In his memo announcing the closure of BuzzFeed news operations, CEO Jonah Peretti recognized a serious mistake: he did not understand that Facebook was not his friend.
Peretti, of course, put it differently. He had, he admitted, “been slow to accept that the big platforms would not provide the distribution or financial support needed to support free, quality journalism, specifically designed for social media”. BuzzFeed, which appears to have been designed for Facebook’s algorithm, had attempted to maintain a precarious balance between a world-class news organization and its top. This week, that plan fell apart.
The social network that BuzzFeed was designed for, Facebook, also began to falter. Just a day before BuzzFeed News died, Facebook parent company Meta announced it would lay off 4,000 employees, following an initial round of layoffs in late 2022 that cut more than 11,000 employees. The Internet is evolving rapidly. Young people are abandoning Meta products – notably Facebook – for TikTok. Meta and Google’s hold on the digital advertising space is starting to wane. BuzzFeed attached its star to Web 2.0 platforms, and now that star is fading.
BuzzFeed launched in 2006, just two years after Facebook (now Meta). The company attracted readers through its popular lists and quizzes, many of which fueled Facebook feeds as the platform continued to grow in popularity. In 2011, BuzzFeed hired Ben Smith, then at Politico, to lead the company’s news reporting effort. BuzzFeed was the future and it was growing quickly.
But the unregulated power of digital advertising, caught in the grip of big tech, combined with the fact that many media organizations make their websites free, both for platforms and for people, has created a perfect storm. “A handful of platforms control the digital public sphere,” says Courtney Radsch, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA who studies the intersection of technology and media. “The media are really hostages. »
Journalism, whether online, print, TV or radio, has almost always made money from advertising. But big tech companies, particularly Google and Meta, with their hordes of user data, quickly took control of this revenue model. In 2017, nine years after BuzzFeed was founded, Meta accounted for 20% of all digital ad revenue, and Facebook alone had 2 billion users.
