BuzzFeed, the news site famous for its quizzes, listicles and reporting, will lay off 15 per cent of its staff as a means of cost-cutting following financial turbulence.
The cuts will spread across BuzzFeed’s global offices and will impact roughly 200 people.
The cuts follow a news report from BuzzFeed published last week about President Trump and his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen that has been widely disputed, though the media company insists the two are unrelated.
According to BuzzFeed, the cuts have been in the works for a few months.
Addressing the cuts, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti sent a staff-wide email, which pinned the redundancies down to a lack of growth.
“Unfortunately, revenue growth by itself isn’t enough to be successful in the long run.
“The restructuring we are undertaking will reduce our costs and improve our operating model so we can thrive and control our destiny, without ever need to raise funding again.”
Meanwhile, some are speculating the cuts are a signifier of the digital media bubble officially bursting.
According to Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, “It’s clear that we have a digital content bubble.
Adding: “There’s no question we’re going to see more cuts, both in legacy media and digital-born ones.”
“In some ways, for journalism to succeed as a business it needs patient investors who are content with incremental growth and modest returns on investment.”
In 2017, BuzzFeed had an earlier round of cuts, with the media company letting go of roughly 7 per cent of its staff.
