the company's worth nothing, ends up doing this.”

“Somehow Buzzfeed has doubled its value from thirty million to seventy million dollars in market cap.”

“That, that led inevitably to everybody who was writing, trying to sort of fish for that traffic to sounding totally identical in the first place. And being completely bombastic in the second, and it eroded trust. So you have now nobody trusting you, and also y…”

“Translations are, it's a pretty shitty business, translation. It's five cents a word, but then pretty soon, suddenly, you know, the people from BuzzFeed found somebody else that would do it for four cents a word, because, and then we're like, fine, we'll do it…”

“Particularly like a Buzzfeed, right? Like they played a game for it. 10 years, it was all about effectively ranking, feed ranking, and things like that. There's not a durable business model. Like you're always one click away from getting swiped when the algori…”

“Buzzfeed did that, and it didn't work, but okay, let's go back to that.”

“BuzzFeed has over a thousand employees. They do four hundred million dollars in revenue, and the company's worth fifty million dollars in the public market.”

“You know, you can look at all these IPOs, my favorite being Buzzfeed trading at 33 cents right now down from 10 dollars. It's like, you know, Buzzfeed's entire market cap is fifty million dollars, right?”

“I don't believe they built up a true brand. They showed up in search results, they got traffic, but there were many, many people that religiously read Business Insider every single day. So it just had a brand that I think was much stronger and more defined.”

“I think he's probably the number one online digital media company. I don't know that, you know, I don't know what creator is going to mean in that many years. Like, I think he has the best pulse on, on online storytelling right now. And I think, you know, we s…”

“The other interesting thing is I just checked BuzzFeed's revenue, but 2022, they had four hundred and thirty seven million dollars of revenue and their business is worth eighty five million dollars today.”

“The hundred million seed round that was just raised is more than the current eighty-five million dollar market cap of BuzzFeed.”

“BuzzFeed News did a lot of great stuff. They won Pulitzer Prizes. People like to sort of sneer at it. It was a great journalism organization. it never made any money.”

“It's always an afterthought. It's never the main focus. You know, even BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed had a really good vertical for a while, but it wasn't their main business. It wasn't their sole focus.”

“Journalism is a terrible business. There's no path to viral growth here. Every time you grow in order to grow their top line, they're going to have expense. So if you want to get more page views, you're going to have to hire more expensive entitled writers as …”

“BuzzFeed IPO was a complete disaster. 80% of people already in their SPAC. BuzzFeed is circling the drain.”

“Most of the new business models that have come along and been hyped for a period of time have proven not to work any better than the old business models, whether it was Vice or BuzzFeed or what Vox or whatever else has come along that people have said, this is…”

“And we landed a contract with CNN and a contract with BuzzFeed that we were going to Translate all their news from English to Spanish.”

“One trend we've seen at Buzzfeed. If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would never have guessed the transformation that's happened in our business from advertising revenue being essentially the only kind of revenue to now having so many of our, so much…”

“There's a great chart from BuzzFeed, information from BuzzFeed on where people watch content on BuzzFeed. And, you know, it's one quarter is direct, and then it's YouTube and Facebook video and Facebook images and Snapchat.”

“And the interesting thing that is starting to happen with computing and with software now is it's pushing out of the technology industry. And so when you have, you know, when you have mobile everywhere, when you have payments being pulled in, when you look at …”

“Sharing has always been the biggest metric because it shows someone thinks that a piece of content is worth passing on to a friend.”

“And that's why we've been able to grow so quickly generate profits and in, while simultaneously investing in foreign correspondence and investigative news team and other things that people thought weren't possible for internet companies to invest in.”

“We did four hundred million video views last month, and about half is mobile.”

“Pinterest sends double the traffic to BuzzFeed as Twitter.”

“BuzzFeed actually began as a company that was trying to provide services for media properties to be more viral. And then figured out that actually it would be better to apply it to their own media property and build that up.”

“Our job, our team's focus was not about building food or building a new food brand. It was the idea of could we build new IP that wasn't connected to BuzzFeed and crack Facebook video, this new platform.”

“Tasty is partnering with Walmart to sell actual physical kitchen goods.”

“He also predicted that in 2019, half of their revenue would come from outside of advertising.”

“A company that just six years ago didn't even employ a single journalist, and today it has a bigger news team than most newsrooms in America.”

“I think if you think about content from a, from at the time, print and broadcast, you think about making something that you push out to this giant audience, but if you're in a classroom teaching, you know, 25 kids that are in front of you real, you start, you …”

“When we started, John just paid every month the expenses of BuzzFeed.”

“We basically doubled our audience every year from when we launched the site, and it started with something like 200,000 or 300,000 people a month.”

“Really the first time we were able to raise money, you know, was from SoftBank, which also was invested in HuffPost, and they, there was another firm that wanted to invest, but they told me I had to leave HuffPost.”

“Cause we probably wouldn't have been able to even raise money if we had said, oh, our plan is to hire lots and lots of journalists and reporters.”

“We learned from Huffington Post that building a news business in the run-up to election is a good time to do it”

“I definitely think it was the right decision, and the reason we published it was because you had everyone in the senior levels of government and media talking about this document and referring to the document even in public communications.”

“I looked at the best businesses on the internet, and they tended to use some form of native advertising. So Google had a search engine, and you enter a keyword in, and it would give you a bunch of related links, but it would also give you a bunch of related pa…”

“When quizzes got really big, a month after that, we could have a branded quiz for HBO, which is, how will you die in Game of Thrones? And you answer questions, and it'll be like, you'll be trampled, or you'll be beheaded. And, like, it was, it got a million vi…”

“When we started BuzzFeed, everyone thought of content as information to get in people's head. This is the article. Are people going to read it and get the information in their head? We had this insight that content was on social was a way of connecting with so…”

“I think that part of it is a gut thing or an emotional thing where you just didn't feel ready. I felt like there was a lot more we had to build. At the time we were really a website and our video business had just started. It was growing so much. And I knew th…”

“The valuation is set through investment, and the fact that people have invested in us has given us resources To build big things in the future, and to not think day to day, like, how are we doing this quarter, or how are we doing, you know, this week, and thin…”

“BuzzFeed is a great example of publishing their research as an executable notebook that you can check their results with.”