Jonah Peretti’s profession so far has been outlined by fixed reinvention. Because the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, Peretti has been on the forefront of digital media for nearly twenty years, navigating adjustments because the as soon as small startup reworked into, at one level, a multimedia powerhouse.
However as the corporate grows older, one query lingers: Has Peretti’s relentless drive for innovation made him too entrepreneurial to guide BuzzFeed to long-term stability?
“The great factor about this discipline,” Peretti muses, “is you do one thing [different] on a regular basis. It’s not been 20 years of 1 job. It’s been 20 years of working a startup, then managing a hyperscaling enterprise, then determining get the corporate public . . .and now the explosion in generative AI. There’s at all times one thing to maintain the job contemporary and new.”
Peretti’s potential to adapt and keep forward of the curve has been an indicator of BuzzFeed’s success. Years in the past, BuzzFeed loved nearly singular success in its uncanny potential to create shareable media. (One video section, centered on why Disney princes would make “horrible boyfriends,” has racked up 77 million views over time.)
Immediately, BuzzFeed’s focus is on AI, together with AI quizzes and different AI-generated content material. It’s additionally pouring a few of its assets right into a product in growth referred to as BF Island, a social community that goals to merge AI with content material creation to “unfold pleasure and allow playful artistic expression.” So he advised Axios final month, anyway.
Peretti routinely discusses the corporate’s upcoming ventures with the media, even after they’re nonetheless of their infancy. Requested why, he tells TechCrunch: “The thought of speaking about stuff you’re engaged on is that you just make the product higher . . .Once you discuss them, it’s not simply along with your workforce however with exterior individuals who may need to collaborate. When there’s a brand new computing platform, there’s an explosion of creativity. These are the moments when you may construct one thing new.”
This entrepreneurial drive has fueled a lot of BuzzFeed’s most iconic initiatives. The corporate pioneered viral quizzes and listicles, then pivoted to extra severe journalism with BuzzFeed Information. However not all of those shifts have paid off. Notably, regardless of its early success, BuzzFeed Information was shuttered in 2023, abandoning questions on whether or not the corporate ought to have caught to at least one clear imaginative and prescient fairly than leaping between them.
BuzzFeed’s shareholders could be pondering the identical after the roller-coaster trip they’ve been on. BuzzFeed went public by a particular objective car in 2021, and as a part of the transaction, it acquired a media firm, Advanced Networks, for $300 million in money and inventory. Immediately, BuzzFeed nonetheless trades publicly, however it doesn’t personal that enterprise; it bought it for roughly $108 million final yr. Extra just lately, BuzzFeed bought one other asset from that Advanced Networks deal – First We Feast – in a separate $82.5 million all-cash deal. (Explains Peretti of each gross sales, “They’re not a lot tech companies. They’re extra manufacturing and expertise heavy.”)
BuzzFeed’s inventory, priced at $10 initially, now trades $2.20 per share.
That is the place the stress lies. Peretti’s embrace of fixed reinvention is putting, however it additionally signifies that the corporate’s technique has usually felt like a collection of experiments fairly than a cohesive long-term plan. The experiments additionally come at a value. Peretti says BF Island is a $10 million gamble for now that’s not anticipated to herald any income this yr. He provides that BuzzFeed’s “core enterprise” is worthwhile.
It’s a good query whether or not BuzzFeed could be higher served by a singular, constant imaginative and prescient for the long run – like The New York Instances has managed to attain – fairly than betting on one new concept after one other.
Sadly, it’s arduous to know the reply. The media business has lengthy favored stability, however Peretti isn’t fallacious to consider the present wave of generative AI is revolutionizing how folks create and share content material. Additionally, as excited as he sounds concerning the prospects, Peretti sounds clear-eyed concerning the dangers.
“The large factor is that BuzzFeed has given us quite a lot of expertise with new codecs,” he says. “We’ve gotten quite a lot of inbound from individuals who have concepts and need to collaborate with us.”
In addition to, provides Peretti, who by now could be accustomed to balancing progress with monetary pressures: “I feel the deeper next-level understanding is that simply doing the identical factor time and again and attempting to to grind it out is definitely a extra dangerous technique than innovating, experimenting, attempting new issues, protecting an open thoughts, and attempting to determine new approaches or new methods to win in a extremely powerful market.”
You possibly can hear rather more from our interview with Peretti in an upcoming episode of StrictlyVC Obtain; new episodes drop each Tuesday.
