Exclusive: Jonah Peretti explains why he sold BuzzFeed

Just days before we spoke, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti agreed to sell the company, which was losing money and at risk of shutting down. Now there’s a new lease on life — and new leadership. Jonah is taking on a new role as president of BuzzFeed AI, and Byron Allen will become CEO of BuzzFeed. That’s obviously a huge structural and organizational change, and a really big decision — prime Decoder bait if there ever was any. What are digital media companies doing to adapt and survive in an information landscape dominated by algorithmic social platforms? Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: Byron Allen is buying BuzzFeed and becoming CEO | Variety BuzzFeed issues going concern warning, lacks liquidity | Wall Street Journal BuzzFeed News is shutting down | The Verge BuzzFeed sells Hot Ones studio in $82.5M deal | NBC News The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed | The Verge I hate myself because I don’t work for BuzzFeed (2015) | The Awl Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt; this episode was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Jonah Peretti, who is technically still the CEO of BuzzFeed, although that will be coming to an end very soon. Just days before we spoke, Jonah agreed to sell 52% of BuzzFeed for a total of $120 million to Byron Allen, who owns The Weather Channel, a number of broadcast stations, and several other websites. The deal is a bit of a life raft for BuzzFeed. The company was once valued at $1.6 billion. But just last quarter, the company told investors it was at risk of running out of cash. Now, there's a new lease on life and new leadership. As part of the deal, Jonah himself is stepping down as CEO and taking on a new role as president of BuzzFeed AI.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Byron Allen himself will become the new CEO of BuzzFeed. It's obviously a huge structural and organizational change and a really big decision. This is Prime Decoder bait. And of course, I've always been very interested in what digital media companies are doing to adapt and survive in an information landscape dominated by algorithmic social platforms. And for all, I've been saying for a long time that the original sin of digital media was Jonah and BuzzFeed betting they could so consistently go viral that platforms like Facebook would pay them for content, just like cable companies pay carriage fees for channels like ESPN. This was the big bet for a lot of companies, all chasing BuzzFeed's influence and valuation. And it has all come crashing down. Most of those companies don't exist anymore.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  And BuzzFeed just faced the brink. So I really wanted to know if Jonah had reflected on that bet and how he saw the work of building audiences and influence now. I also really wanted to talk to Jonah about his new role leading AI BuzzFeed. In the press release announcing the sale, Byron Allen says BuzzFeed will now compete with YouTube through the power of AI. That's quite an ambition, and I was very curious to find out exactly what it means. Jonah is also making lots of games and apps with AI, and we talked about some of them, including his new hybrid of a meme generator and social network called BF Island. Of course, we also talked about moments where things might have gone differently, including Jonah's decision to take BuzzFeed public and his decision not to sell the company to Disney. There's a lot going on with this one, and Jonah was pretty open about it all.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  I'm still not sure I understand what's going on with that YouTube plan, though. You tell me. Okay, Jonah Peretti, still for the moment, CEO of BuzzFeed. Here we go.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Jonah Peretti, you're the co-founder and as of today, still technically the CEO of BuzzFeed. Welcome to Decoder.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  I'm excited to talk to you. It feels like BuzzFeed and Vox Media and The Verge have all come up and weathered all kinds of storms together in digital media. And I say that you are still, as of today, the CEO of BuzzFeed, because just a few days before we're speaking here, you announced a huge deal to sell 52% of BuzzFeed to Byron Allen, and you are going to take a new role as president of BuzzFeed AI. Explain what's going on there.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we were looking at a few possible deals that were transformative for the company. And I'm very excited we ended up with Byron. He is, you know, a force of nature, incredible media mogul. He owns all kinds of different assets. His skills are very complementary to mine. I mean, he's in the mix with advertisers and with partners and with sources of capital and in a way that I, you know, never really have been. And so it's super exciting to have him come in. It also provides liquidity for the company and resources. And then the thing that I've been most excited about working on is really trying to reimagine what should a company operate like in a world where these new AI technologies have gotten

• 4:18Speaker 02

  so much more advanced. And so I'm going to have the opportunity to spend more time on that, which is the thing that I'm most passionate about. So it's been a really great week and we're happy we were able to close this deal and it's going to be transformative for the company.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  One of the reasons that I originally scheduled this interview with you was because there were some quarterly earnings, there were some statements in your financials about BuzzFeed's ability to continue operating, whether or not you had enough cash, there was some speculation that the company was pretty close to bankruptcy. But the brand is strong. I mean BuzzFeed is one of the most famous brands in digital media, if not all of media. Did you have incoming suitors after that last set of financials or was this something you were talking about for a long time?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  I mean, it was frustrating. We had a going concern statement, which means essentially is a technical accounting term, meaning that we didn't have enough capital to cover our expenses for the year, which obviously is a serious thing that we wanted to and needed to disclose to investors. But simultaneously, we had a lot of inbound interest in our assets and in partnerships. And we were talking to creditors, we're talking to all the people you would imagine about injection of capital and things that could be really transformative for the company. But of course, you can't talk about, you know, you can't talk about things that aren't signed, that aren't done. And so during that period, it was quite frustrating because I saw a lot of exciting

• 5:44Speaker 02

  prospects that we had. And this deal with Byron is one of those. And it's really exciting to be able to move forward with more swagger and more confidence and be able to start to reimagine the company and really do a more fulsome turnaround to create a business model and an approach that is for the next five years instead of an earlier era of digital media.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Take me inside Byron's pitch. Was it? I'm just gonna give you money and you can do what you want. Is it I have a plan to reboot the entire company? Compared to the other folks you were talking to, what made his pitch seem like the winner?

• 6:22Speaker 02

  I mean, to me, what was most exciting is that he's a better media executive than I am, and he could be a media executive, and that could allow me to be more of a tech executive. And so that's always what I've loved the most, the intersection of tech and media. And so, and really being able to think about what are these new technologies enable us to do in the future that wasn't possible. That plus the the capital to actually fund a turnaround and to restructure and re, you know, imagine the company. So those two things together were were very enticing. And the his ability to bring things to the company that we just were lacking is was a, you know, huge part of it.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  I've known a lot of media executives. You've known a lot of media executives. You've just evaluated two of them. You've said you're not a good media executive, and he's a good media executive. What in 2026 separates a good media executive from a bad one?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, I think we're in an era right now with where deals really matter a lot. And so deal focused executives are are having a lot, a lot more success than trying to just build organically. The connections with advertisers and the connections with partners and marketers and being able to see from their perspective and sell them things that they get excited about and inspired about is is really important. I think, you know, in the kind of peak growth period of BuzzFeed, kind of 2013, 2014, you know, in that era, really understanding the technology was the the key to being able to build a good media company, because the technology was changing so quickly with the rise of social

• 7:53Speaker 02

  and social platforms, that, you know, you really needed to be deep on the tech side, and there was tons of organic growth available. Like, the platforms were very open in a way that allowed you to drive tons of organic growth. I think today, you know, if you look around the landscape, it's a lot more about deals and partnerships and business development and things like that. And and that can be really transformative for for a company. Whereas the kind of organic growth on on the big platforms is is really just, you know, quite anemic, and there's, there's not as much there in terms of sending traffic to publishers and platforms and and content.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  When you say the technology at that time, 2013, 14, 15? What you mean is, social media platforms were growing, they were aggregating a bunch of users, and then they would send traffic out. What specifically was the technology that you needed to understand at that time that made BuzzFeed successful?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Well, I think if you look at sort of pre-social media and what media was about, there was newspapers, magazines, broadcast. None of it was really social. You'd watch a TV show, maybe there'd be some word of mouth where you'd talk about it with your friends. You'd read a newspaper article or magazine article, but you really couldn't share content. And I think the world didn't quite realize that once everyone was connected together by these social platforms, and once you could connect, where you could use media as a way of connecting with other people and sharing with other people, that the kind of media that would thrive and succeed would change. And we saw that really early, and that was what allowed us to grow so rapidly and build

• 9:34Speaker 02

  such a big brand. And so, I think the technology drives a change in the medium. And so, social media became a new medium that wasn't possible before. And I would say there was also the convergence of social and mobile. So, it was not, it was, mobile was the perfect personal device that was also a social device, plus the social media, and those trends converging really changed what media became. And so, I think we're seeing the beginnings of a similar shift now where AI is going to start to create new media, a new medium for content that wasn't really possible before. And so, there's part of the media industry now where understanding tech is really important, and that's the part that I'm most excited to focus on.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  There's the new thing you're gonna build, I wanna talk about that. I do wanna talk about the structure of it. I just wanna stay focused on the 2013, 14 era for one more turn here. I've, because I think a lot of media companies have made all the same mistake and Buzzfeed is like the vanguard of making a mistake. And I have often described the original sin of digital media is you, Jonah Peretti, betting that you could go so viral so often that Facebook would pay you money, that the social platforms would pay for the programming. And in particular Buzzfeed was great at programming the social networks of that era. I will never forget watching people put rubber bands around a watermelon with like 90 million other people, right? There was, there was something about your understanding of the dynamics of those platforms

• 10:59Speaker 01

  at that time that made a lot of people bet that Mark Zuckerberg would pay you a carriage fee, the way that the cable networks paid ESPN a carriage fee, that your content would make their platforms compelling such that they owed you money. At some point, I think they all woke up and realized there was an army of teenagers who would work for free and that they could get the same dynamics without paying anyone any money. And then all of our businesses changed and Buzzfeed's business changed maybe the most dramatically at that specific moment. What was that experience like for you when you were, when you went from top of the world, where we think we have enough leverage to get Mark Zuckerberg to pay us money to, oh no, there's an army of teenagers who will work for free?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, first, just as a factual matter, we did get paid millions of dollars by Mark Zuckerberg. So the, the prediction that they would pay for content was, was, was accurate. It just was short-lived. So we got paid for that exploding watermelon. I mean, we were, we were paid for-

• 11:57Speaker 01

  But those were all those pilot programs, like stand up your Facebook Live team, we'll, we'll give you the seed funding to buy cameras. There was never actually payment for content. There was no ongoing revenue relationship.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Oh, there was, there absolutely was. We got, we got paid rev share for, for video on, on Facebook. So, you know, tasty, the short tasty videos that, that, that initially blew up, there was no payment for that. But then when Facebook realized they needed to make longer contents, they could put mid-roll ads, you know, there were programs that generated millions of dollars for, for, for our company where we were making longer form video for Facebook and we were getting rev share payments on that, millions of dollars from YouTube. It's not that it didn't happen. It did, it did, it did happen. The, the news tab was another example of it. We got paid millions of dollars for putting news on Facebook. So I think-

• 12:47Speaker 02

  What you're saying is accurate in the sense that it went from free distribution and sending traffic to our site to hosting content on their platform and getting paid for it and rev share for it to then an explosion of creators which made the value of content and the platform's willingness to pay much lower. And so it was it was happening and it was working and it was exciting. And I actually believe that it was a mistake for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and and, you know, to not continue with the news tab, to not continue to pay professional content creators. I think having a diversity of content, have creators, have professional entertainment,

• 13:31Speaker 02

  have professional news, you know, these platforms have way, you know, have tons of resources and could have, you know, spent a couple billion dollars a year on that sustained a vibrant media ecosystem, really owned media in a way that, you know, was would have been incredibly powerful for them and given them charisma and relevance and authority that they just don't have today. Like now, most of the, you know, you look at the lawsuits about addictive behavior, you look at all the kinds of toxic content on the on the platforms, like they didn't have to do that. They could have, they could have just continued to pay and even ramping up, ramping up the amount

• 14:16Speaker 02

  they paid to professional content and to news content, and they would have owned the world. It was actually a mistake that they didn't continue it. They did it and they should have continued it. And the fact that they didn't, I think, shows just a huge blind spot that the tech industry has, like having a small percentage of your revenue going to to underwriting a robust, diverse, trusted ecosystem for content and news and other things would have been a great decision for them and would have long term been much better. And and so I think there is some parallel universe where they didn't, they don't get this wrong. They started on a good path. They were paying content creators. It was expanding. And then it was like, oh, let's get rid of the

• 14:56Speaker 02

  news tab. Let's, you know, stop doing rev share or, you know, let's show vertical video where we don't have rev share instead of longer form video where we do. And over time, You know, just, you know, really messed up the digital media ecosystem in a, in a, in a serious way and led to, you know, the world we have now, which although I love a lot of creator content, you know, the, the sort of battle to get into the feed and being the most extreme and saying things that are just completely, um, you know, false and outrageous or whatever has, has, um, has been a huge missed opportunity for, for those platforms.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  It's not that I don't agree with you, but they won't anyway, right? They stopped investing in news. They piddled away however many billions of dollars on VR headsets and they are in fact now the gatekeepers to all of media. It didn't matter whether or not they paid for news and a bunch of congresspeople yelling at them has had no meaningful impact on their business whatsoever.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I, I mean, I'm certainly not arguing that, that they didn't have tremendous financial success and maybe a couple billion extra in, in profits is, is, is, uh, worth it, worth it to them. Um, but I think that being an influential company with real relevance and, and, um, more charisma and cultural muscle, um, is something that a big tech monopoly could certainly afford. And, and, um, and I think ultimately would have been better for them in a bunch of different ways. And I think the biggest risk of the big platforms right now is essentially a PR risk. The public turning against tech, the public thinking

• 16:32Speaker 02

  tech is making the world worse. The feeling that any new technology is suspect because look what happened in the last round of, of technology. And so, um, so I don't think it's good for them, even if, you know, there may be a little bit more profitable. I think being marginally less profitable and having a, having a buffer against, um, this, this major backlash that is brewing where, you know, like kids are trying to get off their phones and delete their apps and things like that and feel like it's an addictive product that they're trying to battle with. I mean, I think they could have avoided a lot of that just, just by operating differently. So they have won. I'm not arguing that, but I think that they could have, um, they could have won in a deeper sense, uh, if they had, if they had continued that.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  That basic process of helping to underwrite quality content and news and information and entertainment, which they certainly could have done.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  I'm only sitting on this because honestly, how many other people have lived through all of the twists and turns and have made the decisions? And it's been a real journey. And I guess I'm looking at it now with a little bit of distance, talking to you. And I'm so like nuclear opposed to being dependent on the platforms. Like The Verge has always wanted to be its own thing, especially because we cover these companies. And you just have a different perspective. And I, I think my, my response to all this is like, should you build a business on these handful of billion dollars? Will make people like us more in the long term? Or was there ever a point where you felt like you actually had the leverage to make the social platforms pay you real money in a sustainable way?

• 18:08Speaker 02

  If you look at the cable industry, um, you know, and now, uh, Byron, you know, Byron Allen owns the Weather Channel. And, uh, you know, the Weather Channel was, was part of this amazing history of cable. Where companies were, um, these media companies like the Weather Channel were paying for carriage. They were like, I'll pay you a dollar per subscriber so I can get the Weather Channel in homes when cable was new. And, and the cable operators, I think at a certain point realized if they're all paying us a dollar to reach, to reach the, the home, they're gonna have a really bad business and they won't be able to invest in content. And then people aren't going to sign up for, for cable. So they're like, why don't we switch it? Why don't we pay you a dollar?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Now, they didn't have to do that. They could have just said, we're only going to carry channels that pay us. But instead they said, why don't we pay you a dollar per customer and make your programming better? And when you make your programming better, more people will be like, oh, I really want to watch cable. And so the Weather Channel switched from paying a dollar to getting paid a dollar. And that wasn't because the cable operators didn't have leverage. They're the only way that you could even get into the home. They did have leverage. They just saw on a deeper level that having better content would in the long run be good for everyone. And then the whole pie grew because of it. And so. I think that the answer isn't did individual content companies have the leverage to dictate

• 19:37Speaker 02

  terms to Facebook or to YouTube. We certainly never did. The question was, is there a, are there leaders who have enough market power and concentration to see that it's in everyone's interests, it's in society's interests, it's in their interest to grow the pie and, and pay,

• 19:58Speaker 02

  you know, pay for content to have different kinds of content. And, you know, I think early on, talking to the, you know, the tech leaders, they didn't really even understand or think about the cost of producing content. So I would say like, hey, you know, news costs a lot more doing fact checking, calling people up, doing, you know, doing interviews. So if every piece of content is competing against every other piece of content, there's no incentive to ever make any news. You should just make, you know, the cheapest, most popular types of, of clickbait content or something like that. Like, that's not good. That's a race to the bottom. That makes your platform worse. And I think they started to get it. Like, oh, let's add a news tab, or let's, let's do some, you know, programs to make sure that there can

• 20:41Speaker 02

  be, you know, different kinds of content. So I think it was less about having the power to dictate terms and more about, you know, looking at the history of media and saying, you know, there, there's ways that the pie can be grown for everyone and the economics needs to work for everyone and the incentives need to be right for everyone. And when that's the case, the whole market gets bigger. And that's, that, that's something that I think, you know, they, they, they didn't, they kind of wanted to, to, to, to do at some point, but ultimately, you know, when things got tough, they decided to, to just sort of focus on their own profit, profit growth and not necessarily.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  They're paying less and less for content today. I mean, TikTok pays nothing effectively, right? Like, this is the, the creators have to go become little ad agencies themselves, which is another thing you pioneered, right? The idea of the branded content studio that you would distribute advertising onto these platforms in a way that went viral. Even that got sort of outsourced to an army of influencers and creators who are now all standing up businesses with the same kind of dependencies that you experienced.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, but the, you know, you look at Instagram and there's good content. I consume content on Instagram, but you know, you kind of feel like you're just, you're watching. The actual editorial content is ads where creators are promoting themselves or products they're selling. And then in between that, you have ads. And you know, so you're, you're kind of like having a like, you know, a billion plus people just hanging out on an ad network all day. And I think there's a better vision for media than that, that, that we could have all built together. But, um, you know, now, since that didn't happen, we have pivoted really hard to direct traffic. Um, I mean, I'm so happy that HuffPost has so many people

• 22:24Speaker 02

  coming direct to HuffPost's front page every day and getting the news from a independent source that tells it like it is, is like, you know, something that people are really hungry for. More of, you know, the majority of BuzzFeed's traffic now is, is direct. And so we're really realizing you can't, um, you know, you can't have someone between you and your customer. And that's a huge thing that Byron Allen, also, you know, one of his rules of business is like, don't let anyone get between your, you and the customer. And that's part of the reason I think he was interested in BuzzFeed. It gives you, gives him a way to, you know, to go direct to, to, to audiences. And for all of the ambitious things we want to do in the future, we want to have that, have that, that ability to go

• 23:09Speaker 02

  to tens of millions of people directly from, from, from our platform.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 23:27Speaker 03

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• 24:01Speaker 01

  Welcome back. I'm talking with BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti about his decision to sell 52% of BuzzFeed and step aside as CEO. Under the terms announced by Byron through his company, Allen Family Digital, they're going to acquire 40 million shares of BuzzFeed for a total purchase price of 120 million. That will lead them to owning 52% of the company's outstanding shares, and it's 20 million at closing, and then 100 million that's going to be due five years from closing. How does that work structurally? At the end of all that, how is BuzzFeed going to be structured?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  I mean, we're still a public company. It used to be we were a public company that I controlled through super voting stock, and now we're a public company that Byron controls through the 52% ownership.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  So you've given up your super voting stock in this?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  That was actually my next question is where are the 40 million shares coming from? They're coming from you?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  No, we're issuing new shares.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Okay, but you're dissolving your super voting shares?

• 24:56Speaker 02

  I just am converting my shares to just be low vote shares or normal common stock.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Great. And then of the 20 million, you said this is going to give you some operating cash. How much runway do you get out of 20 million?

• 25:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I think infinite runway is the plan. I mean, if you look at our cash burn, it's been pretty insignificant. And I think we also announced on our earnings that we plan to do a restructure. And so I think, you know, setting the company up to operate profitably and to do that for the long term and then have a strong foundation that we can build on top of. So new initiatives are coming on top of that profitable platform of our core businesses.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  So you're issuing new stock. Are any of your existing investors or employees who had equity getting paid out as part of the deal?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  No, no. This was about bringing capital into the company so that we can have a stronger balance sheet and be able to start going on offense again.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  You've mentioned a restructure. I noticed there's a restructure in the press materials. This is a show where I ask everybody about structure. What does restructure mean for BuzzFeed after this deal?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Well, I think it means a few things. It means like looking at our strategy and where we're headed in the future. And so some of it is around understanding how we're going to operate.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  With new technologies that that can change the way the company operates. I think some of it is about just making sure that we have enough buffer to weather ups and downs in this industry. And so being profitable enough so that, you know, if traffic goes down 20% or if revenue or ad markets, you know, shift or change, that we're in a in a strong position so that we can, you know, continue to continue to to operate.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Be more specific, new technologies, you have a new title, President of BuzzFeed AI. There's something called Branch Office, which was your app Skunk Works, inspired by Nintendo, I think is what you you told the New York Times. Is that gonna get set up and more capitalized and become less of a Skunk Works? How do you see this working out?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Part of it is how do we use AI across the business as a whole? And I can share some things, but not not everything. But part of what I think AI is really good for is it's it's almost can be like a nervous system that is able to understand and detect, you know, what's working and what's not working and how content is being shared and engaged with. And some of the early stuff that BuzzFeed did about social content, I think you could do on this whole nother level when AI is able to actually understand the content and then push challenges to creative employees to make new things. But they're making new things with a lot more information about how people are engaged with that with with the content.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  So just to put it in more simple terms, using AI to help our core business and help our people be more creative. So that's one part of it. Another part of it is building entirely new apps. And so Branch Office is an incubator that creates new apps. We just today launched BF Island, which is a new kind of messaging app that allows you to play and message and talk with your friends. They, you know, using using Gen AI. So it's kind of like a an inside joke engine. We found that, you know, making AI content and posting it on Instagram or TikTok just kind of feels like slop. But making funny things with your friends that are about the, you know, specific things that you're joking about and talking about is just a lot more fun.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  And so we we built BF Island for that use case. And then we also. Launched an app called Conjure, which is a camera app where you get a challenge every day to take a picture and kind of discover a mystery every day. You can, for example, take pictures to see if there might be you apps hiding in the in the sky near where you live, or get messages or fortunes or other things on Conjure. So I think when you think about BuzzFeed AI, it's a combination of things that integrate across the entire company and help our teams do their jobs better. And then it's also new apps and new experiments that allow us to test AI as a new medium

• 29:12Speaker 02

  that could potentially lead to new businesses or new apps that break out.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  There's what you're saying here, and then there's this quote from Byron Allen.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  About what BuzzFeed is going to be. I'm just going to read it to you, and I'm hoping you can explain to me how this will work. Here's Byron Allen describing why he's buying BuzzFeed. "As of this moment, with the power of AI, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube to become another premier free video streaming service. How are you going to do that?"

• 29:43Speaker 02

  So I think one thing that is pretty exciting about working with Byron is that there are more assets and more resources and more capabilities to do things that we just couldn't do on our own. And I don't want to give away too much, but there's, you know, he's doing a lot of things in, you know, in these wholly owned businesses that he has where he is in the home with Local Now, a connected TV app. He's doing a huge amount of production with his studios of making content. There are conversations and deals and partnerships and things that he's able to access.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  And so I think what that means, you'll have to wait and see, but putting together pieces and combining that with new technology and making something that doesn't exist is why I'm so excited about this deal. And so, you know, what would YouTube be if it started today? What would YouTube be if it was, you know, something that was created in the world of Gen AI? I think it would be pretty different. It might not be what, you know, every listener is imagining. It's certainly not just making a bunch of AI slop videos or something like that, which I think is the thing that people jump, jump to. But there's different ways that creators could make and play and share.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  And, you know, we have a lot, a lot of stuff to, to, to work out, a lot of stuff to build. But I'm excited about, you know, combining a lot of new capacity that we didn't have before to, to build things that seem, that, that seemed out of reach in the past.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  You know, the folks at YouTube, I know the folks at YouTube. I have my own complaints about YouTube. They've, they've heard them all endlessly. But if I had to put myself in the shoes of Neil Mohan, the guy who runs YouTube, I would read this and say, good luck. It's very hard to chase YouTube. TikTok had to spend like a billion dollars a minute on Facebook ads to get enough users to, to chase YouTube. I understand that you can't give it all away. I'm just saying, with the power of AI, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube, is a pretty big ambition. And I'm curious what the power of AI means there. Is it just operating leverage? Like you can do more with less? Is it you can vibe code a YouTube app? Like, how does that work?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I think you'll have, you'll have to wait and see. I don't want to, I don't want, you know, Neil probably, probably listens to this podcast. So I don't want to, I don't want to, hey Neil, if you're listening, if you're listening, you know, let's go to a Warriors game next year and, and we can, we can share notes, we can compare notes, you know?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Like, there's a distribution challenge that all these platforms have, which is somewhat driven by consumption, right? Vertical short form video became a dominant way people wanted to consume. So then Instagram turned into TikTok and then YouTube turned into TikTok. And then maybe a bunch of people on YouTube didn't want YouTube Shorts. And now you have the option to turn YouTube Shorts off. And what they really want is long form creator video and the economics are better there. I'm just saying, what is the opening that you see that this market needs a new competitor in this way?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  It's going to be a lot easier to put your your content more places more easily and to have content take different forms and different shapes because because of of of these AI tools and so you know, a simple example would be if you have a video, you know, having that turn into a BuzzFeed shaped object that could live on our platform and be optimized for our platform feels feels like something that would have been a lot of work and challenging a few years ago, but it's kind of trivial now. And so I think that opens up some some some possibilities, you know, in the beginning.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  My wife reads BuzzFeed every night. It's like I watch her wind down by reading BuzzFeed roundups of social media posts. That to me right now is the BuzzFeed shaped object. Look at what these people are saying on Reddit. Look at what these people are saying on Twitter. There's some value there. I think curation and taste and being able to see the trends and bring them out together in some kind of synthesis has value.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Has she played? Has she played Word Chain?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  I think so, but there are so many word games going around her house at once that I it's hard for me to determine which ones are in in style at the moment.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty. I mean, the the BuzzFeed games have have really exploded recently and and that's another great example of the fact that writers can buy code games. So instead of, you know, The New York Times launches one game every every every year and, you know, we've done hundreds of games this year with with creative people who are who are writers and not programmers, having a toolkit that allows them to to build in that space. And we've had a bunch of breakouts, you know, it's it's become a big percentage of, you know, big percentage growth in time spent and the comments on the, you know, from the audience are just like that they love them and it allows us to iterate and evolve them more quickly and change them more quickly. So

• 34:51Speaker 02

  that's another example of a Sort of AI acceleration of, you know, what is creating new BuzzFeed-shaped objects. And so I think that level of being able to iterate more quickly and mutate and evolve content, I think is something that allows us to play in new spaces, whether that's, you know, user-generated video, or interactive games, or new post-formats, and quizzes and things like that.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  The challenge there is always distribution. I mean, this is where we started talking with Facebook and the other platforms. How are you going to get new users to consume the stuff you make? And, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was, we're going to put up links on the open web, and they're going to drive a bunch of traffic to links. And eventually, we're going to do a llama and a dress in the same 48-hour span, and that's the future of media. And that was great. And then, you know, the open web has collapsed. You know, there are bigger publishers every day. I think Roger Lynch, literally today, is saying Google Zero is there for Conde Nast, and they are just betting that there's no Google search traffic anymore. Roger should give me credit for that phrase, by the way, but we'll come to that in a different episode. They do all listen. The

• 36:00Speaker 01

  question I have for you is, you can invest more in BuzzFeed-shaped objects on BuzzFeed. Where do you get new readers, new game players from? Because that seems like the hardest problem now for digital media.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we have a majority direct audience now. So, you know, some of that is because of declines in other audiences, you know, but tens of millions of people, you know, every month, you can look at our com scores, you don't have to trust me on it. It's like, we're the biggest publisher in our competitive set. You know, we're bigger than people. We have a lot of people coming. And when we see new formats, like, for example, these BuzzFeed games that we have been creating.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  They come back more frequently, they spend more time, they engage more, they send the games using iMessage to friends, so you have this new kind of social that's more personal, that's more private. And so we have distribution that, like if someone was creating a new company and trying to do any of these things, it'd be very hard to achieve. You know, we haven't really started promoting our branch office apps, these new AI apps, but soon conjure will be all across BuzzFeed and BF Island will be all across BuzzFeed to market it and let people play it. So, you know, we built a lot of distribution in a different era and we have millions of people consuming our content

• 37:26Speaker 02

  and that is the distribution that can help launch these new things and help us grow. And launch, you know, something that could be a competitor to YouTube or a competitor to some of the other big platforms for people who are getting sick of these big platforms and want smaller places that feel more at home that they can go directly to and spend their time on. So, you know, back to our earlier part of the conversation about was it a mistake for Facebook or YouTube or others to sort of pay less for content? And I think that it did result in a lot of more people going direct to other platforms and smaller platforms

• 38:07Speaker 02

  that they probably never would have if they could have gotten quality news on Facebook or Instagram or other places. But now people do go to those places and, you know, it hurt to have a lot of that referral traffic taken away, but now we have the direct traffic and that direct traffic is people wanting something different that the platforms aren't giving and that's a big opportunity to build on top of. And that's the new kind of distribution, it's more fragmented, it's not everyone on the internet, it's not the dress, but it's millions of people who really truly value the content coming directly saying, "I get my news every day from going to the front page of HuffPost." And they're not like trying to kiss up to the Trump administration and like, you know,

• 38:47Speaker 02

  worrying about mergers or whatever, they're just reporting the crazy stuff that's going on in the world. And I go directly to BuzzFeed and know what's going on across social media because... You know, as your wife has realized, it's a lot more satisfying to see roundups of what's happening across social media on BuzzFeed than to be in these toxic environments for hours scrolling, doom scrolling through the sort of raw sludge that's on these platforms.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  You were always really against display ads, programmatic ads, banners and boxes. I always thought you were correct about that. I dislike them. I think the vast majority of the audience dislikes them. But that's how you monetize a bunch of webpages. To this day, it's still the thing you do. You have a bunch of direct traffic. It's growing. You think you can create more direct traffic. You think there's opportunity there. But the monetization was lagging such that, you know, last quarter, you were saying there was substantial doubt about your ability to continue and you needed to take investment. How are you going to monetize all that direct traffic in the future in a way that's sustainable?

• 39:45Speaker 02

  I think a combination. I mean, I think that there's sort of a floor, which is driven by programmatic advertising. Then there's transactional types of revenue. So transactional revenue, I kind of mean that abstractly. So it might mean commerce where people are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on BuzzFeed shopping, where they click through and discover products and buy them. And we're getting affiliate fee, so we can actually show that we're driving direct value. And then there's the other kind of transactional, which is paying to be a member, subscribing. You know, HuffPost has a membership program that has been growing really nicely. I think that there's a lot of headroom there where we

• 40:30Speaker 02

  can grow more with reader revenue and direct revenue. The branch office apps are really natural for freemium models, where you can have fun on the apps to a point. But if you want to go deeper, and you want to, you know, with conjure, if you want to start exploring and photographing more weird things in the world, you got to, you know, become a paid member or, you know, transact with us. So I think that's a good combination.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  We have to pause here for another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Welcome back. I'm talking with BuzzFeed's current CEO, Jonah Peretti, about the company's future as a social media product.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  We were playing with BuzzFeed Allen today. I generated a bunch of pictures. Our producers put a clown nose on me. That was delightful. I thank them for that. It just occurred to me that I could burn enough tokens to make my use of the app unprofitable today. Right? I could just sit here and generate images all day until I definitely cost you some meaningful amount of money. How does that work before you monetize it? Who are your model providers? What's your rate of spend on letting people use the app versus when you think that will return in any kind of monetization?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is pretty established that the freemium model for these kinds of apps is, you know, is, is, is pretty natural. People have shown a willingness to pay for AI services. And so I think.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Wait, have they? I mean, like, you know, ChatGPT has, what, 900 million users and like very, very few of them pay anything.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  I mean, a lot of, you know, how much revenue is ChatGPT generating from subscribers? I mean, it, you know, it depends.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Not enough to pay their bills, I would say.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  But, but there are a lot of smaller freemium apps and a lot of companies that, you know, have 5 million, 10 million in revenue and are profitable. And, you know, you might not hear about those because they're not big venture backed, you know, companies. But I do think that these kind of midsize and smaller types of apps can be really good businesses. And in some ways, it's a little bit like a new kind of media business. It's the economics might be more similar to. You know, a YouTube show or a, or a, a series or a podcast where, you know, that, the, the, the cost of the, of the talent and the show and, you know, is, i- is a, is a hurdle that the advertising or the direct, or the subscribe,

• 43:34Speaker 02

  subscription needs to, needs to clear. Um, but I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of examples of that, that, that I've seen for, you know, talking to, talking to other founders and getting this, you know, sense of, of, of that market. So I feel like there's a, there's a bunch of different ways to, to monetize. It's also like reminiscent a little bit of the earlier era when you had Moore's Law, making everything cheaper. And you just, you know, you, you, you could have a product that, um, that, you know, lost a little bit of money. But if you wait a year, the, the, you know, the processing is cheaper, the costs are cheaper and AI is, is progressing incredibly quickly. So anytime we use a new model, you know, six months later, that the cost of it is like a tenth of what it, what it was.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  And so if we could lock in a bunch of users to an experience that's not about creating the most beautiful images. It's about joking with your friends, getting ideas for what to make. And, and it's a, you know, BF Island is kind of an idea engine where there's all these cool contexts and things that where you might not have thought of that you can then do, use to delight your friends or, um, or play. Um, the cost of that is, you know, making those images is going to, and, and has been going down, you know, a, a, a lot. And so even a, a break even subscriber six months later is a, is a very profitable subscriber.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Is, are there going to be ads there? Or are you just hoping for free and people are going to pay to unlock different prompts and, and why not?

• 44:58Speaker 02

  I think there could be some pretty interesting native advertising, you know, solutions there. And, um, but, you know, we're, we're just very early. And we just, we're just opening this up to, um, to, to, to the public now. So we want to, we want to, we want to get real people using it and then iterating and changing and evolving the app very quickly. And so, I mean, this is, I think the other thing is that AI enables, which is the, the ability to iterate and change a product is just so much easier. And so, um, getting to product market fit becomes a different. A different endeavor if you if you can, you know, get data more quickly and analyze

• 45:39Speaker 02

  it and understand it and modify and test features, you know, much more quickly. And that that that applies to the monetization side as well.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it strikes me in this conversation, right? We're going to compete with YouTube with the power of AI and then, you know, playing with BuzzFeed Island. This thing is a social network, right? You you make images, you share them with your friends, there's incentives to invite your friends. And after all of this time, what Jonah Peretti wants most of all is to just run the damn social networks himself. Like, that's what this looks like to me, is you're building social products because the ones you were relying on screwed you over so badly.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a little bit of that, for sure. That I I feel like I gave them advice from the perspective of someone who cared about content and culture and news, but also spoke their language in terms of tech and social platforms. And they took it for a while, but then they kind of went on this other other other direction. And so, building really good community, building really good social platforms, building really good content networks where people can can share content with each other and consume content and have great things to talk about. Like, I think there's there's there's openings to do that, and probably they're smaller, in some ways, smaller businesses. So, you know, we might only be a tenth the size of YouTube, you know?

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Maybe you're right that we can't get to 100% size.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Neil's shaking in his boots.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Maybe we'll get to 10%. So he can he can still have 90% of the market.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  The turn of the modern social network is creators. That's the other kind of theme that's been showing up in this conversation over and over again, right? There was professional content, there was the idea that maybe we pay for it, the creators showed up and they upended the content economy in a million different ways. BuzzFeed, in many ways, was also at the vanguard of that problem, right? That situation. The "Why I Left BuzzFeed" video launched a million YouTube careers. You you just sold hot ones, so you what you had purchased and then you sold. Like, there's something about BuzzFeed's relationship to the creator economy that it at different times was really rich and really rewarding. Really, really complicated. And then for many, at the end, it really poisonous. What have you learned from that? If you're going to stand up new social networks, how do you bring new creators along with you?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  And was there ever a time when you could have salvaged the creator relationships you had at BuzzFeed?

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, when you think about BuzzFeed Video, it was, it was really awesome for the team that was there because they had all these collaborators. They, a lot of them came in as, as, you know, interns or fellows, you know, you know, the Try Guys came in that way, you know, a, a, a, a bunch of, of the talent came in. Um, you know, really almost like interns that became fellow, got fellowships and then became junior producers. And then, you know, kind of worked their way up. The challenge, I think, became when, when, when the platforms really started to,

• 48:36Speaker 02

  to disaggregate the, the media companies, like essentially having individual creators create their own channels without media companies. It, it meant that the very top creators could make more money if they left. Um, and it, it kind of started to kind of break the cycle of development. Because essentially, almost every media company, if you look over, you know, the last hundred years, there's some stars and they get paid the most, but they get paid twice as much or something that, you know, or three times as much, but they're producing 10 times as much value. Um, and, and then you have a lot of new, you know, new talent coming in and they're learning

• 49:18Speaker 02

  and maybe they're working their way up, but they're getting kind of subsidized by, by the, the sort, the sort of, you know, bigger talent. And so it creates this like natural tension in these businesses where the whole process of having a, a community and an organization and professional development and new talent coming in and, you know, like all of that kind of breaks if, if the top talent is like, we'll just do a Substack or we'll just do a podcast that we own and, and take, take, you know, 90% of the profits from it, or, um, or, you know, we'll just make our own YouTube's channel. Um, then you, you know, the process kind of breaks where you don't, you no longer have that like redistribution that sort of helps the next generation learn, the young reporter or the new video producer or.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Whatever. And so I think early BuzzFeed was trying to build essentially like a collective and an organization. And at a certain point, some of the talent was like, I'm making too much money. I mean, I'm not making enough money. I'm gonna go create, create my, my, my own thing. And, you know, that worked for some of them. A lot of them found that it really sucked to try to be a YouTube creator and having to call in friends and favors and not having resources and not having collaborators and the loneliness of it and the burnout and, and, you know, YouTube and TikTok love to give, you know, the trending designation to new talent, but then a year or two later, it's like, they don't get that

• 50:45Speaker 02

  anymore. And, and so it really is, you know, kind of broken for a lot of, a lot of the talent that, that was frustrated and left, like, didn't work out that well. But for some, for some talent, it, it, it works great. And so I think, I don't know, that's one of the core challenges, I think, with media companies and this sort of platforms that are trying to just completely, completely blow up the media companies. It's one thing if, if you're a news organization, you know, with a union, it's one thing if the top talent is stuck to that news organization. It's another thing if you collectively bargain and the people who want to make the most money just go to Substack. That's the most, you know, Substack is probably the biggest union busting, you know, like, development

• 51:27Speaker 02

  that, that, that exists, even though that's not their intention, but it, it, you know, there, there's this contract of the top talent, you know, only capturing part of the value to help support the, the up and coming talent. And I think, I think that is, you know, poorly understood and is one of the reasons why the media environment has got, been somewhat impoverished, because you have a lot of creators who've gotten big and podcasters who've gotten big, but never came up through a system where they had smart peers and editors and people who could help them get better at their job. They just came up through a system where they're trying to game the algorithm to get attention and get big enough that they can then, you know, capture, capture that value for themselves.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  You run HuffPost. HuffPost has this problem and has this dynamic. You're talking about AI. Are you gonna start to publish AI journalism on HuffPost to solve this problem?

• 52:18Speaker 02

  No, no, no, we're not, absolutely not. The reason people come to HuffPost is because they can get trusted content that they can't get on the platforms that are full of AI slop. So HuffPost is, is a, is a, is a place where Talented human journalists who actually do have a sense of collective endeavor and who who believe in the mission of HuffPost. They work together and they they make content that the audience knows is trusted.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Are they receptive to using AI in the news gathering process? Is that something that you want them to start doing? You're taking on a new role as president of AI. This is the conversation in journalism.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there's things that AI can do in journalism. I think it's it's, you know, the example of being able to, you know, vibe code and create new games and new formats is is one example. I don't think a HuffPost journalist would, you know, you remember back when like Snowfall was this like big, you know, story.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  We did tons of Snowfalls on The Verge.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  The big, complicated layouts, we love them.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that kind of thing is trivial to do now, right? You know, you can you can design interfaces that, you know, are are, you know, it's trivial from a technical standpoint. Like, you don't necessarily need an engineer to to do that. You you need someone who has, you know, good sense of design and good vision or whatever. But and you need the journalism to be good and the story to be good. But so I think a lot of it depends. It's like, how can you use AI to elevate journalism, to promote it better, to connect people to it, to research and find, you know, like crawling the web is something that, you know, how many times have journalists spent three days going around to websites or whatever? And now with Claude Code, you can basically say, I need this data source, I need this data source, I need this data source.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  I wanted them all in folders. Okay, I want to cross reference them. You know, the kind of kind of fact gathering and things like that that you can do is is something that could help elevate journalism and make journalism better. But having AI write journalism is, you know, just would undermine the core trust that is is the main reason that people are coming directly to HuffPost to get their news every day.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I'm just curious how much of the talent business you still want to be in in this new world, right? Where you you're apparently going to run a thing that competes with with YouTube. I assume that means user generated content. You're running BuzzFeed Island is a bunch of user generated content. But the BuzzFeed shaped object today, a roundups of user-generated content on their platforms. How much of the talent business do you want to be in in the future?

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think what's kind of amazing about YouTube and some of these other platforms is that they're not really in the talent business. Like BuzzFeed.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  This is specifically what I'm asking. Do you want to run platforms for users?

• 54:58Speaker 02

  BuzzFeed was in the talent business, you know, providing healthcare and benefits and professional development and a context and real estate and all these things. And when creators would leave to just go directly to YouTube, you know, they got a rev share. And so some of what we what we will do in the future will be more user-generated. Like where you look at, you know, users making quizzes and and and things like that and creating things for themselves. And, you know, you've played with BF Island. That's that's something where the user creating is actually the entertainment. It's not like they're creating, you know, they're creating content not as the as the joy of creation. And so I think we'll have a lot. There's a lot more things like that that are that are possible.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  But then when we do have talent that work for us, I think it's important to find people who want to be part of a collective, who want to be part of something that they're doing together, who want the professional development, who want the resources, who want the peers, who want the health insurance, who want, you know, all of those, all of those things. And so it just depends on the, you know, on the on the business. But I think if you look at HuffPost, it makes a lot of sense to have journalists who work together in some cases for, you know, over a decade, who who really know what they're doing and are professionals. And that's that shows in the work that they're doing. The same is true with at BuzzFeed and figuring out how to do even more to elevate the talented writers and creators

• 56:24Speaker 02

  and people making things at BuzzFeed, I think, is part of what I want to do with my, you know, increased focus on AI.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're at the end of one kind of road here, right? You're stepping away from being CEO. You're going to become the president of BuzzFeed AI. Byron's going to be the new CEO. Even again, in this conversation, it strikes me as you were the right CEO for what you would call the open distribution era. And he might be the right CEO for what you're calling the deals era, where you got to show up and you have to negotiate rights. And I don't know, maybe AI companies are going to pay you for stuff. And there's just a lot of deals to be made in a way that, quite honestly, it feels bittersweet for me. Like the open web era is also where I came up and I I feel very strongly about that thing in a lot of different ways. At the end of this road, you're taking on a new role, there's going to be a new CEO. There's two moments I want to ask you about that could have been previous endpoints.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  One, in 2013 Disney offered to buy BuzzFeed for what Ben Smith has reported to be $650 million. Do you think he should have sold back then?

• 57:19Speaker 02

  So, I mean, from a financial standpoint, it's hard to say that that wouldn't have been a good deal to take. It was, I think, 450 with an earnout that could get to that 650 number. And, you know, we were just hiring Mark Schufz to build our investigative team. We were just starting with BuzzFeed Video and that whole cultural phenomenon of BuzzFeed Video was kind of just about to take off. There were a bunch of things that I'm really glad we got to do as an independent company and I wouldn't really trade those years where we were able to, you know, build and explode and hack culture and influence the internet in a massive way.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  And I think it would have been harder to do that, you know, inside of Disney. I think it would have been a great financial deal and I do wish that, you know, my partners and investors and others had been able to have that financial, you know, windfall, which, you know, was unfortunate that we weren't able to sort of live up to that. The other thing I would say is that I don't think selling the company at that moment would have been the maximization of value. I think selling it two years later would have been and there was, you know, a lot of interest that people don't know about, you know, in those sort of subsequent years. And so, the Disney deal was the first time someone came and I think Iger was ahead of the curve and saw that there was a lot of growth and excitement there.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  But I think we could have done a transaction for more than that even if we, you know, two years later. There was a weird... Thing that there was this view, I think, from the board that the fact that I like turned down that Disney deal meant that I would never sell for any price or whatever. And so that also partly led to never really exploring any of those other, you know, types of deals. But, you know, in retrospect, if you had perfect hindsight, you know, there's, there's probably some kind of deal we could have made in, in 2015 or 16 that would have also given us, you know, the right partner and resource, resources to fare the next challenging time.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  You're stepping down as CEO. I gotta, I gotta, I've tried to ask about the future, but it feels important to check on these moments in the past, especially now, you know, Disney in particular, Josh tomorrow, the new CEO is saying Disney Plus is going to be an everything app and that very much implies user generated content in a totally different way. And it feels like those things would have been aligned. The other moment I want to ask about, you went public in 2021. That was a SPAC. It was very fashionable at the time. Do you feel like that was a miss? Do you think that was the right decision?

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Well, I think the biggest, the biggest issue was we missed the window. So again, if you had perfect hindsight, you know, if you could, you know, do it over again, I think we, we would have gone public via SPAC and we would have done it without buying Complex and we would have just done it right away because the market was super hot. We could have gotten a lot of capital into the business and we didn't need Complex. Like our, our business, you know, we were bigger with Complex, but our business was probably, probably better, our numbers were probably better without Complex than, than with. And so we could have just done the deal more quickly and had more cash on, on the balance

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  sheet and, and then we would have been able to have a lot more leeway and, and latitude to reinvent the company when the market got really tough. And so the, the, the problem is when, when we started to explore this Complex acquisition, it slowed down our ability to get, to, to, to complete the SPAC transaction because we needed to agree with, you know, on a sale and agree on all these terms and negotiate, I mean, with Hearst and Verizon who co-owned it. And, and so, and then we needed to then, once we went public, like figure out how to integrate and work with, you know, cultures that were not really well suited to each other. The, the Complex culture was just very different than, than the BuzzFeed culture. And so in retrospect, I think.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Hitting the SPAC market while it was hot, bringing in a bunch of capital, doing it with just BuzzFeed, and then using that to reinvent the company as a public company, we would have been in a really exciting position and we would have had capital to do acquisitions and things like that. Instead, we missed that window. The SPAC market got ice cold. We were already kind of far along on the Complex deal, and so we ended up with debt instead of cash. And so, the debt to buy Complex basically has been a burden that we've slowly been able to alleviate, first by selling Complex, then by selling First We Feast, and now with this partnership with Byron Allen and that investment. But it's taken a bunch of time

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  to kind of get back to where we have the balance sheet we need to innovate and operate in a way that's more confident and more deliberate.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Why did you buy Complex if you didn't think it was the right choice?

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  At the time, the strategy was let's consolidate the digital media industry, let's give advertisers something for every demographic. So we were stronger with female audiences, and they were stronger with male audiences. And they had a lot of great properties, and so we thought this would be a one-stop shop for advertisers. What ended up happening was both the value of digital media and the traffic that we've been talking about was challenging. But in addition, advertisers started to spend more and more with the platforms directly, and the programmatic buying became a bigger and bigger thing. Complex just doesn't have

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  that much distribution. They were premium but smaller audiences. And when more shifted to programmatic, that really helped BuzzFeed and HuffPost. But it meant that Complex was really dependent on this direct sales channel, which was becoming weaker for all digital media companies. And so, I think that things didn't go the way we had hoped with Complex. But we were excited at the time, and that's partly why. And then it was like one of those things where we were like, okay, we now have to take on this debt to buy them. But if things go well, the debt won't be an issue. But when things were tougher than expected, the debt burden really...

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Was challenging and it's one of the reasons why I think people don't realize that the underlying BuzzFeed assets are better than than people think because they look at the whole thing and it's like but you start backing out pre-COVID real estate and you start backing out the debt, the debt burden and you start backing out some restructuring costs and you kind of look at like what is the actual business and how you know, and the pieces of that, I think it's doing better than people think and I'm, I'm glad that, that, you know, Byron was able to see that because and, and some others were able to see that. So we had, uh, we had an opportunity to, you know, to, to do a deal that, that makes a, makes a big difference and allows us to unlock that value and not have it just be kind of captured by our current structure.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. BuzzFeed's greatest strength, I'll call it the millennial era of digital media, was that it was a cultural phenomenon in millennial digital media, but I, I think that's the best way to describe it. There were all those posts about why I left BuzzFeed, but before that, I will never forget the letter to the editor at the All, where it was just the poor digital journalist who was like, I don't work at BuzzFeed and it kills me every day, right? And like, this thing rocketed around. I think Corey Seager wrote back to them and it was like a great digital media moment that I will never forget. Like it had totemic power in the media ecosystem at that time. There's a reason Disney wanted to buy it. You're talking a lot about AI. I think my, my last question for you, how do you get back to that cultural relevance?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  When I look at the polling from Gen Z in particular and they dislike AI, right? If AI is a thing that's going to accelerate you back into relevance, but the younger demographic dislikes it so much, how do you connect those dots and solve that problem?

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  a lot of what we do does not

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  read or appear as, as AI. I think people don't like certain things about AI. If you just ask them in general, what do you think of AI? You know, there's a lot of pretty negative responses.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  I think people love playing Word Chain and I don't think they mind that, that AI coding tools were used in creating Word Chain and and, and so I think The the human agency and human intention is in the in the product. The person who designed the game was is obsessed with making a really fun game. The people playing it really like it. The creator of the game is in the comments, talking to them, and they're like, when are you gonna make the next one? And I love this. And and so I just think that um that saying, do you love AI? It's kind of like saying back in the day, do you love mobile? You know, or you know, or like,

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  But a lot of people would say, yes, my, you know, my career is based on, do you love mobile? Like, the answer was, millions of people being like, yeah, I want a whole website about that.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there were industry people who who like who like mobile. But I think most people were like, they like the things they can do with it, and they like the way that they use it. Or, you know, it was, you know, it's like, do you like microcomputers? It's like, well, no, I like that I can do spreadsheets now, and I don't have to have, you know, all, you know, like, I so I think if you think of AI as a computing platform, it's the question is, what what are the apps built on top of that computing platform that Gen Z will like? And there already are many of them. And, you know, um, it's, it's, uh, you know, whether it's using them to do their homework, or to help them, help them, you know, um, solve problems that they have with, you know, personal challenges

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  they have, and talking to chat GPT, or Claude, or whatever. Like, I think there is a lot of love for AI, and a lot of hate for AI. And I think we just live in a world where like, everything is super polarized, and everything is kind of love and hate. And so I think fighting for a new way of using AI, and a new way of thinking of AI, that puts people first, that is creative, that it it magnifies people's agency, that is not about feeding everyone the same slot, but is about like, helping people have a more personalized and connected experience, and connect with their friends. Like, I think that's gonna be something that you have, we'll have to fight for, because there'll be all kinds of dystopian uses of AI. But I think we can build something that is special, that makes people see the power of this new computing platform, but not through the

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  platform itself, but through the through the applications, and through the fun things that they can do with it, and the fun ways they can connect with their friends.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm excited to see how that all plays out. When does the deal close? What's the timeline?

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  You know, hopefully, we'll get it closed by the end of the month.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  All right. And then you and Byron are gonna have to come back and you have to show me this AI-powered YouTube that's gonna make Google's

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, you'll have more fun talking to him than me, so.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  I've talked to him before. He is quite a character. I'm honestly curious. You've described some big products and some big vision. I'm eager to see them come to fruition. You're gonna have to come back soon. Jonah, thank you so much for being on Decoder.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks for having me.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  I'd like to thank Jonah Preddy for taking the time to join me here on Decoder and thank you for listening. If you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. You really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. You can watch clips on TikTok and Instagram, also at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane of Decoder. Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

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