BuzzFeed closes news division as part of new round of layoffs to survive
BuzzFeed’s commitment to its news division is not sustainable and is coming to an end. Jonah Peretti, founder and CEO of the company, has informed his employees in these terms in an internal statement in which he also announces that up to 15% of the staff of the entire organisation will be laid off. That’s 180 jobs, including the approximately 60 that will be lost in the closure of BuzzFeed News, which in previous months and years had already been cutting its workforce.
The closure does not mean that the viral media par excellence is leaving the news arena, as the HuffPost brand survives within the company because it is profitable after successive adjustments. Peretti attributes its ability to survive to the fact that it has a loyal audience that regularly visits its front page and does not depend on social networks to the extent that BuzzFeed News did, which in any case has accumulated different awards and recognitions throughout its existence, including a Pulitzer.
The news division was created in 2011 and has been loss-making ever since. Peretti adds that he decided to “overinvest” in it because he loves his work and his mission, but regrets not having applied “higher standards of profitability” to it. The impact on advertising planning of the difficult macroeconomic context helps to explain this situation and also that of Insider, another key native US player in the sector, which has also just announced that it will be shedding 10% of its workforce.
BuzzFeed will no longer maintain the news arm it launched in 2011 at a loss and will henceforth only maintain HuffPost, which is profitable, in that area.
However, BuzzFeed’s prospects are particularly delicate. It ended last year with a loss of more than 100 million euros due to the decline in advertising, and since it began trading, it has been posting a string of declining time spent by its readers. This declining metric is mainly due to the fall in traffic from social networks in a context in which Meta is reducing the visibility of news on Facebook and does not help to inspire confidence in a company that is currently trading more than 90% below the price at which it debuted on the market.
