BuzzFeed

Funding

Despite reaching annual revenues in the hundreds of million of dollars at its peak, BuzzFeed has been consistently loss-making since its inception.

BuzzFeed raised $3.5 million in 2008 through Hearst Ventures and SoftBank. In 2011, BuzzFeed ran more than 100 social media campaigns, resulting in their revenue tripling compared to 2010. In January 2012, BuzzFeed announced that it had earned $15.5 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, Lerer Ventures, Hearst Interactive Media, SoftBank, and RRE Capital to expand the site's content. Later, in October 2012, BuzzFeed ran sponsored content for the Obama administration leading to an increase in ad revenue. By January 2013, BuzzFeed announced that New Enterprise Associates had raised $19.3 million. The company was reported to be profitable in 2013.

In 2014, it was reported that BuzzFeed had passed $100 million in revenue. In August 2014, BuzzFeed raised $50 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, more than doubling previous rounds of funding. The site was reportedly valued at around $850 million by Andreessen Horowitz. BuzzFeed generates its advertising revenue through native advertising that matches its editorial content, and does not rely on banner ads. BuzzFeed also uses its familiarity with social media to target conventional advertising through other channels, such as Facebook. In December 2014, growth equity firm General Atlantic acquired $50 million in secondary stock of the company.

In August 2015, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in BuzzFeed. Along with plans to hire more journalists to build a more prominent "investigative" unit, BuzzFeed planned on hiring journalists around the world and plans to open outposts in India, Germany, Mexico, and Japan. It planned on hiring staff for its UK bureau, its rapidly-expanding motion picture unit and its food-themed business, Tasty. NBCUniversal invested an additional $200 million in 2016 after the two companies had collaborated on many projects, namely the Rio Olympics. The companies planned to work together to market themselves to advertisers. Together, Comcast and its NBCUniversal subsidiary own about a third of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed has said that it intends to stay independent.

After laying off 100 employees in 2017, BuzzFeed laid off 200 of its employees in 2019 to help facilitate growth despite raising revenue by 15% from 2017 to 2018. Facebook began funding two BuzzFeed News shows in 2019 for Watch. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, on March 25, 2020, BuzzFeed announced in an internal memo that it would cut employee salaries on a sliding scale of 5% (lowest income bracket) up to 25% (highest income bracket). Peretti said he would not be taking a salary until the end of the pandemic. Many staffers expressed relief at this announcement as there were no layoffs. On May 13, 2020, the company shut down its divisions in the UK and Australia, furloughing 10 news staff in the UK as well as four in its Australian outpost.

According to a news from June 24, 2021 on Variety, BuzzFeed, valued at $1.5 billion through a SPAC deal, is to go public and acquire Complex Networks for $300 million.

BuzzFeed raised $16.2M in its latest funding round, which was Post IPO round held on Dec 03, 2021.

In 2025, BuzzFeed had a net loss of $57.3 million, noting that it did not have enough resources to fund its cash obligations for 2026, stating that "there is substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern."

Acquisitions and stock listing

BuzzFeed's first acquisition was in 2012 when the company purchased Kingfish Labs, a startup founded by Rob Fishman, initially focused on optimizing Facebook ads.

In October 2014, BuzzFeed announced its next acquisition, Torando Labs, which would become BuzzFeed's first data-engineering team.

On November 19, 2020, BuzzFeed announced that they would acquire HuffPost in a stock deal that made Verizon Media minority shareholder in BuzzFeed.

In June 2021, BuzzFeed announced its plans to go public via a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and planned to acquire Complex Networks. After initially listing on Nasdaq at $10 a share, valuing the company at around $1.5 billion, the share price subsequently declined to under $1 by 2023, leading to a delisting notice by Nasdaq in May 2023, requiring them to raise the share price above $1 within 180 days or risk being removed from the exchange. Once the deadline for this notice passed in November 2023 with the stock price still below $1, they were given a further 180 days until May 2024. By January 2024, the stock price of the company had declined 98% since its initial listing, with the entire company now only worth around $37 million, and the company was significantly burdened with debt. In May 2024, BuzzFeed implemented a 4:1 reverse stock split, bringing them above the $1 a share threshold.

In May 2024, activist investor Vivek Ramaswamy acquired a 7.7% stake in BuzzFeed, making him the fourth-largest shareholder, which he later increased to 8.37%. Ramaswamy said that he thought the company was undervalued, and that he wanted to shift the company's political leanings such as by hiring right-wing media personalities. Elizabeth Lopatto, writing in The Verge, called his effort futile, as voting power in BuzzFeed is primarily in Class B shares, which have 50 times the voting power of the common Class A shares Ramaswamy had purchased. 90% of Class B shares are held by founder Peretti and close associates, meaning that Ramaswamy has little voting power despite his large shareholding.

By March 2026 the stock price had fallen under $1 again to around $0.66-0.75 a share, and Nasdaq again threatened to delist the stock.

Divestitures

In February 2024, BuzzFeed announced the sale of Complex to NTWRK, a livestream shopping platform, even as it would retain some popular franchises. At the same time, it reportedly considered selling Tasty, a social media food brand. The moves marked a retreat for the company after its December 2021 public listing done to finance acquisitions and came during a difficult period for media companies. It also announced layoffs. In July 2024, the company sold travel-brand Bring Me! to media publisher LOST iN. In December 2024, BuzzFeed sold First We Feast, which produces the show Hot Ones, for $82.5 million to a consortium of investors. According to Reuters, in early 2024 British media group The Independent reportedly discussed a multi-year agreement to acquire control of BuzzFeed and HuffPost's operations in the UK and Ireland.

Unpaid contributors

Matthew Perpetua, BuzzFeed's director of quizzes, published a blog post in January 2019 after being laid off, revealing that many of the site's most popular quizzes were created by unpaid contributors. Perpetua identified one college student in Michigan in particular as "the second-highest traffic driver worldwide." The student, Rachel McMahon, said that until she saw Perpetua's blog post, she never knew that her quizzes were so significant for BuzzFeed's traffic. The quizzes made an estimated $3.8 million for the media company. According to the Detroit Free Press, she had never asked BuzzFeed about getting paid and the only material goods she received from them were four $30 Amazon gift certificates, a BuzzFeed sweatshirt and T-shirt and several water bottles.

Advertiser influence on editorial

In April 2015, BuzzFeed drew scrutiny after Gawker observed the publication had deleted two posts that criticized advertisers. One of the posts criticized Dove soap (manufactured by Unilever), while another criticized Hasbro. Both companies advertise with BuzzFeed. Ben Smith apologized in a memo to staff for his actions: "I blew it. Twice in the past couple of months, I've asked editors—over their better judgment and without any respect to our standards or process—to delete recently published posts from the site. Both involved the same thing: my overreaction to questions we've been wrestling with about the place of personal opinion pieces on our site. I reacted impulsively when I saw the posts and I was wrong to do that. We've reinstated both with a brief note". Days later, Arabelle Sicardi, one of the authors of the deleted posts, resigned. An internal review by the company found three additional posts deleted for being critical of products or advertisements (by Microsoft, Pepsi, and Unilever).

In 2016, the Advertising Standards Authority of the United Kingdom ruled that BuzzFeed broke the UK advertising rules for failing to make it clear that an article on "14 Laundry Fails We've All Experienced" that promoted Dylon was an online advertorial paid for by the brand. Although the ASA agreed with BuzzFeed's defense that links to the piece from its homepage and search results clearly labelled the article as "sponsored content", this failed to take into account that individuals might link to the story directly, ruling that the labeling "was not sufficient to make clear that the main content of the web page was an advertorial and that editorial content was therefore retained by the advertiser".

Hiring practices

In February 2016, Scaachi Koul, a Senior Writer for BuzzFeed Canada, tweeted a request for pitches stating that BuzzFeed was "...looking for mostly non-white non-men" followed by "If you are a white man upset that we are looking mostly for non-white non-men I don't care about you go write for Maclean's." When confronted, she followed with the tweet "White men are still permitted to pitch, I will read it, I will consider it. I'm just less interested because, ugh, men." In response to the tweets that were deemed racist and sexist, Koul began receiving a barrage of hate comments and threats of violence. Sarmishta Subramanian, a former colleague of Koul's, writing for Maclean's, condemned the reaction to the tweets, and stated that Koul's request for diversity was appropriate. Subramanian said that her provocative approach raised concerns of tokenism that might hamper BuzzFeed's stated goals. In January 2019, BuzzFeed announced that it would cut its workforce by 15%. In July 2019 BuzzFeed announced that it would voluntarily recognize an employee union.

Ideology

BuzzFeed states in its editorial guide that "we firmly believe that for a number of issues, including civil rights, women's rights, anti-racism, and LGBT equality, there are not two sides." The Week's correspondent Ryan Cooper and American Enterprise Institute's senior fellow Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner raised questions about whether BuzzFeed undermines its credibility by taking sides on political issues. In June 2015, BuzzFeed and websites like the Huffington Post and Mashable temporarily changed the theme of their social media avatars to rainbow colors to celebrate same-sex marriage being ruled constitutional in the United States.

In June 2016, the left-leaning media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that in 100 BuzzFeed stories about Barack Obama, 65 were positive, 34 were neutral, and one was critical. The report called BuzzFeed's coverage of Obama "creepy" and "almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic." BuzzFeed has partnered with Obama on a get-out-the-vote campaign. During the same month, BuzzFeed cancelled an advertising agreement with the Republican National Committee over what BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti called "offensive remarks" made by Donald Trump. Peretti said: "We certainly don't like to turn away revenue that funds all the important work we do across the company. However, in some cases we must make business exceptions: we don't run cigarette ads because they are hazardous to our health, and we won't accept Trump ads for the exact same reason."

In January 2017, BuzzFeed released what became known as the "Steele dossier", an uncorroborated private intelligence report that alleges several salacious accusations of Trump. Margaret Sullivan at The Washington Post wrote of the release: "It's a bad idea, and always has been, to publish unverified smears." David Graham at The Atlantic called it "an abdication of the basic responsibility of journalism." NBC's Chuck Todd called the release of the document "fake news". Ben Smith defended the decision to release the document from accusations that it was done out of partisanship, arguing that the dossier is of "obvious central public importance."