In 2021, BuzzFeed went public, but the move quickly proved disastrous - the company, once valued at $1.5 billion, only raised $16 million. Neither was turning a profit.įortress Investment Group, Vice's main creditor, could take the media company if it declares bankruptcy, according to The New York Times. Vice and BuzzFeed had already struggled to attract new investments for several years and were forced to resort to taking on debt to stay afloat.

In 2017, Vice Media was valued at $5.7 billion - more than the market capitalization of The New York Times at the time.īut when progress is slow in coming, investors 'get impatient,' Edmonds says.Īs interest rates rose over the past year, tighter lending conditions have made venture capitalists more tight-fisted, and 'everybody called in their chips,' explains Aileen Gallagher, chair of digital journalism at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. 'Venture capitalists told themselves a fairy tale, which was if Vice and Buzzfeed News and all the rest are going to generate this much traffic, there must be a way to monetize all that traffic.' 'These outlets expanded way beyond their capacity, because they were attracting an enormous amount of venture capital,' says Dan Kennedy, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston. 'It's the end of the marriage between social media and news,' he told The New York Times.Īt the start of the 2010s, Vice and BuzzFeed - along with the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post - were the standard bearers of a new generation of media outlets that were completely online and ready to battle the traditional purveyors of news. 'I think the free model - trying to build high volume, and then sell ads on that basis - hasn't worked out nearly as well as hoped,' says Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism research organization.īen Smith, the onetime editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, is more unequivocal. The two media groups have different profiles and goals, but one thing they have in common is a reliance on advertising dollars to fund their operations.īut in tough economic times, advertising is one of the first things to go, and tech giants now account for 70 percent of all digital ad revenues, with Google and Facebook leading the way.

House by Frank E. Peretti