Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti said in a company email on Thursday that he overinvested in the platform because he loved their “work and mission” so much.
In the email, Peretti said he had been forced to cut what was left of the news department because the financial model was not sustainable.
As reported in The Guardian, he said: “I made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”
He said the entire company had been hit by the pandemic, a troubled stock market listing, a slowdown in digital advertising, a tough economy, and changing audience habits.
Buzzfeed raised millions from investors in the early 2010s as it rode the popularity of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. It later invested in original news reporting, believing this would attract a higher quality of advertisers.
The news team went on to win a Pulitzer prize in 2021 for its reporting on the infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.
Peretti said he regrets not holding the company to “higher standards for profitability” and said he “exhausted many other cost-saving measures to preserve as many jobs as possible” including cutting costs and closing physical offices.
