in his note Announcing the closure of BuzzFeed’s news operations, CEO Jonah Peretti I confess Big mistake: He didn’t realize Facebook wasn’t his friend.
Naturally, Peretti put it differently. He admitted that he was “slow to accept that the big platforms will not provide the distribution or financial backing required to support free, premium, purpose-built social media journalism.” BuzzFeed, which appears to have been built for the Facebook algorithm, has precariously attempted to balance a global news organization on top. This week, that plan fell apart.
The social media for which BuzzFeed was created, namely Facebook, is also beginning to falter. Just a day before BuzzFeed News died, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced that it would lay off 4,000 employees, after a first round of layoffs in late 2022 that laid off more than 11,000 employees. The Internet is changing quickly. Young people are abandoning Meta Products — especially Facebook — for TikTok. Meta and Google’s stranglehold on the digital advertising space is starting to loosen. BuzzFeed tied its star with Web 2.0 platforms, and now that star is starting to fade.
BuzzFeed launched in 2006, just two years after Facebook (now Meta). The company wooed readers with its popular lists and contests, many of which were posted to Facebook feeds as the platform continued to climb in popularity. In 2011, BuzzFeed hired Ben Smith, then at Politico, to lead the company’s push toward news reporting. BuzzFeed was the future, and it was growing rapidly.
But the unregulated power of digital advertising, caught in the grip of Big Tech, along with the many media organizations that made their websites free to access for both platforms and people, created a perfect storm. “The digital public sphere is controlled by a handful of platforms,” says Courtney Radsch, a postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA who studies the intersection of technology and media. “The news outlets are really hostage to that.”
Journalism – whether it’s online, print, TV or radio – always makes money through advertising. But the big tech companies, notably Google and Meta, with their hoards of user data, quickly took control of this revenue model. By 2017, nine years after BuzzFeed was founded, Meta accounted for 20 percent of all digital ad revenue, and Facebook alone had 2 billion users.
For publications established in the digital age, the promise of such huge reach came with risks. By expertly leveraging Facebook’s algorithm and audience, BuzzFeed can reach huge numbers of people. At that time, there was no such thing as a thought. Facebook was everywhere, and in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, advertising budgets, which until then had been focused on traditional media, plummeted. When they rebounded starting in 2010, money shifted away from traditional media to digital advertising, of which Meta and Google controlled half of the amount in the US.
Radsch refers to Google and Meta as the “social web operating systems,” thanks in part to their stranglehold on digital advertising and, at times, their ability to make publishers around the world dance to their beat. This was the case in 2015, BuzzFeed, along with New York times, He started posting directly to Facebook itself using the Instant Articles feature, which allowed publishers to keep 70 percent of ad revenue. “Facebook really understood what was important to us,” said Greg Coleman, head of BuzzFeed at the time.